We re-examine the dynamics of uniaxial nernatic liquid crystals using the polar fluid model. This modelling approach was investigated by Eringen, but his description of rotational elasticity is significantly less tractable than that proposed by Ossen and Frank who represented the microstructure by a unit vector, known as the director. In this paper we combine the Ossen-Frank elastic energy with the polar fluid model and establish the differences of the resulting polar nernatic fluid model with the classical Eriksen-Leslie equations of nematodynamics. Although the polar fluid framework seems quite different from the Eriksen-Leslie model, the non-dissipative contributions in the final equations appear to be closely related, while the dissipative contributions differ slightly. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.