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**** “Nanook of the North.” “Louisiana Story.”Home Vision. $29.95 each.

In these two great documentaries--the first and last films Robert Flaherty shot--he records without condescension the lives of people usually dismissed as colorful primitives: Eskimos in the 1922 “Nanook” and Cajuns in the 1948 “Louisiana Story.” Both films are ethnographic classics by a director whose love of his subjects ennobled them. (Each uses a corporate sponsor: a fur company is discreet in “Nanook,” but Standard Oil over-intrudes on “Louisiana Story.”) Both films breathe with the poetry of life. There’s a sad postscript: Industry did not preserve the wilderness, and Nanook died of starvation even as Flaherty’s film made him world famous. (“Louisiana Story’s” original Virgil Thomson score is conducted by Eugene Ormandy; the tape of “Nanook” has a new, sometimes intrusive score by Stanley Silverman, performed by Peter Serkin and Tashi.)