Triste Arctique: Amy Taubin on the films of Zacharias Kunuk.
Taubin, Amy
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) erupted onto the screen at the 2001
Cannes Film Festival, just as its eponymous hero of legend, at the
turning point of the film, bursts naked from his ice hut, startling his
would-be assassins who had left him for dead, fleeing on bare, bleeding
feet across the vast, dazzlingly white tundra and ice floes of the
northeastern Canadian Arctic. Literally coming from nowhere--it was the
first theatrical feature made within Inuit society by an Inuit director,
Zacharias Kunuk--the film was astounding visually, kinetically,
narratively, emotionally, historically, from beginning to end.
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Only about two dozen critics showed up for the film's first
press showing at Cannes, but the air-conditioning in the theater was
blasting at crowd level. Huddled in my seat, I felt as if the chill were
emanating from the screen. By movie's end, there were only a
handful of us left; nevertheless, within days, word of
mouth--appropriate, given the film's origin in an oral
tradition--had made The Fast Runner a must-see event. It won the coveted Camera d'Or, the prize for best first feature, and went on to win
many more festival prizes; it also had modest box office success in a
dozen countries, including the United States, and was named to
innumerable critics' "best of the year" lists.
Kunuk's film would have been memorable even if the
circumstances under which I encountered it hadn't been, by chance,
perfectly aligned to amplify its qualities. In addition to that cold
theater, there was the fact that the movie had screened a day after
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux (the restored and
extended version of Apocalypse Now). They were a wild pair: both epic
journeys across forbidding terrains, filled with violent interactions
and larger-than-life characters--the Coppola baroque, overheated,
replete with the kind of set pieces that only eight-figure Hollywood
budgets can buy, the Kunuk spare as its white-on-white landscape. Which
was stronger? I could not then and still cannot choose between them.
Based on an ancient Inuit story set about a thousand years ago, The
Fast Runner is a cautionary tale and a prescription for survival under
conditions in which a single blood feud can jeopardize the future of an
entire community. The film opens on a blindingly white snowscape; in the
distance, a man, alone but for his sled dogs. The dogs are howling and
so is the wind. It could be the opening of a horror film, the sound as
uncanny as the throat singing that accompanies some of the later scenes.
The sense of primal terror continues in the next sequence, which acts as
a prologue to the narrative proper. Inside a hut, lit by flickering oil
lamps and crowded with men, women, and children, inexplicable,
frightening things are taking place. Two men are glimpsed naked and
bound; someone shouts out an accusation of patricide; one man places an
animal-tooth necklace around the neck of another. Men exchange malign
smiles while women, their faces tattooed with delicate lines like seal
whiskers, look on worriedly. One of them offers a terse voice-over
explanation for the nightmarish events: Evil has descended on the
community, brought by a shaman from the north.
Twenty years later, evil is still afoot. Oki, the spoiled son of
the camp leader, is envious of his cousins Atanarjuat, the fast runner,
and Atanarjuat's older brother Amaqjuaq, the strong one. Atanarjuat
and Oki are rivals for the hand of the gravely beautiful Atuat. She had
been promised to Oki but has fallen in love with Atanarjuat. Imagining
an easy victory, Oki agrees to fight Atanarjuat: Winner gets the girl.
The ritualized punching match involves each participant offering his
temple to his opponent, who lands the hardest blow he can. After several
punishing rounds, Atanarjuat is victorious. Several years pass.
Atanarjuat, Atuat, and their child are camped with Amaqjuaq and his
wife. Oki sends his sister, Puja, the Helen of Troy figure of this
Arctic epic, to stir up trouble. Puja seduces Atanarjuat, who makes her
his second wife. But when Puja rolls from under Atanarjuat's
bearskin to Amaqjuaq's as they lie side by side, Atanarjuat throws
her out. Puja tells Oki that Atanarjuat beat her, and Oki, who has been
looking for an excuse for murder, goes with his followers to ambush
Atanarjuat and his family. Amaqjuaq is killed, but Atanarjuat escapes to
make the mythical marathon run that justifies his name. He finds refuge
with an elderly couple, exiles since the occasion of that primal
sin--the barely glimpsed patricide--and they nurse him back to health.
In the meantime, Oki rapes Atuat and, following the family tradition,
kills his own father, installing himself as camp leader. He blames the
murder on Atanarjuat. Eventually, Atanarjuat returns to challenge Oki to
yet another hand-to-hand combat, which he wins by combining brawn and
brains. The curse of the evil shaman is lifted and order restored.
The mesh of power and desire, of jealousy, murder, and revenge, and
of the laws and taboos around propagation is familiar stuff, from the
House of Atreus to the house of Tony Soprano. What's unique about
The Fast Runner is that the drama of human interaction is played out
within a larger drama: the struggle to survive in the most hostile
environment imaginable. Thus scenes of playful courtship, violent
combat, plotting and planning (enacted with gleeful spontaneity and
great conviction by an almost entirely nonprofessional cast) are
interspersed with close-up, detailed depictions of quotidian activities--greasing a sled, skinning a walrus, feeding a bit of raw
animal heart to a drooling baby--that would not be out of place in an
ethnographic film. As in cultures where survival is uncertain, the focus
is on the body. Jokes are ribald, sex is bawdy, fighting brutal,
laughter loud, singing and dancing exuberant. The dialectic of the film
is between the heat of flesh and emotions that spill out every which way
and the frozen, awe-inspiring, ascetic beauty of the landscape. The Fast
Runner is nothing if not an elemental experience.
It is a production of Igloolik Isuma Productions, a company founded
in 1990 by Kunuk, Norman Cohn, Paul Apak Angilirq, and Igloolik elder
Pauloosie Qulitalik. Apak, who died in 1998, wrote the screenplay for
The Fast Runner, the first feature-film script written in Inuktitut, one
of the principal Inuit languages, which is spoken by about thirty
thousand people. He gathered the material from various Inuit
storytellers, each with his or her own variation on this central myth in
Inuit culture.
In 1981, Kunuk traveled from Igloolik, a remote island community in
the northeast Canadian Arctic where he had lived since childhood, to
Montreal. There, he sold three soapstone carvings he had made and used
the money to buy a video camera, with which he returned home. As legends
go in the short history of video art, this rivals the one about Nam June
Paik rushing out in 1965 to buy the first Porta-Pak available in the
United States, encountering, as he left the store, a car bearing Pope
Paul VI along Fifth Avenue, videotaping him, and showing the video that
very night to an audience of art-world luminaries at a Greenwich Village
coffeehouse. Whether factual or apocryphal, these stories reflect the
magical aura that surrounded the video apparatus when it first became
available to individuals working outside the television industry.
After seeing some of Kunuk's videos, Cohn, a New York-born
video maker who was living in Canada in the early '80s, moved to
Igloolik to collaborate with him. "We started working
together," Cohn, the director of photography for The Fast Runner,
wrote me, "because we found ourselves two men from vastly different
origins who shared the same vision and artistic sensibility." That
vision was built on a belief that video was not merely a recording
device or an art medium but had the potential to transform culture and
individual lives. While the messianic fervor of the American video
makers of the late '60s and early '70s was short lived and
video communities such as New York's Raindance Corporation quickly
disappeared, the work of Igloolik Isuma suggests that, hyperbolic idealism aside, there are certain situations in which video empowers
makers and audiences as no other medium can.
From ancient times the Inuit have transmitted their history and
culture orally through storytelling. The Christian missionaries who had
begun colonizing the Inuit as early as the 1700s would devise a
phonetically based alphabet in the nineteenth century and begin
translating the Bible into Inuktitut. The written version of the
language is thus tainted by its colonialist origins. The missionaries
outlawed vital elements of the indigenous culture--its storytelling,
drumming, singing. The rituals and traditions of its shamans were
condemned as satanic. Kunuk and Cohn's project has been to use
video as a forum for reviving and preserving the traditional stories and
the oral, performative aspects of the storytelling, as well as to
document in detail everyday activities as they are practiced today and
were in the past. Over the last twenty years, they have developed a
fluid moving-picture language that combines drama and documentary, which
they have dubbed "re-lived cultural drama." "If something
is shot a certain way and very well acted," Cohn explains,
"you can make a historical drama that couldn't possibly be
'real' look like it's a documentary, or, even better,
have the transparent quality of live TV--like the news, where you
actually see it happen as it happens."
Their first sustained experiment in the form that proves so
dazzling in The Fast Runner was Nunavut (Our Land). Produced in 1994 and
1995, it is a thirteen-part made-for-television historical drama set in
1945, less than a decade before the Canadian government began moving the
nomadic northeast Arctic Inuit to settlements. The narrative, which
follows five families over the course of a year, is culled from the
memories of Inuit elders and in many cases is enacted by their direct
descendants. Our Land prefigures one of the most striking aspects of The
Fast Runner--the retarding of narrative flow by focusing on the rituals
and activities of daily life. Thus there are lengthy sequences of
hunting and fishing, of food preparation and eating, of chiseling snow
into building blocks for igloos, and of harnessing dogs and traveling by
sled over the vast, inhospitable landscape, which in itself, as in The
Fast Runner, provides half the drama. Our Land is of necessity a
survival story. The other dramatic element involves the ongoing conflict
between the vestiges of traditional Inuit culture and Christianity,
which would not be introduced to Nunavut, the remotest region of Canada,
until the twentieth century; but almost immediately upon its
introduction around 1920, it became the dominant institution in Inuit
society.
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In addition to Our Land, Isuma (which means "to think" in
Inuktitut) has produced more than a dozen one-off pieces for television.
Eight of them are collected in a video anthology titled Unikaatuatiit
(Storytellers). The first three pieces are set in the 1930s and sketch
out the method of historical reenactment elaborated in Our Land. The
other five are present-day documentaries. The pieces delve into
problematic issues around education, government, gender roles, and
ecology (in one piece, hunters illegally kill a bowhead whale, once an
important source of food and now a protected species). Again the theme
of old versus new is crucial. One of the loveliest pieces shows
Kunuk's preteen son being taught by his grandfather how to kill a
polar bear. The intimate, contemporary home-video aspect of the piece
gains resonance from an elder's account of the old way of hunting.
If one's visual introduction to Inuit culture came through The Fast
Runner or through the broadcast of Our Land, which put Igloolik Isuma
Productions on the Canadian cultural map, it is momentarily startling to
see residents of Igloolik dressed in flannel shirts and living in metal
houses rather than lumbering about in layers of bearskin. Such is the
power of Kunuk and Cohn's method of giving presence to the past.
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Nevertheless, in terms of theatrical feature films, The Fast Runner
has proved a hard act to follow. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006),
codirected by Kunuk and Cohn, with digital videography again by Cohn, is
as different from The Fast Runner as two films can be that are made by
the same creative/production team, use largely the same group of actors,
and are shot in the same overwhelming and defining landscape. Like The
Fast Runner, The Journals portrays Inuit society from the inside, but
its story is devastatingly bleak, which may partly account for the
film's mixed reception when it premiered at the Toronto
International Film Festival last fall and played at the New York Film
Festival immediately after. It may also be that there is no way to
reproduce the thrill of a first encounter.
Set in 1922, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen depicts the savaging of
Inuit traditions and identity by Christian missionaries--in this case
native Inuit proselytizers--who employed a diabolical strategy to
destroy the shamanism on which the culture was based. Rasmussen was a
mixed-race Arctic explorer and ethnographer (father Danish, mother
Inuit) who recorded his encounter with Avva, the last of the great Inuit
shamans, in his journal. Although the journal is, in actuality, the only
written record of their meeting, it is by no means the film's
governing point of view; the title has a certain irony. From the first,
what we might assume is Rasmussen's story is threaded through that
of Apak, the shaman's daughter, who is looking back at this moment
of cultural and personal crisis from the perspective of an old woman.
Around the midpoint of the film, Rasmussen parts company with Avva and
Apak and is not seen again. Thus, he is not a witness to the denouement of the tragedy, which is depicted from Avva and Apak's points of
view. Indeed, the shape of the narrative precisely reflects the struggle
of the Inuit people to reclaim their history.
The first half of the film takes place almost entirely inside the
hut where Avva is living with his family in self-imposed exile from the
newly Christianized Igloolik community. "They never stop
singing," someone says, and it is clear from their smirks that the
family believes their former friends have drunk the Kool-Aid. Rasmussen
is visiting with two other Danish explorers. The family entertains their
guests with songs and then asks Rasmussen to sing one of his own in
exchange. The Dane performs an a cappella rendition of
"M'appari tutt'amor," an aria from Friedrich von
Flotow's Martha (1847), and although he doesn't understand the
lyrics, Avva responds to the expression of love and loss in the melody.
In the morning the family and their guests assemble outside the hut,
clustering around Rasmussen's portable phonograph, on which he
plays a 78 of Enrico Caruso singing the same aria. The sequence is an
overt reference to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (where
Nanook takes a bite out of the record Flaherty gives him), which, along
with Rasmussen's journal, is one of the only surviving documents of
Inuit life during this period and, like the journal, is the account of
an outsider. (It is interesting to note that Flaherty completed Nanook
in 1922, the very year in which The Journals is set.) Before Rasmussen
departs to continue his explorations, Avva tells him the story of how he
found his calling as a shaman. Finally, Avva and his family, accompanied
by the two other Danes, go off by sled in a different direction, back
home to Igloolik. En route they encounter a contingent of Christian
converts, also from the island. Avva's family has nothing left to
eat; the converts offer them food, but only on condition that they
participate in the Mass. Knowing that certain animal parts are forbidden
to shamans lest they lose their powers, the missionaries have designated
these very organs as the Host. Thus the choice for Avva and Apak, who
has inherited her father's gift, is between starving to death and
losing their identity.
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The final sequences of The Journals are as heartbreaking as
anything in cinema, worthy of comparison with the death of the donkey in
Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar. Their power has to do with the
quietly grave performances of Pakkak Innukshuk as Avva and Leah
Angutimarik as Apak and with the way in which Kunuk and Cohn employ, in
a series of extended wide-angle shots, the vast Arctic landscape as the
site of a metaphoric journey that is existential, spiritual, and
cultural. First Apak makes the trek from her father's hut to the
Christian community that awaits her. Then Avva, alone in the snow,
summons his spirit helpers to bid them farewell. Delicately beautiful
beneath their elaborate furs, the bewildered spirits slowly retreat
across the tundra, crying and looking back over their shoulders as Avva
continues to wave them away. As they become specks in the distance and
the image begins to fade, the whitened sky, reflecting the setting sun,
turns pink and gold, the colors as ephemeral as those in the afterimage of an Agnes Martin painting. After a brief credit sequence in which we
see photographs of the real Avva and Rasmussen, there is a final iconic
Arctic image of a dogsled traversing the snow. Accompanying its passage
we hear the Caruso recording of the haunting aria played earlier in the
film--its juxtaposition with the image suggesting that the apparition of
beauty referred to in the lyric is of a culture whose integrity has been
fatally breached. The final sound in the film is that of the ice
cracking apart.
AMY TAUBIN IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF FILM COMMENT AND SIGHT &
SOUND.
