An Inuit Lithurgy

Maliglutit (Searchers, 2016), directed by Zacharia Kunuk in partnership with Natar Ungalaaq, revisits John Ford’s masterpiece, The Searchers (1956), from the perspective of the Inuit, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic to which the director belongs. The actors in the film are all Inuit, as were the majority of the technical team. The film is entirely spoken in Inuit and was shot in the small community of Igloolik in Northern Canada.

Maliglutit finds inspiration in the classic Western, a genre linked to the mythical narrative of American expansionism and a frontier always waiting to be found by European colonisers. Indigenous peoples, the “Indians” who resisted the invasion of their territory, were seen as hostile to the civilising forces of the settlers, being portrayed in classical American cinema as “savages” except for occasional instances of nuance.

In The Searchers, Ford draws the main plot from the violent racial dynamic between the Comanches and the white settlers. Did we expect a kind of poetic justice in which the racist, colonialist vision of the American Western is turned on its head? Kunuk is not here to settle the score with History, nor to decolonise historical memory. The film plays out in full in the heart of a small community of Inuit hunters. When he returns from the hunt with his older son, Kuanana finds that members of his family have been killed and his wife and daughter kidnapped. The criminals are other Inuit hunters, who had previously been exiled from the community for hoarding food and sleeping with the women of others.

With the film being based in 1913, in a period when contact between the Inuit and white settlers was intensifying, it may seem strange that the latter are physically absent; but Kunak does not forget them, and their influence is felt subtly through the presence of day-to-day tools and utensils the Inuit use, such as cooking implements, guns and, above all, the telescope, which often provides the director’s camera with its line of sight. The obvious relation to Ford’s film is established through the plot, a story of revenge and search for kidnapped women, but Kunak’s objective here is to construct an identity-based cinema. He films, documentary-style, the daily life and practices of the Inuit, framing these in long shots that show the haunted landscape and icy tundra of the Canadian arctic. There is indeed a confrontation between the tiny, claustrophobic human spaces inside the igloos — in which bodies are barely able to manoeuvre around the only source of heat shown in the film — and the immense white landscape, majestic and supernatural, which is where the true essence of the Inuit resides. We can see this film as almost religious in the way it connects the profane and the sacred, and the role of Jonathan Frantz’s photography is essential for reinforcing the idea that human survival depends on nature, brutally beautiful, inhospitable and punishing. And the natural world is crucial to the revenge. The icy mountains and cold glaciers proclaim unforgiveness to the criminals. Their bodies become literally frozen, their beards tipped with ice, their breath crystallising in the air, their fur-wrapped frames moving with difficulty in environments that afford no place to hide. This is a liturgy to mother nature and to a people who have blended with her, something that the wonderful soundtrack celebrates from the very first scene onwards through guttural, ritual chants written and performed by Tanya Tagaq. These chants are appeals to the gods to assist Kuanana, whether in the hunt or on his quest for vengeance, and this is also symbolised by the small totem of an Inuit god he carries with him.

When comparing to The Searchers, we may be disappointed by the simplistic portrayal of the characters. In the American Western the focus is on the protagonist, Ethan Edwards, a tormented Civil War veteran with an obscure past who appears suddenly in the desert to visit his brother. Everything is tense, full of subtext. His search for the niece kidnapped by the Comanches is ambiguous in its intentions, and his racism becomes explicit when he admits that he wants to kill her: after so many years of pursuit she has already become “one of them”, forever sullied by the Indians. We know how this will end. The hero redeems himself, saving his niece and delivering her to her new home with the white settlers. Ethan’s search was also for his own soul, but this imperfect hero is condemned to solitude and there is no place for him in this newly reconstituted home. So, in the most iconic scene of the film, the door of the house closes on him, before he leaves accompanied by lines from the song ‘Ride Away’: “A man will search his heart and soul/Go searching way out there”.

In Maliglutit the protagonist does not have these ambiguities and, consumed by vengeance, Kuanana is able to reunite the remaining members of his family and bring them together in the igloo. He too goes inside and stays.

The individualist tendency, so important for classical American cinema especially where the protagonist’s redemption is concerned, is here put to one side in favour of a cinema that celebrates an imposing natural world and the community whose existence depends on it. Maybe this is why silence predominates for much of the film, what sounds there are being those of animals and humans in their titanic struggle to survive in this cruel environment.

Is this a Western? Yes, in the sense of a simple-living community in constant struggle with a natural world full of boundless possibilities. Switch the horses for dogsleds and the desert for the icy Arctic tundra and we may be able to speak of an “Inuit Northern”.