Another chilly review from Duncan Shepherd

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It affords the spectator a sterling opportunity to test his broad-mindedness.
Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published July 3, 2002
The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
Any wag who wished to say that The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) is the best Inuit-language film to have ever come down the pike, might have said equally well, if not as waggishly, that it's the worst. More objectively: the only. The "language" qualifier allows it to dodge head-to-head competition with such superior Eskimo epics as Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents and Philip Kaufman's The White Dawn (subtitled only in part), let alone Robert J. Flaherty's seminal silent documentary, Nanook of the North.
The most urgent thing to say about it is that, for all its exoticism, it is just one more addition to the amassment of movies now shot on video. So once again you get those funny, fuzzy, feathery edges and those glassy, glazed surfaces, besides the optional hand-held-camera shakiness and wide-angle-lens protuberance. But really! (Picky, picky.) If everything else remained the same while the image got upgraded to the vicinity of, say, Dersu Uzula, how much improved would the movie be? My answer to that one would be (with all ambiguity intended): incalculably. With its predominantly Inuit cast and crew, headed by director Zacharias Kunuk and scriptwriter Paul Apak Angilirq, The Fast Runner earns points for authenticity, if not, at the same time, for ability to communicate. (Flaherty, a true intercultural mediator, had of course forged the mold for ethnographic filmmaking by enlisting the natives as helpers.) And it earns more of the same -- but again, nothing extra -- for a storyline lifted from centuries-old oral tradition: an evil curse, forbidden love, jealousy, treachery, murder, rape, patricide, and incommensurate revenge (reminiscent of the Kenny Rogers C&W oldie in which the singer avenges the rape of his beloved by beating up her attacker: that'll teach him!). The unfamiliarity of this material naturally draws your attention to the most elementary and most minute details: the faces, the cat-whisker or bicycle-spoke tattoos around the noses of the women, the icicles on the men's mustaches, the slitted metallic anti-glare goggles, the dress, the tools, the endless gutting and scraping of animal carcasses, the mealtime belching, and, overtowering everything, the terrible terrain.
One measure of how far the filmmakers are inside the culture is the unapologetic brutality and barbarism. (The Inuit equivalent of a knightly joust for the hand of a maiden is to have the rivals take turns punching one another on the temple, undefended.) This, to be sure, affords the spectator a sterling opportunity to test his broad-mindedness. As storytellers, however, even as documentarists, the filmmakers are to a high degree inept. (Flaherty, although a documentarist first, was also an able storyteller.) Dramatic impact will always tend to be lessened when you have to wait awhile to find out who just did what to whom. The ideal way to avoid such delay is for the director to establish who's where before it happens. Kunuk is not good about that. (The unquestioned piÃ¨ce de rÃ©sistance of the film -- the hero's barefooted and bare-assed flight across the ice from three murderous pursuers -- at least gives you plenty of time to get your bearings.) And our hunger for basic ethnographic education must follow the same course: we have to pick up whatever dropped nuggets we can while we struggle along the unmarked trail. The final thing to say about the film, after several checks of the wristwatch throughout it, is that it is nearly three hours long. In a word, it's an ordeal.
From the opposite end of the globe, a video hot tip: Peter Delpeut's The Forbidden Quest (nowhere, I would guess, but Kensington Video, foreign section). Delpeut, if you don't place the Netherlander's name, was at the top of my list of last year's best films for his Felice Felice (nowhere but the San Diego International Film Festival), and was near the top of my list in whatever year his Lyrical Nitrate appeared (nowhere but the Ken Cinema). This one, a sui generis blend of documentary and fantasy, with an on-screen cast of one (Joseph O'Conor), plus an off-screen interviewer (Roy Ward), falls between the other two in chronology, much closer to the earlier. Dedicated to Frank Hurley, the "picture man" on Ernest Shackleton's 1914 voyage to the South Pole, the film makes use of much of the same archival footage that went into last year's The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, supplemented with similar footage from other such voyages of the period, all of it color-tinted and presented as the record of a single fictitious South Pole expedition in 1905 on a Dutch ship called the Hollandia.
This footage is passed off as the booty of the sole survivor, the ship's carpenter, who recounts the tale -- in English -- straight to the camera in black-and-white footage ostensibly shot in Ireland in 1941. (Admittedly it doesn't look much like the black-and-white photography of the time, much more like that of its own time, or approximately Schindler's List time.) With the tinted footage, most of it pristinely preserved, Delpeut is once again able to pay tribute to the cinema and its pioneers, as he did in different ways in his two films already cited. But at the same time he is conscious of the limitations of the medium: the footage cannot corroborate the turn of the tale down the wayward paths of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne (both of them acknowledged in the closing credits). Or to put it in purely cinematic terms: he begins in the LumiÃ¨re camp, strikes out toward the MÃ©liÃ¨s (the period of the tale, keep in mind, is 1905), but like so many of the would-be discoverers of the South Pole, he never quite gets there. Somehow the sense of belief -- in the power of the cinema as well as in the power of the supernatural -- comes through stronger than in any of the facile, literal-minded, rolling-in-dough FX extravaganzas of con- temporary Hollywood. Special effects could certainly do a better job of illustrating every last occurrence in the narrator's tale. They could not do a better job of convincing us it actually happened. And oh yes, the film runs an hour and a quarter.

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Topic - Another chilly review from Duncan Shepherd - clarkjohnsen 13:35:19 07/09/02 (1)

Criminy! Another Kenny Rogers simile! - TAFKA Steve 14:25:35 07/09/02 (0)

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