Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Nanook of the North (1922)

Most everyone who has sat through a high school English or social studies class has seen this film, the most widely recognized silent documentary.

Director/cameraman Robert J. Flaherty endured years of hardship in frozen Canada to produce this initimate portrait of an Eskimo fisherman and his family, Nanook of the North (1922).

— Carl Bennett

This Blu-ray Disc edition has been mastered from the 1972 35mm restoration print materials, from which many of today’s prints have sprung. The restoration was conflated from Robert Flaherty’s personal 35mm print which was struck from the original negative now held by the British Film Institute, and nitrate prints held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, and fine-grain nitrate materials used to produced the 1946 sound rerelease. The materials themselves are very-good to almost excellent, with some footage surviving in slightly rougher form and some footage, which is sharper than the bulk of the print, is compromised by deep, nearly plugged up, shadow details. Additional digital restoration was done to balance the greyscale ranges of the various prints and to remove dust, speckling, processing flaws and print damage.

The results are very-good, with some differences in the amount of film grain which is generally less pronounced than in other silent films on recent high-resolution home video.

The film is accompanied by a small orchestra music score composed and compiled by Timothy Brock, who directed the Olympia Chamber Orchestra in 1998.

This edition of Nanook of the North is highly recommended as it has never looked better on home video.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Regions ABC Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Regions ABC Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

This early DVD edition, produced for The Criterion Collection by David Shepard of Film Preservation Associates, has been digitally transferred from high-quality 35mm print materials. The image is reasonably sharp, but has been surpassed in quality by the Flicker Alley Blu-ray Disc edition noted above.

The presentation features a music score composed and directed by Timothy Brock.

Supplemental features include exerpts from an National Educational Television documentary series on Robert J. Flaherty featuring an interview with his wife Frances Flaherty (8 minutes), and still photos.

Even though this is an older disc, this is our recommended DVD home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

North American collectors will need a region-free PAL DVD player capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible signal to view this edition.

France: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 2 PAL DVD edition from Amazon.fr. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 2 PAL DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

Better to consider the Criterion DVD edition noted above.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.