Eskimo

A pretty liberal movie for it's time.There's a couple regressive elements since for some reason they want to frame the movie as a documentary in that it looks down upon Inuit lifestyles but it mostly portrays the white characters as they should as invaders on a foreign culture. Interesting for film history at least.

Eskimo is a long and sometimes slow movie, which is what works against it. For a movie that won Oscar for 'Best Film Editing' it sure is a movie that would have benefited from more tight editing. I'm sure W.S. Van Dyke took some inspiration from Nanook (1922) and this film is close to a equal historical importance. And while it's still a fiction story and a Hollywood movie, it shows a lot of respect to the exotic nature of the culture they are filming. So in short; Eskimo is a valuable film.