The
Primal Seen
by Chris Dashiell
Overstuffed with history, the modern mind has trouble
absorbing the mythic realm. Gods and monsters, creation and destruction,
the trickster's gift and the hero's journey - all this, if glimpsed
at all, is seen as gigantic, monumental, astonishing. Yet this is contradicted
by a curious quality of aboriginal story-telling - the tone is casual,
everyday, as if such things happened as a matter of course, and are
in fact still happening now.
The
Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), the first feature made in the
Inuit language, tells an ancient tale of how an evil spirit descended
on a tribe, causing a blood feud that involved treachery, adultery,
and parricide. The central story involves two brothers, Atanarjuat and
Amaqjuaq, who earn the enmity of their cousin Oki when the former wins
Oki's intended bride Attuat through combat. Later, Atanarjuat takes
Oki's sister Puja as a second wife, a decision that leads to discord
between the brothers and a murderous plot against them by Oki. Miraculously
escaping death by running naked across the ice with enemies in pursuit
(one of the movie's most amazing sequences), Atanarjuat must endure
exile, preparing, with the help of an ally, to return and battle his
nemesis.
Shot
on digital video in the arctic locations associated with the myth, The
Fast Runner employs intense visual immediacy, dynamic camera movement,
and lots of close-ups, to immerse the viewer in the everyday aspects
of Inuit culture - hunting, sleeping arrangements, food preparation,
dogsleds, clothing, social relationships - while avoiding the distancing
effect of folklore through its matter-of-fact narrative strategies.
Just as a story provides a foundation for a ceremony, so here the spiritual
elements are for the most part subsumed in the plot - everything seems
to take place in an eternal Present which in substance is the same as
our time now, the characters embodying the spirits and destinies of
their predecessors and successors. By creating a work that originates,
as it were, from within the suprahistorical tradition of a native culture,
the film succeeds in making myth tangible and alive.
The
director, Zacharias Kunuk, has been making Inuit documentaries for Canadian
television for quite a few years. This project, his first feature, was
inspired by recordings of different versions of the Atanarjuat myth
collected by Inuit author Paul Apak Angilirq. Three years in the making,
the film has all native actors - only Natar Ungalaaq, in the title role,
had any professional experience. The widescreen digital photography
is incredibly beautiful - from the vast expanses of ice to the inside
of igloos lit only by seal-oil lamps, the film captures the texture
of traditional Inuit life. The actors perform with impressive honesty
and naturalness.
Eschewing
exposition, the mysterious prologue consists of short, enigmatic scenes
that are like fragmentary bursts of archetypal vision. The elements
and their relationship to the whole gradually become clearer during
the film's main story. Kunuk presents the forbidding landscape as epic
background, the eye opening out to the horizon, with shades of white
and brown, always alternating with the rawness of close-ups and the
ever-moving camera.
The
picture is almost three hours long, but it never dawdles, always placing
the action before us with little sense of mediation other than that
provided by the evocative soundtrack of native music and singing. This
is that rare work that seems completely new, in both meaning and form.
You can lose yourself in this movie - it builds and builds, until the
sense of power absorbs you into its world. The folkloric immediacy,
like painting with broad strokes, has its drawbacks - parts of the picture
are more finished, 
as
if emerging from an elemental chaos (I was was also occasionally jarred
by modern-sounding subtitles) - but it has even greater advantages.
The scale becomes awesome not only in spatial terms, but in temporal
ones as well.
Unexpectedly, the story, which seems to be heading towards
a resolution familiar from countless tales of revenge, suddenly enlarges
to become the story of a ceremony, the establishment of community as
a way of seeing, a higher purpose than the way of individuals. The hero's
journey, taking place in the ordinary life of Eternity, is repeated
now, today, in the extraordinary rituals of Time.
©2002 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
