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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm

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Nanook of the North (1922)

 


Reality at the end of world


There is an astonishing sequence in Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” (1922) in which his hero, the Inuit hunter Nanook, hunts a seal. Flaherty shows the most exciting passage in one unbroken shot. Nanook knows that seals must breathe every 20 minutes, and keep an air hole open for themselves in the ice of the Arctic winter. He finds such a hole, barely big enough to be seen and is poised motionless above it with his harpoon until a seal rises to breathe. Then he strikes and holds onto the line as the seal plunges to escape.
There is a desperate tug of war. Nanook hauls the line 10 or 12 feet out of the hole, and then is dragged back, sliding across the ice, and pulls again, and again. We can’t see, but he must have the line tied to his body — to lose would be to drown. He desperately signals for his fellow hunters to help him, and we see them running across the ice with their dogs as he struggles to hold on. They arrive at last, and three or four of them pull on the line. The seal prevails. Nanook uses his knife to enlarge the hole, and the seal at last is revealed and killed. The hunters immediately strip it of its blubber and dine on its raw flesh.

Seeing “Nanook of the North” a week ago at the Toronto Film Festival, magnificently projected in 35mm and accompanied by a live performance of a new musical score, I did not much care about the purity of Flaherty’s methods. He shot his footage in 1920, when there were no rules for documentaries and precious few documentaries, certainly none shot so far north that nothing grows except a little moss, and 300 Inuit could inhabit a space the size of England.

We know, because Flaherty was frank about it, that he recruited the cast for his film. Nanook was chosen because he was the most famed of the hunters in the district, but the two women playing his wives were not his wives and the children were not his children. Flaherty’s first footage was of a walrus hunt, and he revealed that Nanook and his fellow hunters performed the hunt for the camera. “Nanook” is notcinema verite.And yet in a sense it is: The movie is an authentic documentary showing the creation of itself. What happens on the screen is real, no matter what happened behind it. Nanook really has a seal on the other end of that line.




The movie shows Nanook during a few weeks in the life of his family. Countless details fill in a way of life that was already dying. We see the hunters creeping inch by inch upon a herd of slumbering walruses, and then Nanook springing up and harpooning one, and then a fierce struggle in which the mate of the walrus joins the battle. Such scenes simplify Inuit life to its most basic reality: In this land the only food comes from other animals, which must be hunted and killed. Everything the family uses — its food, fuel, clothing and tools — comes in some way from those animals, except for the knives and perhaps harpoon points, which they obtain at a trading post. They are a luxury; before there were trading posts, there were already Inuit.

One of the film’s most fascinating scenes shows the construction of an igloo. Nanook and his friends carve big blocks of snow and stack them in a circle, carving new ones from the floor so that it sinks as the walls rise and curve inward to form a dome. Then he finds sheets of ice, cuts holes in the igloo walls, and inserts the ice to make windows. There is another igloo, a smaller one, for the dogs. And inside the big igloo, the tiniest igloo of all, for puppies, which the big dogs would quickly eat.

The film is not technically sophisticated; how could it be, with one camera, no lights, freezing cold, and everyone equally at the mercy of nature? But it has an authenticity that prevails over any complaints that some of the sequences were staged. If you stage a walrus hunt, it still involves hunting a walrus, and the walrus hasn’t seen the script. What shines through is the humanity and optimism of the Inuit. One of the film’s titles describes them as “happy-go-lucky,” and although this seems almost cruel, given the harsh terms of their survival, they do indeed seem absorbed by their lives and content in them, which is more than many of us can say.



    1. 7.6/10IMDb100%Rotten Tomatoes













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