Читать книгу The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic - Melanie McGrath - Страница 8

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 commercial. Pathé had just taken on a distribution contract for Harold Lloyd's first big feature, Grandma's Boy, and this they decided would be just the thing to tin can with Nanook: Capitol okayed the package, sight unseen. When the manager of the Capitol Theatre actually saw the Arctic picture he tried desperately to backpedal, but by then he was locked in, and so, on 11 June 1922, Alakariallak and Harold Lloyd burst on to the New York scene together. Even by New York standards, it was an eccentric coupling. About the only thing Alakariallak and Harold Lloyd had in common was that they both smiled a lot. Grandma's Boy went down tremendously well, but not half as well as Nanook. The audience took to the Inuk man in an instant. Here he was, a decent, hard-working, good-natured individual, hemmed in on all sides by natural terrors, cheerfully carving out a life for himself, for Nyla, his sweet-faced wife, and their romping children, with no sense of how much easier and more comfortable were other lives being lived by men and women only a few hundred miles to the south. Sure, the movie was disjointed and rough in places, but it was filled with bright, unforgettable moments; Nanook struggling to extract a seal from its breathing hole, Nyla pulling a boy from her amiut, the family diving under their sleeping skins at the end of another frozen day. To this audience, still reeling from the trenches and the mustard gas of the First World War, Nanook and Nyla were innocent wanderers in an as-yet unblemished world. They saw in Nanook of the North a story of love and through love, survival. What they were watching was not simply some performance put on for their entertainment. At some level, at least, it was the truth. Grandmas Boy could wait. What New Yorkers wanted was Nanook.

Word spread and soon people from all over the city were flocking to the Capitol Theatre. Pathé hastily expanded its distribution and, before long, Nanook was playing in theatres as far away as Tennessee and Nebraska. By September 1922, three months after its first release, Flaherty's ‘adventure picture’ had crossed the Pond and was playing to sellout audiences at the new Gallery Kinema in London and at the Gaumont Theatre in Paris. From there it went on to Bangkok, Peking and Moscow, picking up ecstatic audiences everywhere. Nanook was fast becoming a huge, global hit. Confectionery manufacturers began turning out ice creams with Alakariallak's face printed on the wrappers and, before long, he was unwittingly advertising everything from chocolate bars to cleaning fluid. In Los Angeles, a three-man team of songwriters whipped up a popular song about him, with a chorus which began ‘Ever-loving Nanook/Though you don't read a book/But oh, how you can love/And thrill me like the twinkling northern lights above …’ Thousands of miles away, in Malaysia, Nanook entered the language. Even now nanuk in Malaysian means a strong man.

And so Alakariallak and Maggie gradually became famous. But it was an odd kind of fame because neither Alakariallak nor Maggie knew anything about it. What little mail reached Inukjuak came once a year on the annual visit of the Hudson Bay Company supply ship and almost all of that was for the post trader. The Inukjuamiut rarely received any news from outside Cape Dufferin, and when they did, it was often so garbled that it made little sense to them. Eventually they heard that Nanook of the North had opened in New York City and that it had gone on to England, France, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand and China, but all these were places they knew nothing about and had a hard time imagining. Even their own country, Canada, seemed so remote to them as to be the stuff of dreams, or, rather, of nightmares, since they knew it principally as the place in the south to where Inuit people were sometimes transported when they were ill and from where, generally speaking, they never returned.

Four years after the film's first showing, Robert Flaherty's charming, violent depiction of the lives of Alakariallak and Maggie Nujarluktuk in the Barrenlands had grossed US$251,000, five times its initial cost, and Robert Flaherty had become a household name. He was taken out to fancy dinners and asked to speak at meetings and conventions. Louis B. Mayer called, as did Irving Thalberg and an assortment of other producers, agents and managers. Everyone wanted the same thing. Another Nanook.

Flaherty took his new-found fame in his stride. He was already 38 years old and from a very early age he had marked himself out as having some special place in the world. Now others were simply confirming his opinion. After ten years in the Arctic he felt he had earned his reputation.

Of the legacy he had left there, he knew very little. News of Inukjuak reached him only rarely. When he left, Maggie Nujarluktuk had been five months pregnant so Robert could not have been in any doubt about her condition, but sex was different up on Cape Dufferin and it was custom, sometimes, for a woman to sleep with more than one man. Flaherty may well have told himself that the child was not his. And if it was his, well, then, he may have thought that his wilderness baby was best left up in the Barrenlands.

If he did think of his bright-eyed, smiling Inuit girl from time to time, if his heart occasionally hollowed for her, then he kept the feeling to himself. In any case, he was not given to introspection. The plain fact of the matter was that he already had a wife and daughters back home and they were where his heart ultimately lay.

Alakariallak continued to hunt and Maggie Nujarluktuk took care of her baby. The winter of 1923 was brutal. Sea currents broke the ice into floes and the prevailing westerlies turned to the north, roaring across Hudson Bay and pushing the floes together into monstrous pressure ridges which rose like great walls from the sea. For a time, hunting seals became impossible and Alakariallak was forced to take his dog team inland in the hope of finding caribou, but after days of sledging he failed to come across a single animal. He turned back west towards the coast and began to make his way home but he and his dog team were caught in a blizzard. They carried on as best they could but at some point the dogs must have grown hungry and exhausted. Although they were now only a few days' travel from the coast, they stumbled and began to die, until there were no longer enough dogs left alive to pull the sled. Alakariallak, too, was spent. As the blizzards blew up again, the great hunter and – though he didn't know it – international movie star set about making himself a snowhouse for a shelter, then spreading his sleeping skins inside he lay down to die.

A few miles to the southwest of Alakariallak's lonely grave, on the coast at Inukjuak, Maggie Nujarluktuk pulled a little half-breed boy from her amiut and set him down on a pile of caribou skins beside her.