How Does The Film Through These Eyes Reflected By Netsilik Films?

The documentary Through These Eyes is an exploration of the forgotten U.S. educational program implemented in the Kennedy-era. Leading intellectual, educational, and ethnography experts at the time, were charged with the task of devising an educational program which would invoke peace in the adults of the future. To do so, they came up with Man: A Course of Study or MACOS, a film based, year-long social sciences course for 5th grade students. Despite the program being created in good faith and containing revolutionary concepts, it was eventually evicted from the curriculum by enraged parents and conservative politicos.
The core of the program was a film series which followed an Inuit family living in remote Canada. The footage showed the life and culture of the Netsilik Eskimos, a culture which had remained unchanged by the outside world until the late 1910’s. The Eskimos’ way of life in extreme isolation offered an interesting tool for interpretation, they were used to encourage students to find cultural relativism and understand the different building blocks which make up human community and society.
One of the questions that rose was the idea of being able to see the ethnographic present. It is easy to ask people to remember the past, but having people re-enact their culture for the camera is very difficult. The documentary failed to explain exactly how anthropologists filmmakers successfully utilized a technique that allowed people to enact their culture for the camera. This being said, Agnes Nartok, one of the Netsilik in the original film explained that they were very much so living like the film showed at the time and so it wasn’t as much of acting as it was just living