Blood Lust of the Wolf
(2015-17, live cinema performance)
Blood Lust of the Wolf is a new live cinema performance that remixes the classic film Nanook of the North (dir. Robert Flaherty, 1922) into a fugue state about race, ethnicity and exploitation. The show dissects the core of what makes Nanook disturbing yet compelling nearly a century later— the film’s approach to ethnography.
By examining the landscape and people that were once fragmented during Flaherty's filmmaking process, and reassembling them into new personas and places, Blood Lust of the Wolf invites the audience to reconsider their own positions and complicities in global systems of race and exploitation.
Features music by about.theWindow
What does the title mean?
Nanook of the North was a silent film, so like other films of the time, it uses text intertitles to situate and advance the film's story. Intertitles were much more baroque than narration or dialogue, the film is peppered with these poetic and strange turns of phrase. The phrase "blood lust of the wolf" is an intertitle used to describe the mighty sled dogs, but unmistakably ascribing such characteristics to Allakariallak, the man playing the character of Nanook.
Selected Screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festval, Los Angeles Filmforum, Temple Structural Documentary Symposium, UFVA 2015 (Washington, DC)
Please contact Simon for information on booking performances of Blood Lust of the Wolf.
