The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Melanie McGrath
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СКАЧАТЬ run into a single bear. They begin the return journey by day, travelling in small bursts, walking beside the sleds whose dogs are by now too weak to pull them. The sea ice pours on either side, as flat and formless as a newly ironed sheet. As they walk, Alakariallak keeps them cheerful with stories of the bears he has killed the year before. At night they build a makeshift snowhouse and he sings them versions of the songs he has heard on Flaherty's gramophone. The following day they stumble into Inukjuak, dark with snow blindness, their hearts like old stones, their noses half eaten by frostbite, their feet frozen into their boots, hardly able to believe they are alive still. The Révillon Fréres post manager, Stewart, comes out to meet them, brings them back to the cabin, unwraps their feet and sets them up with mugs of hot, sweet tea. Only the week before, he reports, two huskies dug a female bear and her two cubs from their den a couple of hours' travel away from the settlement. The bear and her cubs battled it out against the dogs and sent them spinning into the air and sliding back on their bellies. There was no need to have gone all the way to Cape Sir Thomas Smith. For a moment silence falls. Then Alakariallak grabs his sides with both hands and laughs and laughs so hard that tears leak from his eyes.

      Perhaps it is this brush with mortality which draws Robert Flaherty closer to Maggie Nujarluktuk. In any case, he begins to spend more time with her. Everything about Maggie must seem so fresh, so unpolished and innocent, as different from the huddle of sophisticates Flaherty knows in New York as snow is from Shineola. Of course, he knows nothing about what she is thinking or feeling; neither, really, can he imagine it. She is unexplorable, a terrain that even he cannot reach nor will ever fully know. This, precisely, is her charm. Who knows why she goes to him? Ambition, curiosity, love even? He cannot tell, and it does not matter.

      As winter deepens, Robert Flaherty and Maggie Nujarluktuk become lovers. They conduct their affair in the clapboard cabin, overlooked by Frances Flaherty and the boy with the mandolin and a pile of cameras. After a while she moves from her family snowhouse to live with him. No one expects it to last and this, too, is part of the beauty of it.

      All through the winter, Robert Flaherty continues filming, developing the film as he goes along and staging little shows of the rushes in his cabin with hot tea and sea biscuits and, often, music and even dancing. As winter gives way to the spring, bringing long, clear days of brilliant sunshine, Flaherty films Alakariallak cutting snowblocks with a walrus tusk snow-knife, heaving them one on top of another to form a dome, while Maggie goes in after to caulk the joints between the blocks with dry snow, packing the surface smooth, the baby tucked safely in her amiut. When it proves too dark to film inside the snowhouse, Flaherty has Alakariallak and his friends build a half-dome exposed to the daylight as a prop. For two days they labour but each time the structure proves unstable and collapses and Flaherty stands by while the Inuit laugh out loud at their mistake and set themselves to the task once more. At the end of the second day, a stable half-dome stands on the sea ice. They build a sleeping platform of snow inside and line it with skins and Maggie sets a qulliq, or blubber stove, burning with seal fat. While Robert Flaherty winds his camera this made-up family goes through the routine of turning in for the night, Alakariallak sliding under the sleeping skins while Maggie and Cunayou undress the children and slot them in their places, before pulling off their own sealskin parkas and slipping naked between the children and their man.

      Spring gives way eventually to summer and finds Robert and Maggie still together, communicating, now, in a mix of Inuktitut, English and sign language. The tundra, too, ends its silence. By late June, the snow is melting on the tops of eskers and hills, then later on the lower ground. The sun warms the black soil and speeds up the process. Where the tuff gives out to lake water or streams, seams of ice-free water appear. The night shrinks into a thin, blue glimmer. Heather begins to uncurl and grow buds. Summer birds appear from the south, rustling among the willow collecting twigs for their nests and, later, insects for their young. The air whines with bees and mosquitoes, pink saxifrage bursts from the willow bed, the grasses grow cotton tops and, when the Annie drops anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River in August 1921, the lovers already know that Robert Flaherty will be heading south alone. He will leave Maggie Nujarluktuk there, on the shores of Hudson Bay, with their baby swelling in her belly.

       2

      The Inuit settled back into their habitual routines and the events of the previous year faded to the stuff of campfire stories. In New York City, Robert and Frances Flaherty shut themselves in a room in a walk-up apartment and edited 75,000 feet of film. By November they had a rough cut and were touting around town looking for a distributor. Just before Christmas, the Flahertys managed to persuade Charlie Gelb at Paramount to screen a version of the movie, now being called Nanook of the North, before an invited audience at Paramount's screening rooms. It had taken Flaherty a decade to get this far and he knew that Nanook was his last chance. If it failed, he would have a hard time finding another backer. But his movie-making career was not the only thing on the line. Flaherty had poured his passion into Nanook. For ten years, he had brooded over the Arctic and its people. Up in Inukjuak, he felt he had witnessed something great and timeless about the human spirit which it was his duty, even his destiny, to pass on. At the time, he had written in his diary that he wanted to capture ‘the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible, before the white man has destroyed not only their character but the people as well’. He still felt that way. He had documented a disappearing world. He had to hope that Nanook would go down better in New York than his first effort in Toronto. If it did not, it would be too late to make another.

      The hour or so that followed would be one of the most agonising, and most important, of Robert Flaherty's life. As the opening image of ice and rock and dark water flooded the room, Flaherty felt the audience tense. The intertitle appeared. ‘No other race could survive,’ it read, ‘yet here live the most cheerful people in all the world – the fearless, loveable, happy-go-lucky Eskimos.’ Alakariallak's image faded up and cut, eventually, to Maggie pulling the baby from her amiut, the faces so familiar to Flaherty but so distant now. The audience went quiet. He saw one or two of them straining for a better look at the screen. Maggie and the rest spilled from the kayak. A few people laughed. The film segued from one sequence to another until, in the final moments, they were witnessing Alakariallak and his family going to bed in anticipation of another day. The end credits appeared, the lights went up and the audience began streaming out but Robert Flaherty was left with no clue. Some were smiling, others looking dazed, even grim, a few wearing no expression at all. He waited with Frances. When the room had finally been cleared, the screening room manager sidled over to him. Well, he said, Nanook of the North was a brave film all right, and he could see that Flaherty had put a great deal of time and effort into making it. The manager knew what he was about to say would not sit easily but the plain fact of the matter was that the movie was unwatchable. A bunch of strange-looking people dressed like animals eating walrus meat. Who in their right mind would pay to see such a thing?

      Robert and Frances Flaherty spent the holiday season licking their wounds. One thousand, twelve hundred and fifty miles away in Inukjuak, the Révillon Fréres factor gave a Christmas party for the Inuit, with ship's biscuit, tinned sardines and bannock bread. People sledged in from all over Cape Dufferin, danced a few Scots reels and some American square dances and staged sled races. When the light failed they bundled inside the fur post, drank sweet tea and sang songs about the old ways.

      One of the few who did not join in the festivities that year was Maggie Nujarluktuk, who spent Christmas Day in her family's snowhouse, giving birth to a baby boy, Robert Flaherty's son.

      Early in the New Year, Robert and Frances began once more to look for a distributor for Nanook of the North. Flaherty showed the picture to First-National, who turned it down, then to Pathé in New York, who agreed in principle to distribute it. Some time in early spring, Pathé struck a deal with the owner of the Capitol Theatre in New York City to show the picture on condition that Pathé package it with something more СКАЧАТЬ