Well, yes this is a tricky movie to talk about, and an easy one as well. First and foremost, it was incredibly boring. That's it. It is the story of a man who walks around on some glaciers, and sleeps with a couple women. That is, of course, the part that is trickier to discuss, but much worse.

Atanarjuat is the first film, that I know of, to come out of complete Inuit authorship. For this I applaud everyone involved, and was very hesitant to be condemning of a nascent film voice and industry. I'm over it. They created no sense of time, and it lead to alot of white urbanites leaving theatres and commenting on "How different they live." Please. The film stills at the end of the movie showed several of the members that had died during production. The homage to each one clearly had them garbed in such normal clothing as flannel shirts, and were sitting in a building that looked an awful lot like it was made of *gasp* wood. And lets be blunt, they're exposed and technologically savvy enough to do an entire feature length film. So I guess Ataranjuat is meant to be a myth or an historic tale, since the scenes have been entirely robbed of any modern objects that could lead us to believe otherwise. Only, there should have been a scene with a storyteller (gather around kids" or something along those lines assisting the audiance in realizing the film was set in the distant past.

Afterall, no one watches the BBC retellings of Jane Austen and thinks that the contemporary mode of transportaion for the British is a horse-drawn carriage. We don't leave our little American theatres saying, Those Brits have weird marriage issues and clothing that make the ladies look pregnant."

But we did leave that after watching the 2002 Fast Runner, and that is deeply problematic. No really, they're never seen modern technology (how'd the filming happen) have multiple wives, and sleep with even more women, and basically grown people sit around all day glaying games and eating food. How naive and "earthly." It sounds right out of a 1700's Colonial Anthropolagists memoirs of those *fascinating Indians.* Sadly, the authentic director couldn't shake the imperialist eye, but since he's Inuit, we're all going to take it as the reality of coastal Alaska.

Oh yes, and its deathly boring, did I mention that?

This is one of those movies that I was watching, stopped for the night, and for the life of me I couldn't force it upon myself to start it up again.

You didn't miss anything. Yes. I don't mind painstakingly slow filming if the camera lingers on informational content. Exposing us to something we may not know. If the cameras had panned the igloos to show us the materials of a hybrid culture (modern technology mixed with traditional and weather-tried structures and meterials) I might have forgiven the movie. But all it did was follow him around on icy plains, and reinforce odd concepts of a *tribal* and *backwards* peoples. It was very dissappointing.

Yeah, I was really trying to figure out when it was supposed to take place, because either way it came off as very weak. If that was REALLY what the culture was like now, then wow, that's pretty wild, but five bucks says it ain't, and if so it's probably an extremely limited amount of people.

Its not. For the simple fact that they had such things as cinematographers, direction, actors, and elaborate filming technology (including ways to remain by his side as he was sledding without the camera shaking too violently). There were some outclips at the end showing how the movie was made, and it sure didn't look like a bunch of illiterate people that still used sticks and stones having cameras placed in their hands for the first time ever. Eh, I wish they'de incorporated their own filming of the movie in the movie. It would have made for a very interesting juxtaposition. I remember my parents coming out of the theatre raving about how great it was. I saw it about a year later and just knew they had said that because its not ok to attack something so new as the topic if Inuit living. Yes it is, it was a poorly thought out movie and encouraged the most basic form of eurocentric anthoropological sympathy out of people like my parents, and everyone else.... 87% fresh at rt, 96% cream of the crop.

96%?! Wow, that is extreme, and I agree, they probably just dont' want to speak ill of the first movie from a culture like that. I was actually thinking that the possibility of it existing now is that it was a group of people who were professionals making a film about a smaller group out in the middle of nowhere, but it's a big stretch.

Yow! I'm a big fan of this movie, and not because I'm on some sort of colonialist's guilt trip. This movie is based on a traditional story told orally by the Inuit over the course of their history - I particularily like the timelessness of it. Although, I imagined it to take place in around 3,000BC, it could just as easily have happened in 1492AD or 33AD or 10,000BC - the only time it definitely didn't happen is in the present (ie: the last 100 years till now). To me the dramatic elements seemed as archetypical as any Shakespeare used. As to the non-dramatic parts of the movie, well perhaps it's just me, but I'm a sucker for the rare authentic portrayals of human life in pre-history - I'm fascinated by the cultural, technological, and climatic adaptations our ancestors used to live on this planet for the hundreds of thousands of years before the blight of civilization. This is a rare and special movie, sorry to hear it didn't work for some of you...

Yow, DV - this is your weirdest rant ever! I can understand you finding the movie boring if your not into historic material culture and all that, but I can't understand you beiing so freaked out about the lack of temporal context. To me, that is one of the highlights of the movie! Even your Jane Austen example doesn't make sense - we don't need a framing device of a storyteller to get that it's set in another historical period - How cliche!

Are you sure you're feeling alright? Have you been under alot of stress lately? This is so darn uncharacteristic...

Excuse me? There's no need to talk down to me. I like that you disagree, I think you bring up good points, but I don't accuse you of running a fever because of it. And, btw, if I am sick, its with tb, because that used to be equated with creativity and the passionate nature of youth and lovers, so, in that case, yes, maybe I am. :wink: *coughs up blood ala Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge!*

Anyways, I'm actually doing a paper about this in the next two weeks, and I do see your point about Edwardian epic pieces, but I disagree that nascent film industries (full-fledged ones too) shouldn't be sensitive to reception and what kind of identity they are promoting. Really, I do. I think this film propagates bad concepts of contemporary indigisism (is that a real word?) that do neither the subject nor those looking at this film for "authentic" insight any justice. I don't think it came off as historic material culture, its decision to remain timeless also includes the contemporary, and so one could consider this a contemporary study of Inuit material culture, and in that regard, its not very insightful. My statement about how boring it is has nothing to do with if I disagreed about its obsrvations on material culture, hell my response to that is clearly what helped me make it through the movie. The boredom had to do with poor editting and the fact that nothing really happened. I've seen enough bad National Geographic specials on dog sleds that watching one for three hours alone doesn't really hold my interest, even if its an accurate depiction of a past/present sled. That's just me.

Boredom is always debateable, the treatment of the subject matter is different altogether. I've been very interested and thought there were some great movies that I still disagree with content. Those are tricky for me to evalate since I don't really like to seperate form and content at all. Anyways, I would be interested if you could get your hands on a copy of Faces of Women? Its another piece not rooted in any particular time (and also in multiple geographies) that I thought was excellently done. I think there are more creative ways of incorporating oral tradition and style into filming, and for me, Fast Runner failed to do that, while the above movie was successful. I think it'll explain to you what I mean maybe about narration entrance point (if meant to not be taken literally), though I do understand that we don't need someone to introduce Edwardian England, I guess part of that is assumptions that its not necessary too. I don't think the same holds true for all films is all.

*Serves Cappucinos and Berrets*

I recently watched the DVD version and I see that they have added a warning screen that comes right after the FBI warning...

I thought you said one of the reasons you enjoyed it was as a source of material history? That means you read an element of reality into it too. Comoparing it to TDAT is like saying that since the weather isn't going to explode within the next day that no one should consider the reality of events depicted in, say, Schindlers List, Bloody Sunday, or Glory to have any basis in reality either.

Re-reading this thread, in the course of writing my review for Ten Canoes, was like visiting Bizarroland.

How in the world can so much modern politics be overlaid upon a primitive tale such as this? It is an aboriginal story of their ancestors, previously told in the oral tradition of storytelling for lo, these many generations, and now told in a wholly new medium -- DV, digital video. Whether a viewer finds it boring is one thing, but to misinterpret the whole intention of a film to score post-modern critical points is just plain wrong. In retrospect, it is very similar to the whole Children of Men debacle. Such rigidity of interpretation is not pretty. Every aspect of world culture cannot be shoehorned into a pretty costume and made to sit up and beg at the feet of Western academic theory...