The Inuit Cinema Aesthetic
At about the same time that I came up with the Slow Media concept, unbeknown to the rest of the world, a young Inuit filmmaker, Zacharius Kunuk, was using similar, hi-def technology to shoot his first feature length narrative in Canada’s high Arctic. This project, Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner, produced over two short summer seasons in Zach’s home community of Igloolik, would go on to win the Caméra d'Or (Golden Camera) at Cannes, and six Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture. Atanarjuat was also a commercial success, it grossed more than US$5 million worldwide. In 2015, a poll of filmmakers and critics at the Toronto International Film Festival named Atanarjuat, the greatest Canadian film of all time.
When I first viewed this break-through film in 2001, I was astounded that a film of almost three hours (2 hours and 52 minutes) scripted wholly in the Inuktituk language, could attract an international audience. Yes, it had many of the essential components of good drama (love, betrayal, lust) but I felt it was clearly speaking to its audience in other, very powerful ways.
A substantial component of the Zach Kunuk’s dramatic style was to employ extensive, unhurried shots of both the tundra and the ice. From a southern viewer’s perspective, this substantially slows down both the narrative pace of the film, and the sense of cinematic time in this Inuit story. A still frame, wide shot of the expansive tundra might be held for as long as thirty seconds while a human form first appears on the broad Arctic horizon and then travels, at a walk, towards us. While we experience this very measured, very dramatic entrance and slowly recognize the specific character, we are also being given the time to simply ‘be with the tundra’. We sense the mild summer wind
and the sun coaxing the life forth from the newly thawed Arctic surface soil, and we actually get a sense of the light on this land. This is what I refer to as “real time”.
It is a cinematic, Inuit sense of time and space. It is a welcoming of the audience, an invitation into both the Inuit way of seeing and being with the land and ice. Its references are the sun, the specific season, and the elements at work on the landscape. This aspect of Inuit cinema aesthetic imbues much of the film, and my sense is that this is one of the major gifts of this film that the international, largely urban audience has heartily embraced.
And it’s not just by chance that this Inuit cinematic aesthetic evolved in Zach Kunuk’s home community of Igloolik. This was the only community in the high Arctic (and perhaps the world) that rejected television twice in the early seventies when American stations first began bouncing their satellite signals into Inuit communities. They didn’t like the effect this new incursion was having on neighboring villages as Elders began to be ignored, and everyone stayed home rather than visiting through the long winter months.
When Igloolik finally did begin working with television in the early eighties, it was in the same style as the radio programming they had been producing for over twenty years. It was community-based storytelling, in their language, with no commercials. This is what later became the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC). The pace and structure of the IBC programs was not dictated by the commercial model with short 6 minute acts, punctuated by 7-8 minutes of commercial breaks in every half hour. And after a twenty-year incubation, the culmination was Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner.
The Slow Media style and ethos is built on these same principles, an unhurried approach to thoughtful, well composed images of the earth that work with the power and beauty of nature in real time.
What’s your window on the world?
Zach Kunuk is still making fabulous whalebone carvings, 35 years after he traded his first carvings as a young man in Montreal, and brought a video camera home to Igloolik.