10 Bullsh*t Documentaries That Aren't Worth Your Time

9. Nanook Of The North

Chang may have started off the trend of staging scenes in supposedly €œreal€ documentaries, but Nanook Of The North has to the be the all-time champion of hoodwinking its audience. Whilst A Drama Of The Wilderness pioneered the genre, Nanook was the first big success of non-fiction filmmaking, and claimed to be better than Chang precisely because it didn't fall into any of the Hollywood theatrics that Schoedsack and Cooper indulged in. Instead it was presented as an actual, genuine documentation of the lives of the infamously private Inuit population of Alaska. The film followed the lives of the titular Nanook, his wife, Nyla, and their baby, Cunayou, as they built an igloo to live in and hunt seals with spears. Which is what everybody at the time assumed Inuits did, but it was amazing to see it on the big screen, in startling black and white! Even today the film is highly thought of for standing "alone in its stark regard for the courage and ingenuity of its heroes." Except that courage and ingenuity is almost entirely bullsh*t. Director Robert J Flaherty, much like Schoedsack and Cooper, also claimed that he was interested in capturing the truth of these people's lives; in fact he staged as much in Nanook as in Chang, he was just better at hiding it. It's since transpired that Nanook's name was actually Allakariallak, the multiple wives he supposedly has were the concubines of the director, and every part of the unique, whimsical lives lead by the stars is a construct of Flaherty. By that point Inuits were living in houses, using guns to hunt, and almost certainly knew that gramophones weren't something they were supposed to eat.