ugh an inspired montage of close-ups, 'reverse angles', pans and tilts"(45). The key phrase here is "participatory camera," as Flaherty placed the viewer inside of the action with his personal camera. During many scenes, you feel as involved in the action as the subjects; One scene in particular was the shot of the blizzard conditions attacking Nanook and his family's freshly built igloo. Snow is swirling in all directions and the camera is in the middle of all of it.
             The camera work is not the only significant development that this film brought about. This film actually established the rules of ethnographic filmmaking. Many sources blindly praise this film just because of the fact that it did become the model for most other films of this nature to follow. One such comment was "Robert Flaherty used the techniques of narrative editing to heighten the realism of his documentaries"(Parkinson 45). Upon further analysis of the film, however, one begins to see that this is far from true. His films are less like reality and more like his view on the Eskimo people. Unfortunately, his view on the Eskimo people would raise outrage among most viewers today, and amazingly enough his viewpoint is revealed by the same narrative editing that Parkinson claims brings reality. Over the years, this film has been cut and recut so many time
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