Hit and myth
Well-told Inuit story runs away from the summer pack. By David Fear

Atanarjuat

CINEMA STARTED OUT as a carnival sideshow, an attraction that garnered little respect and got by on sheer novelty. But it eventually took its place as the dominant medium of the 20th century when it proved itself capable of giving viewers a real story. While movies – in particular, the "summer" varieties – seem destined to decline further into sensation-minus-vision marathons, great stories still rise to the top. They don't rise much higher than Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner). Its source material is Inuit legend. Yet it's not just the centuries-old oral history that makes the film feel so revelatory and revolutionary. It's the fact that, even as it utilizes modern forms of no-frills filmmaking, it has managed to boil down cinematic storytelling to its essence.

In once-upon-a-time mode, the story begins with two brothers, Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) and Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk), whose family was ousted from the tribe by an evil shaman. As the film tells it, the boys grow up surviving on their own but continue to catch flak from Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq), the cocky son of the tribe's leader and Atanarjuat's rival for the hand of pretty Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu). Our hero eventually takes Atuat as his wife, but when Oki's promiscuous sister enters the brothers self-contained environment, betrayal and murder ensue. A wounded Atanarjuat flees his home and is taken in by a good shaman who nurses him back to health. The "fast runner" decides to return and face his foes in order to reclaim his family name and restore order to the community.

When Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk first heard the tale of Atanarjuat, he was a six-year-old living with his family on the same northern Canadian land the story's protagonists inhabited. "My mother would tell us that story at night, to get us to go to sleep," he recounted on a recent visit to San Francisco with the movie's producer-cinematographer Norman Cohn. "It was the same story that had been told to her when she was young, and the legend of the Fast Runner was several generations old before then." I reminded him of something he'd told British magazine Sight and Sound: "Greeks were good at temples; Inuit were kick-ass storytellers." He smiled and replied, "They had to be. There was nothing else to do!"

Part of the film's grandeur comes from the fact that tribute is not just paid to the prodigious way the Inuit have with a classic "hero on a journey" narrative but also to the still-vibrant culture and environment that fosters that kind of storytelling. Long, nearly silent takes are devoted to capturing the Inuit lifestyle, working the frostbitten land in order to survive. Shot in a digital wide-screen format that renders the frozen tundra like an icy Monument Valley, the Arctic landscapes take on an otherworldly quality custom-built for mythopoetic status, even as the film's realist visual approach and slowed-down pacing ground its context within a patient, philosophical, and ritualistic culture.

Which brings up the unspoken issue of a cultural reparation for the traditional representation of the Eskimo world, an entirely different on-screen myth perpetrated by such Arctic Circle entries as Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents, Map of the Human Heart, and a certain landmark documentary. Even as the United States' indigenous population finally got to go dignified into their Cheyenne Autumn years, the average filmgoer's image of the Eskimo can be reduced to Nanook biting a phonograph in mock ignorance. If Atanarjuat accomplishes anything, it's the dispelling of that simplistic image of the snow-blind "noble savage." These characters fight, fuck, fuck up, and finally triumph like most movie heroes and villains. The emphasis is never on the alien, but on the familiar.

With its you-are-there approach and real-time rhythms, Atanarjuat gives you the feeling that you've unwittingly stumbled across found footage from a long-lost, pre-cinema past. It's only during the credits, when shots of the actors in motorcycle jackets pop up, do you remember it's "only" a movie. Deliberately paced, told completely in the Inuktitut language, and three hours long, it could put off viewers used to 30-cuts-a-minute blowouts. But considering moviedom's nouveau mythmaker for the ages just delivered a new episode seriously lacking in mythic stature, the irony of both Atanarjuat's timeless structure and its timing isn't lost on its makers.

"Yeah, we're the anti-Star Wars," Cohn mused. "They're using digital technology to create something where nothing feels real. And we're using it to create a feeling of authenticity, as if it were happening all around you so that the myth actually resonates."

'Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)' opens Fri/21 at San Francisco theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.