ATANARJUAT: THE FAST RUNNER (directed by Zacharias Kunuk) is the first feature film ever to be made in Inuktitut. It’s also the first to be made almost entirely by Inuit — made in many ways, for the clothing, the artifacts such as spears and kayaks, and the dwellings were all painstakingly researched and then handmade by artisans to recreate the world of almost a thousand years ago, long before the coming of Europeans. For the people of the community out of which this film emerged, it will be what they have lacked for so many years: a validation of their roots.
The danger might have been that such a film would have only a curio value, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Atanarjuat won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for best first feature and then went on to collect six Genie Awards, and no wonder. It’s already being called a masterpiece. This film is a knockout.
I’ve seen it, or parts of it, on three occasions. I’ll talk about them in reverse order.
The film was viewable in England before its release in Canada, so I saw it in its entirety in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Art. We went to the matinee, but even so we were lucky to get in: the place was packed. During the screening, my English pal and I — supposed mistresses of sang-froid, both of us — did a lot of arm clutching, and, at the end, some unseemly snivelling. As we staggered out of the theatre, red-eyed and wobbly-kneed, she said, “My god! What a film!” Speechlessness is the best tribute.
I’d known Atanarjuat was going to be on in London because, while I’d been in Paris doing my bad imitation of a person who can speak French, we’d happened to turn on the BBC, and the film was being reviewed, complete with excerpts. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an English film critic indulging in this kind of breathless rhapsody. “If Homer had been given a video camera, this is what he would have done,” said he, and there’s something to that.
Which bit of Homer? The story of the House of Atreus would be my guess, for this is a generational saga with many Homeric elements — love, jealousy, rivalry between young contenders, extraordinary feats of strength, resentments passed from fathers to sons, and crimes that beget consequences years later. The world of Greek myth is one in which gods interact with human beings, dreams have significance, grudges are held, vengeance is exacted, the ways of Fate are dark, food can cast a spell, and animals aren’t always what they seem; and if you substitute the word spirits for the word gods, these things are true as well of Atanarjuat.
It helps going into the film to know a couple of things. First, this is not a “made-up” story, any more than Homer would have said The Iliad was made up. It’s based on oral tradition — on a series of events said to have really happened, in real places. (You can follow the travels of the characters on the film’s web site.) So it would be beside the point to fault someone called “the author” for something you don’t like about “the plot.”
Second, a newborn child was thought to be a reincarnation of someone who’d died. Thus, when the grandmother addresses a young woman as “little mother” — which throws you the first time you hear it — it’s not just that the girl is named after the old woman’s mother: she is that mother.
Third, spirits are all around. They can confer extra strength, and they can enter into people, and make them behave badly (like the demons cast out by Christ). But they can be mastered to some extent by shamans, who can also call on the dead for help. So, as in Homer, this story isn’t just about conflict between human rivals. It’s a battle between one lot of spirits and another, kicked off when an evil spirit arrives and sows discord among the members of a hunting group, and enters into one of them.
Fourth, it was forbidden for a woman to speak to or even look at her brother-in-law. That’s why the bad sex scene between the wayward second wife of the hero and the hero’s brother isn’t just any old roll in the fur. It’s really bad.
Fifth, there are various kinds of strength. There’s the strength conferred by the position of leadership — keep your eye on the teeth-and-tusk necklace, the equivalent of the crown in Richard III — and this position is always held by a man, because the group is a hunting group and it’s the men who hunt. There’s the strength conferred by shamanistic power, which can be used for good or ill; but it helps to know that both the woman (later the grandmother) who gives a talismanic rabbit’s foot to her brother, and the brother himself, possess this power.
And finally, there’s moral authority. This can be earned or lost. (Watch out for the moment when, in any western genre film, the hero — his enemies finally at his mercy — would blow them to bits. This doesn’t happen. Instead, Atanarjuat says, “The killing stops here,” thus gaining moral authority. We could use a little of that right now.) But the ultimate moral authority resides with the elders, who wield it sparingly, though to crushing effect. Keep your eye on the grandmother.
These were things I would have liked to have known the first time I saw this film. It was the summer before it was to preview at the Toronto International Film Festival (on September 12, 2001: the preview was cancelled). I was on an icebreaker in the Arctic, with a tour group called Adventure Canada. They’d asked me to come along and give a couple of talks, a small price to pay for the experience of seeing places I’d only ever dreamed about. Everything about this voyage was magic; the Arctic light effects alone — the mirages, the Fata Morgana, the “glories” — were worth the trip. At one point we all got out and stood on an ice pan, looking forebodingly like a David Blackwood lithograph.
If we’d taken off all our clothes and leapt from floe to floe, we might have resembled instead — from a distance — the spectacular scene in which the hero of Atanarjuat runs stark naked across miles and miles of broken pan ice. I didn’t get as far as this during my first viewing. It wasn’t that the film was being shown in episodes on a TV set and it was hard to read the subtitles. But Pakak Innuksuk — the man who plays the Strong One, the hero’s older brother — was on the ship with us. He was a man of few but cogent words, a hunter from much farther north, and in the film he was much as he seemed in life; more brusque, but recognizable. So I watched up to the place where Pakak was sleeping in a skin tent along with his brother, and the three murderous rivals were sneaking up on them. I knew Pakak was about to be horribly speared, and I didn’t think I could go through with it. (It was okay to watch Pakak being speared in London. I hadn’t just had pancakes with him.)
There’s a permeable boundary between reality and art. We know there’s a connection, we know there’s a difference, but there’s no stone wall. When I think of Atanarjuat, of course I will always think of Pakak. While we were scrambling around on the Arctic landscape one day, I recalled with some embarrassment having been told that a native band, lacking a word for “northern tourism,” had come up with an expression that means “white men playing in the woods.” So there we were, mostly white people playing on the rocks, and there was Pakak, standing on a cliff where he had a good view.
He had a large bear gun. He was watching out for animals. As he, and all the men of whom (says the lore) he is an incarnation, have been doing for thousands of years.