Taxidermy and romantic ethnography

Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” (1922) is widely recognised as the world’s first documentary film. Flaherty is a hugely important figure for the development of documentary-, ethnographic-, and art cinema. He shot “Nanook” on two Akeley 16mm film cameras. 

Carl Akeley had invented this camera for himself to accommodate his years-long expeditions to Africa which had proven available camera equipment too flimsy. He also invented a fluid-ball head tripod (existing camera fixtures operation demanded more than two hands making them ill-suited for shooting wildlife), thus providing everyone since Flaherty on-the-fly shooting abilities. 

Carl Akeley was first and foremost a naturalist. His Africa expeditions collected elephants, gorillas and other large mammals for exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History a.o., and he also laid the foundation for modern taxidermy, inventing a new method of producing light-weight molds

Nanook is also widely criticised for its colonial gaze; in her 1996 essay “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: ", Fatimah Tobing-Rony points out the likeness of Nanook to taxidermy: Flaherty symbolically kills his protagonists to reshape them in his own image.