Picturegoer (1934)

PICTUREGOER Weekly January |3 Filming the Frozen SYqrth PETER FREUCHEN, the Danish explorer and author of the book " Eskimo," from which W. S. Van Dyke filmed this Polar epic, tells you of the difficulties which beset the expedition in Alaska and how they were overcome. IX feet six, the wooden left leg thumping firmly along, the heavy V — S brown beard and brown hair framed by an old sea-captain's hat tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees, Peter Freuchen breezed into New York with the freshness and openness of the Arctic regions where so much of his life has been spent. In his hotel suite the Danish author talked of Eskimo, the M.-G.-M. picture which has been adapted from his book of the same name. "My own book," he began in a voice strangely gentle for so large and hearty a man, "treats of the Greenland Eskimos, whom I know and with whom I have lived; whereas this picture is a story of the Alaskan Eskimos. " What is most ama zing is that their customs are almost exactly alike. You see, there are only about 32,000 Eskimos altogether in the world. "Most of them originally came from the North of the United States; and when they drifted northwards and separated in Alaska, Greenland and Siberia, they were speaking the same language and living with the same folk lore. "For a thousand years now explorers and surveyors like myself have been able to go from one Eskimo community to another, separated by days and weeks of travel, and find only the slightest variations in speech or habits. "Tn the beginning we thought of going to A Greenland, since that, after all, was the place I knew best — but Greenland has four solid months of darkness during which it is not only dangerous to move about but almost impossible to do any photography. "Furthermore, the rays of the sun are so penetrating that all our film would have been ruined in a short time. "Though I'd known that the life in Alaska was pretty much the same as in Greenland, it was still surprising to find so many similarities. About the only serious difference was the extent to which the Eskimos in the North are civilised. This is, of course, the influence of the white man and, in particular, the missionaries. "In certain cases we were shocked to find that the Eskimos had lost the habit of their own customs, so much had they assumed white characteristics. " But it wasn't long before they became intensely interested in re-enacting the details of the life they had lived before the white man came and attempted to re-live them — and I should not be surprised if some of them have since abandoned the white communities and gone back to their own lives. " Habituating oneself to the rigours and peculiarities of such a climate as Alaska's is a difficult enough task for transient visitors. But establishing semi-permanent and livable headquarters where all manner of special equipment can be stored is a* far greater problem and one which presented formidable complications for the expedition when it arrived for nine months of intensive work at Teller Island, off the tip of Alaska. "The result of these nine months of labour, and of eight further months of editing and retaking in the studios, is the ambitious film drama, Eskimo. "When W. S. Van Dyke, the director, disembarked with myself and his company from Mala, a mighty hunter of the North, who plays a leading role in the picture. Dortuk, " The Garbo of the North," and Nunarook, " the Eskimo Jimmy Durante," brought back to Hollywood for further interiors and close-ups in Van Dyke's production. the whaling schooner, Nanuk, it was late in June of last year — and Alaska, contrary to a general impression of all-year-round frost, has a season which they choose to designate as summer. "Up around Teller Island this means a temperature ranging from 20 degrees to 50 degrees, and the habitations are not the famous igloos (which function only in the extreme winter) but tents of sealskin, later dismantled and preserved. "Although we were eager to live in the same manner as the natives, partly to ensure friendliness and partly to be as comfortable as they seemed, the plan was not found to be feasible because we should have had to construct the tents on too large a scale. "Too many sealskins would have been needed and, before the tents could have become really livable, we should have had to move out of them into our winter headquarters. "Accordingly, we set up only a dozen tents of the more easily obtainable caribou skin, merely for sleeping; where we actually lived was in a series of wooden shacks and in a large old ware