The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

Atanarjuat - The Fast Runner

By Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the extraordinary new film by Zacharias Kunuk, begins with the arrival of an unnamed evil. Amongst tribes of Inuit at the turn of the first millennium, a shaman invites a curse upon rival families, a curse that lasts for generations and threatens to destroy everyone involved. Based upon an ancient Inuit legend, The Fast Runner toys with traditional narrative structure by presenting Atanarjuat's story as a straightforward fable, while the cutting-edge technology belies the film's inherent fictional qualities.

The Fast Runner, perhaps by necessity as much as choice, is filmed in digital video, a medium that has been sporadically effective to date. The harsh temperatures, climate and locations prevented film from being used on the extensive location shoot. Film literally could not survive the shoot. While the decision to shoot in DV may have been purely tactical, the result is penetrating, a re-imagining of the language of cinema. Kunuk's camera goes places a film camera could never go. The environment that Atanarjuat inhabits is not only a foreign country: it feels almost like another planet.

Atanarjuat is a remarkably athletic Inuit, who vies for the affection of another's promised bride. Oki, Atanarjuat's rival, concedes to a battle of wills to determine who wins the young girl's hand. Atanarjuat triumphs, and a course of events is set into motion that will lead to murder and betrayal, including the killing of Atanarjuat's brother and a remarkable chase across the frozen tundra, Atanarjuat nude and bleeding from his frost-bitten feet. This is the most alive and resplendent piece of audaciousness in cinema this year. Atanarjuat becomes an unleashed beast, his instincts carrying him farther than any man should be able to go. I have seen nothing else on film recently that rivals this scene's out and out boldness.

Kunuk's film is a haunting fable, unabashedly romantic and lyrical, gleeful with its own rawness and the vivaciousness of telling a story that few have seen or heard before. The Inuit language (this is the first-ever film shot entirely in the dialect) has a kind of choppy, poetic quality that feeds the ears like a remembrance of a time gone but not forgotten.

The world the filmmakers have created is remarkably earthy, filled with minute details that lend every frame an urgent sense of authenticity, like the contemporary cousin of Robert Flaherty's landmark documentary, Nanook of the North. We see igloos being constructed from the ground up (an amazing process), seal hides being harvested (both for meat and for fur), and fires being tended for hours on end. Men take multiple wives, depending upon the needs of their tribe and these relationships, while polygamous, are never insignificant. Atanarjuat loves his wives equally, and the close-knit tribes learn to live together copiously, even when someone in their mists betrays them all. All of this gives the film a certain pedigree: it appears to be meticulously researched and authentic. But it's also a wonderful narrative device. The repetitive nature of the Inuits' lives is an effective foil for the complications that follow the haunting of the film's opening. The inherent threat to their stability and the sanctity of their rituals is what ultimately leads to the tribes chasing away the evil presence at the conclusion of the nearly three-hour long film.

In an age when digital usually means either low quality or CGI, Kunuk has crafted a rarity, even, perhaps, a first: a DV production that is truly cinematic. The photography is rhapsodic, full of sweeping vistas that accent the closeness of the Inuit people, rather than the grandeur of the landscape that surrounds them. Though Norman Cohn's photography is exquisite, it is the intimacy of the narrative that shines brightest of all. This is one of the most astonishing films in recent memory, a truly marvelous amalgam of new technology and ancient lore, storytelling at its most primal and immediate.