| In a recent article in The Globe and Mail, American novelist and MIT humanities professor Alan Lightman writes that the Canadian North provides us with "a unique resource in creating private space." He says that the region is an "enormous tract of almost uninhabited land comprising the upper two-thirds of the country" and suggests that the mere existence of it "creates soul space everywhere."
As romantic as that notion is, there are those who might say Lightman’s idealism is matched only by his ignorance. Among those is Norman Cohn, director of photography, co-editor and co-producer of Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), a film by Igloolik director Zacharias Kunuk, and by far the most important Canadian film to be released in the past year. Cohn particularly bristles at the idea that the region is considered to be uninhabited.
"This idea of true North – true, free North – is a totally European, colonized view (held by) people who’ve never set foot there," he says. "Or if they have, they’ve been sports hunting or parachute skiing for a week or two, and think of... how wonderful it is to be in this vast empty space, whereas Inuit have been living there for thousands of years."
Cohn says one of the many things audiences find astonishing about Atanarjuat is that there is so much human activity, and drama, taking place in a landscape that is frequently considered to be hostile to human habitation.
The mythic structure of Atanarjuat’s story includes elements central to the greatest films ever made. A tale of a community that is influenced by an evil shaman to the point that relationships between various families all but collapse, it is essentially a parable about the importance of social responsibility, and the sustaining power of love, in times of extreme hardship. All this within a film that introduces a story that many of us never knew existed – an Inuit legend that has been passed down from generation to generation since the time before European colonization.
"I think our film is about de-romanticizing the notion of the Arctic as the... tabula rasa," says Cohn. "That wasn’t any blank slate – this was a very inhabited, sophisticated, complex environment that was just invisible to (European colonizers) because they didn’t know what to look for."
Cohn compares it to a similar situation in Australia, where the government, until recently, had designated the majority of that continent’s land mass to be uninhabited territory. Yet, he says, when you look at a map in an Aboriginal cultural centre, it will show the same land divided into 500 to 600 distinct Aboriginal cultural groups – people whose presence there goes back at least 30,000 years.
Cohn also notes that in the United States, John L. O’ Sullivan’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny became the justification for rapacious American expansionism and, ultimately, the genocide of many indigenous peoples.
"That romantic view of these wildernesses denies the reality that they’re actually home to large numbers of people," says Cohn. "It used to be vast numbers of people before disease and exploitation wiped them all out."
But what Atanarjuat shows is that there is still a connection to the pre-colonial way of life. Everything that you see – oil lamps, igloos, dog teams and handmade props – is still familiar to the Inuit of today.
At the same time, the film represents the evolution of an oral storytelling tradition into a cinematic one. This is emphasized when the final credits roll, and you see footage of the cast and crew shooting the film with digital video cameras. After being totally absorbed in the mythical heroism of Atanarjuat for almost three hours, the effect is jarring, but Cohn says that’s intentional, and is meant to show that Inuit culture is a living culture, not a museological one.
"It’s important not to... romanticize the concept of any culture being more authentic if it’s fixed in some particular time in your mind.... This culture is evolving just like any other.... We’re undoing your stereotypes, but we’re not trying to replace them with some new set of stereotypes. It’s so that you walk out having to think – that’s all." |
