Also this issue:

Future Tense
Fighting destiny and city hall in Minority Report.
-Sam Adams

Cold Fire
Inuit storytelling makes the jump to the big screen with Atanarjuat.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks

Cruel Tunes
S&M meets Shostakovich in The Piano Teacher.
-Sam Adams

new

June 20-26, 2002

movies

Movie Interview

with Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn

by Cindy Fuchs

Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn work off each other. Emotional, psychic, spiritual -- they share rhythms that are difficult to pinpoint, fascinating to see. Cohn underlines that their primary objective in making the film, shot in widescreen digital Betacam, was to “follow the story” laid out in the late Paul Apak Angilirq’s screenplay, which, Cohn admits, was more like a six-hour movie. They ended up with some 140 cassettes, over 70 hours of footage, then “distilled.”

Modest concerning the production, the two are longtime videomakers, apart and together: For 32 years, Cohn was a documentarian (he calls his work video portraits, and notes that “before I met Zac, I was a famous video artist in an extremely small, marginalized universe”), and Kunuk “brought the first video camera to the Arctic” 21 years ago. Angilirq’s experience went back “even further, as part of a weird national training program during the 1970s.” All this training came in handy, as many decisions had to be made on the fly. The harsh weather and work with several first-time actors demanded it.

They conceived and made the film based on traditional and enduring Inuit values, meaning that the working relationships among actors and crew were “horizontal, not vertical.” That’s how “the Inuit do everything: seal-hunting, card-playing, filmmaking,” says Cohn. “There’s no Martin Scorsese. That’s a socially inappropriate concept. The auteur cannot exist in Inuit culture.” Kunuk smiles, “So many of us were discussing all the time, about shots. Even the actors got in on it. My job was to get it going, to organize. And Norman was able to throw the camera right in their faces.”

As Cohn puts it, such an approach is congruent to a “focus on process over product. You can’t make a left-wing movie in a right-wing style. The process of your approach is imbedded in your result, if there is any result, because some things are pure process.” And so, he says, “Our film is the result of the ways people are treated, respected, empowered to make the film with us, because we had a sense we were making it together, and it was an important activity, not just a job.”

Video, Cohn says, allows a new way to think about time and “a quality of existence. There really is a fourth dimension, and in our culture, we’re trained not to see time. We want to make time visible, or maybe, risible.” As Kunuk puts it, for the Inuit “children are behind us, fathers are ahead of us.”

As to the praise they’ve received, Cohn says they agree: “For Inuit, there is no pride, vanity, or taking personal credit. We’re not taking too seriously the response, except to use it to make the film more available to more people. It has tremendous political and cultural purpose, both to Inuit and for Inuit, and from Inuit to the outside world. It’s not Inuit’s fault, or any native people’s fault, that they are stereotyped and dehumanized to the point where nobody has paid any attention to the fact that they might have solutions to the shit we all find ourselves dealing with.” He laughs, “The John Wayne figure, in Inuit culture, is socially irresponsible. Our film is the antidote to the pathological heroism of the bloodiest century in history.”

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September 4, 2003
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