The Long Exile Read Online Free Page A

camping equipment, a canoe, a Haulberg electric-light plant and projector and two movie cameras. lust about two months after that, on board the schooner
Annie
, Flaherty “let go anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and the five gaunt and melancholy-looking buildings” of the post “stood out on a boulder-ridden slope less than half a mile away,” as he wrote in his diaries.
    By the time he reached Inukjuak in 1920, Robert Flaherty had a good sense of what he needed to do and how to do it. Before he left New York he had paid a visit to the Craftsman Laboratories to get advice from Terry Ramsaye and Martin lohnson, who were trying to put together an adventure film from lohnson's various travels in the tropics. Film-making was new and, in spite of his experience filming on Baffin Island, Flaherty was unsure about the grammar of film sequences and shots. He had also updated his equipment. The Ake-leys he had bought to replace the earlier Bell and Howell usedgraphite for lubrication rather than oil so they were less likely to freeze. They were also the first cameras to be fitted with gyroscopic tripod heads allowing the camera to be tilted and panned by a single movement without too much jerking. Eastman Kodak had provided an old English Williamson printing machine, which Flaherty screwed to the wall of his cabin beside his Frans Hals print. He had also brought developing fluid and a small battery of lightweight lights and a Graflex stills camera, and soon after his arrival in Inukjuak he fixed up a rudimentary darkroom with a drying annex, heated by a coal-burning stove, in which to dry the developed film.
    So Flaherty finds himself in this tiny, remote settlement, with nothing but his equipment, a few pictures, his gramophone and a tremendous sense of his own destiny. He is keen to begin filming before the weather closes in and ice creeps across the sea so he takes Alakariallak, Maggie and Cunayou out along the coast and he films his first sequence, of hunter, wives, children and dogs all emerging, one by one, and as if by magic, from the one-man
kayak
seat. It's a bit of a joke, a moment of comedy in what will, he hopes, be a tense and dramatic tale of survival against the odds. He films Maggie pulling the baby from her
amiut
and setting him down among the husky pups. He watches her smile through the Akeley. He says, “Smile!”
    A few days later, Flaherty sets up the projector in his cabin and invites his cast in for a viewing. He offers round hot tea and sea biscuits and quickly discovers that Maggie, Alakariallak and the rest have no idea what a film is or, for that matter, what the images represent. When he shows them stills of themselves, they hold them upside down and he has to take them to a mirror before they are able to understand what it is they are looking at. Finally, when everyone is crammed in and settled and seems to have at least some idea of why they are there, he runs the rushes, noting with satisfaction, later in his diary, the gasps and giggles of his cast as they recognise themselves in black and white and two dimensions.
    Summer is short in the Arctic and this one is quickly done. By mid-September the summer birds are gone and the long winter is once more closing in like a fist around Inukjuak and the business of making a movie suddenly becomes a good deal more complicated. Inukjuak lies south of the Arctic Circle but by October the light is already limited to six hours a day and by November there is only sufficient daylight for three hours' filming. The water for washing the film begins to ice up and, as winter grips, Flaherty's helpers are forced to cut a hole through six feet of ice, pull water up in buckets, pour it into barrels and load it on to a fourteen-foot-long sled hauled by a ten-dog sled team to the little cabin. A constant wind sends smoking whorls of dry snow blasting into the camera lens, blizzards break open and in a matter of minutes the cast are unable to see as far as their