Minneapolis/St. Paul

'The Fast Runner' brings new technology to an old myth

Kunuk of the North

The searcher: Natar Ungalaaq in 'The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)'

Image: Lot 47 Films

by Peter Ritter
July 3, 2002

A sublimely beautiful three-hour epic filmed in Igloolik, a minuscule Inuit community some 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) opens in the amber glow of a fire-lit igloo, amid the jostling of naked bodies. "I can only sing this song to someone who understands it," intones a female narrator, as two men, bound at the hands and feet, tussle with one another in a pit. When one of the men slumps over dead, a leering shaman materializes to anoint a new leader with a wreath of walrus tusks. The proceedings have the aura of ritual mystery, and we're given only half-clues as to what's going on--whispers of an evil curse, of incest and patricide. But The Fast Runner's spell binds quickly; from the opening scene, we're immersed in a world that's at once dazzlingly alien and intimately familiar.

The Fast Runner is the first feature film made in the Inuktitut language, and it doesn't just sound new; it also looks and feels like nothing that has come before it. Small wonder that critics casting for analogies have reached beyond the cinematic canon, comparing it instead to Shakespeare and the Iliad. The Fast Runner has the same cosmic sweep, the same sense of universality as those works. In fact, it may be one of the richest expressions of human culture ever committed to celluloid.

All that, one suspects, is gravy to the film's director, Zacharias Kunuk, who labored for three years to bring The Fast Runner to an Inuit audience. "The response of the outside world is a surprise," says Kunuk during a visit to Minneapolis with the film's director of photography, Norman Cohn, a native New Yorker who has lived in Igloolik for the past 17 years. "I never knew there was a whole circuit you make after you finish a film." At any rate, international acclaim seems not to have overawed Kunuk: Shortly after winning the Caméra d'Or for best debut feature at Cannes last year, he slipped back to Igloolik, packed a rifle, and went out wolf hunting.

Kunuk, age 44, cut his teeth making video documentaries about Inuit traditions. Not surprisingly, his first feature is precisely attuned to the rhythms and texture of Inuit life. Some of the community's rituals are arrestingly exotic: In one scene, for instance, enemies resolve a dispute by taking strict turns striking one another with blows on the temple, as though according to the Queensberry rules. Others are more prosaic: Women scrape glistening gristle from frozen seal carcasses; men care for their dog teams; and young lovers play an erotic game of tag in the snow ("I'll wolf you," one young man tells his paramour while slipping a hand beneath her furs). Under the patient gaze of Kunuk's camera, The Fast Runner's characters flirt, joke, make love. It may be a shock for American audiences, so indoctrinated by Hollywood's pallid illusions, to see such recognizably human beings on a movie screen. And Kunuk turns these scenes of daily life into deft character sketches; when one man mistreats his dogs, we're given to understand that he is a vicious lout.

Shot on digital video, The Fast Runner has the present-tense immediacy of documentary--but it's no ethnography. (Indeed, it might be seen at least in part as a rebuke to Robert Flaherty, who, in 1922, introduced the world to the "happy-go-lucky" Eskimo in Nanook of the North). Rather, Kunuk's film recounts Igloolik's oldest and most beloved myth, a parable about a feud between rival nomadic families.

"It was a bedtime story to put us to sleep," explains Kunuk. "It was also a lesson: What kind of person do we want to be when we grow up? This story is an example telling us, If you are this kind of person, then this is how you will end up. It was a story everybody knew, passed down from generation to generation."

Jumping ahead 20 years from the opening scene, The Fast Runner recounts the rise of Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq), the lazy heir apparent of the Igloolik clan. Oki, we learn, harbors a jealous grudge against the community's two best hunters, brothers named Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innukshuk) and Atanarjuat (the gentle-eyed Natar Ungalaaq), over the village beauty, Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu). Into this combustible mixture steps Puja (Lucy Tulugarjuk), a petulant temptress whose blue facial tattoos give her a feral quality. Puja's role in the story is roughly that of Helen of Troy, with a dash of Eve: She's a sower of mischief, an embodiment of the curse cast in the film's first scene.

Even as members of the community live cheek to cheek--the vast, blue-white horizons remind us that individualism is not an option in this most inhospitable of places--fissures appear. When, inevitably, violence breaks through, it is all the more awful for happening beneath the perpetual Arctic sun. Blood spattered on the pristine snow serves as a metaphor for the transgression.

Then, in the sequence that lends the film its English title, Atanarjuat bursts from the defiled ground and, with both the camera and his brother's murderers nipping close at his heels, takes off naked and barefoot across the wind-whipped ice sheet. Provoking a mixture of primeval dread and elation, the scene is The Fast Runner's emotional centerpiece: Watching the lone figure's flight from corruption into the trackless wild, you get the sense that you're witnessing the genesis of myth.

Watching The Fast Runner, one finds it hard not to reflect on how cinema--the lingua franca of our age, for better or worse--has rarely lived up to its early promise. It isn't just that Kunuk's film possesses a grandeur that has mostly been drained from movies; it also has an instinctively democratic spirit, an openness to life's messy passions and unexpected enchantments. The animus behind the film is that of an entire community. Compare it with another digitally shot adventure set a long time ago in a land far, far away, and you begin to understand what a singular achievement The Fast Runner is. Thanks for playing, Mr. Lucas: This is what epic art looks like.

Perhaps it seems paradoxical that The Fast Runner should employ Hollywood's latest toy to illumine one of the world's oldest oral cultures. After all, the Inuit didn't even need an alphabet until a few generations ago. To hear Kunuk tell it, however, digital filmmaking, with its limitless adaptability and modest technical demands, is merely a revival of the communal storytelling tradition that was nearly wiped out during Igloolik's dual colonization--first by Western missionaries, and then again by television.

"When I was growing up," the director explains, "my parents were already Christianized. The Christian system didn't allow them to tell their stories. In the Sixties and Seventies, they didn't allow storytelling or drum-dancing. Only in the Nineties [did] one of our most respected elders start bringing it back. And we started to realize: We had this culture for 4,000 years. How can we just throw it away in 50 years?"

The Fast Runner is nothing if not a tribute to the endurance of stories--whether they be Inuit myth or the John Wayne Westerns that Kunuk grew up watching. At the same time, hailing The Fast Runner as a masterpiece of aboriginal folk art may unintentionally diminish the exquisite artifice with which it's constructed. Indeed, although it won a raft of Genies (the Canadian equivalent of Oscars), none of the actors was nominated, presumably under the assumption that they were simply playing themselves. (To make the point that they were performing, Kunuk includes a few minutes of outtakes at film's end.)

Likewise, the film's visual style, while seemingly naturalistic, is in fact exquisitely composed. When the characters are out hunting on the ice, the camera bumps alongside their dogsleds. The viewer might also notice that there are few wide-angle shots; instead, the camera lingers on the actors' faces, and you get a sense of the vastness and isolation of the landscape from their perspective. According to Cohn, who began experimenting with video in the 1970s, the film's democratic aesthetic is entirely conscious. "There are always politics in shaping an image," he explains. "For example, the more edits in any scene, the more I've shaped it, the less you see. The political [question] is, Do you get to see something for yourself and figure out what you think? Or do I sort of shape it for you, so that you see it how I saw it?"

Befitting the filmmakers' communal method--Kunuk compares their shooting style to hunting seal--The Fast Runner ends with a reassertion of Igloolik's traditional values. The reconciliation comes not, as you might expect, through continued bloodshed, but through a few quiet words. Watching it, you begin to comprehend the meaning of the narrator's line in the opening scene: The Fast Runner is really a story about stories--how they bind us to something larger than ourselves, and how they still have the power to save us from our basest instincts. For the sake of our survival--as much as for the sake of cinema's--it's a lesson well worth hearing, and understanding.

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