Glasgow Film Festival 2015: On the Trail of the Far Fur Country
The integrity of early documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s work has been debated by film scholars for decades. Nevertheless his 1922 debut Nanook of the North is admired for its innovations, and frequently credited for having introduced dramatic narrative to the genre. If this moving piece from Kevin Nikkel teaches us anything, it’s that Flaherty was actually behind the curve. Canadian retail titan The Hudson’s Bay Company had released The Romance of the Far Fur Country two years earlier.
A travelogue following a group of arctic fur trackers as they ricochet across snow-covered terrain between the company’s various outposts, the largely lost film’s journey is here recreated in a contemporary setting. New footage contrasts with the old, most of which is astonishing. Scenes depicting the last vestiges of a dying industry are suitably elegiac, while the devastation wrought upon indigenous communities by exploitative settlers is made painfully clear. Nikkel presents us with visions of an idealised past, and the turning point at which the world began to go hideously wrong.