The Long Exile Read Online Free Page B

own hands. As temperatures drop, film shatters inside the cameras from the cold and the men are forced to stash the retorts and sometimes even the cameras inside their parkas to keep them warm enough to work. The moment the cameras are brought into the relative warmth of the cabin, they frost up and have to be taken apart and dried piece by piece. One time the Graflex is so badly affected by condensation that Flaherty has to dismantle it completely only to discover that he cannot recall how to put it back again and one of his Inuk helpers has to sit down at his table and gradually, by candlelight, put it back together.
    Flaherty constantly finds himself having to charge after hunters too excited by the prospect of a kill to stop and remember to pose for the camera. He spends a good deal of time trying to persuade the Inuit to repeat their actions or simply stand where they are told. Maggie and Cunayou fall out. There are disputes over pay.
    But none of these setbacks seems to discourage the film-maker for long. He bounces from day to day in a kind of ecstatic trance. In his spare time he fiddles for the locals, or sets up impromptu screenings of his rushes. In all the excitement, the contradictions of his ambition pass him by. Here he is, a white man banked by a fur trader, making a film about an idealised kind of Inuit life which, if itever existed, has long since been turned upside down by, among others, white men and fur traders.
    By November the sea around Inukjuak is frozen firm and by December it is stable enough to travel on long distance. At Christmas, Flaherty throws his customary party for the Inuit, serving up sardines and sweet tea, and making a space in the fur store to dance square reels and Irish jigs. When the New Year arrives he decides that what his film needs is a polar bear hunt. The bears are rarely seen around Inukjuak but Alakariallak says that female bears often pass the winter with their cubs in dens at Cape Sir Thomas Smith, two hundred miles north along the Ungava coastline, and so, on 17 lanuary 1921, Flaherty sets off with Alakariallak and another man he has nicknamed Harry Lauder after the singer and the party turns north. They reckon on being away a month, allowing ten days each for the journey there and back and another ten for bad weather, stopping to film wherever they find polar bear. But the going proves difficult, the ice near to the coast pushed into mountainous pressure ridges and the dogs hard-pressed to pull the sleds over broken ice fields and knife-sharp candle ice, and when eventually they reach Cape Sir Thomas Smith there are no polar bears. For a few days they meander across the cape, one time travelling all day and night only to find themselves within two miles of their starting point. No bears. The dogs become more and more desperate from cold and hunger until they eventually stage a rebellion, making a dash for the shelter of the hunters' snowhouse and refusing to allow themselves to be harnessed, and Alakariallak has to carry the lead dog to the sled whimpering with misery and cold. Still, they see no bears. One by one the dogs begin to starve. The men are so cold now and so low on fuel, they are reduced one night to burning the cross bars from the
komatik
to keep them warm. The following night they have nothing left for a fire but film. Four two-hundred-foot rolls are sacrificed to boil water for their tea. They lose two dogs to starvation before Flaherty finally makes the decision to turn back for home. In eight weeks away they have not run into a single bear. They beginthe return journey by day, travelling in small bursts, walking beside the sleds whose dogs are by now too weak to pull them. The sea ice pours on either side, as flat and formless as a newly ironed sheet. As they walk, Alakariallak keeps them cheerful with stories of the bears he has killed the year before. At night they build a makeshift snow-house and he sings them versions of the songs he has heard on