(8:40)

     In 1922, Robert J. Flaherty launched into household/academic celebrity a new documentary film: Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic.  However, much of his film was staged, rehearsed, and edited for effect.  This of course continues routinely today in documentary filmmaking.  But importantly, even where contemporary anthropology filmmakers make concerted efforts to capture life as is on film, it is the camera and its imaging techniques that speak first, before the anthropologist or her subjects.  Curiously, even our most influential (surreal?) anthropologists sometimes willfully deny a camera’s power.  Fifty years after Nanook (and 40 years before Zapook), our continuing failures to capture ‘reality’ were certainly never lost on Frank Zappa. 

     Many others have spoofed Nanook or themselves on YouTube.  I have collected some of these mediations here to build a montage chorus to which Zappa is again our logically absurd conductor. 

Read the original project HERE... and its original audience HERE.