Account of the way of life of Eskimo of southern Baffin Island, based on author's experience in early 20th century.

Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

Author's expeditions to Belcher Islands and Ungava, northern Canada, 1910-13.

Documents one year in the life of Nanook, an Inuit and his family, based at Hopewell Sound in North Ungava. The documentary describes the trading, hunting, fishing and migrations of an Inuit group barely touched by industrial technology. Nanook of the North was widely shown and praised as the first full-length, anthropological documentary in cinematographic history.

A tale of a father, a son, and a fishing trip in the wilderness of Alaska that will delight readers young and old. Nanook is an exciting story of an Inuit father and son’s fishing expedition in the Alaskan tundra. Young Nanook is about to embark on an adventure that will test his responsibility and his readiness to provide for his family. But one dangerous decision will teach him a lifelong lesson . . . From the rushing waters and abundant salmon of the Canning River to his close encounter with dreadful Old One Ear, Nanook’s journey leads to a message that shows the unbreakable love between father and son.

Charting the intersection of technology and ideology, cultural production and social science, Fatimah Tobing Rony explores early-twentieth-century representations of non-Western indigenous peoples in films ranging from the documentary to the spectacular to the scientific. Turning the gaze of the ethnographic camera back onto itself, bringing the perspective of a third eye to bear on the invention of the primitive other, Rony reveals the collaboration of anthropology and popular culture in Western constructions of race, gender, nation, and empire. Her work demonstrates the significance of these constructions--and, more generally, of ethnographic cinema--for understanding issues of identity. In films as seemingly dissimilar as Nanook of the North, King Kong, and research footage of West Africans from an 1895 Paris ethnographic exposition, Rony exposes a shared fascination with--and anxiety over--race. She shows how photographic "realism" contributed to popular and scientific notions of evolution, race, and civilization, and how, in turn, anthropology understood and critiqued its own use of photographic technology. Looking beyond negative Western images of the Other, Rony considers performance strategies that disrupt these images--for example, the use of open resistance, recontextualization, and parody in the films of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, or the performances of Josephine Baker. She also draws on the work of contemporary artists such as Lorna Simpson and Victor Masayesva Jr., and writers such as Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, who unveil the language of racialization in ethnographic cinema. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, innovative in theory and original in method, The Third Eye is a remarkable interdisciplinary contribution to critical thought in film studies, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, postcolonial studies, and women's studies.