A breath of frosty air in film history

From the Arctic regions of Canada comes Atanarjuat, by Zacharias Kunuk, the first feature film in the Inuit language in the history of cinema. Right away this gives us two reasons to celebrate: first, the cinematic certification of how Eskimo communities have regained administrative control of some of their old lands; and second, the possibility now afforded the rest of the world to make contact with this cultural heritage, which for millennia has existed at the other end of the spectrum from what is conventionally seen as ‘development’. Were it not for the film crew being made up almost entirely of people who grew up in these landscapes, the tension between the timeless rawness of the object and the technological artillery of the subject would hardly go unnoticed.

The importance of seeing Atanarjuat is also in the fact that today we have few other opportunities to observe human nature outside of the social conventions we are used to, in this built landscape we call civilisation ruled by complex systems and intangible powers. Over there, surrounded by snow, everything is more direct, despite the vastness of what the eye can see. There are no ministers, parliamentarians, politicians. There are community values, codes of honour, and any problems that arise are solved immediately, body to body, in accordance with mutually understood rules and laws. Any behaviour contrary to what is considered morally admissible has its predetermined response and, however radical or even tragic the solution may seem to us, the problem is resolved.

The indigenous people’s culture is highly ritualised. Their battles are not subject to whims but rather choreographed according to an official grouping that manages conflicts, known as the clan. It is not an accident that the word Inuit, in their language, means ‘people’. Family life makes clear the place of the individual — a branch in a tree, which, as such, may be less or more exposed to the elements.

The temperature being far below zero, animal skins are used by the Inuit to cover their bodies. But if there is an expectation that function will trump form — fruit of the preconception that leads us to look down on indigenous communities — we will be frankly surprised. The coat that Atanarjuat brings his wife when he returns from hiding would surely make many a fashion victim today salivate with desire. But one of the more moving things about this film is the fact that this clothing is no barrier to tenderness. Embraces between those who respect each other penetrate any fabric. Loving gestures display pure emotion, in strong contrast to the materialism to which we, “the civilised”, are subject. And this great reset (far from the perversity imagined by Klaus Schwab) also leaves nothing out when it comes to the possibility of analysing human nature: the essential issues are the same as ours, they are just more visible to the naked eye. And they confront us with the self-defeating civilisational process — a process which, over time, has sought to distance us from raw animality while, paradoxically, bringing us closer to another, constructed, animality that today tends to take sophisticated and cruel revenge on that repression.

Atanarjuat not only presents to us a remote community, but also proposes a remote mode of telling a story. The path travelled by cinema is here opened up by an ethics of life that takes care not to vampirize, mutilate or injure what it documents, even as we are talking about a fiction film in which we can sense the aesthetic echo of the Western tradition — Zacharias Kunuk has admitted, indeed, that as a child he was a fan of John Wayne. But the set of principles by which the film’s crew governed itself allows us to talk about this film as the cinematic birthplace of a secular civilisation that goes back millennia — a rare or even unique feat in modern times. In truth, these indigenous hunter-gatherers — without cars, without weapons other than sticks and bones, without computers — live practically as their ancestors will have lived 10 thousand years ago. Whenever a European — like me — finds it difficult to function in contemporary society without a touch-screen phone, it is reinvigorating to know that these ancient cultures continue to survive on this Earth.