The Hunter Who Happens to Make Movies

he first time I shared a meal with Zacharias Kunuk, we were squatting over the steaming carcass of a freshly killed seal, eating its liver raw. The next time, we sat next to one another at a long table in a downtown Toronto restaurant. Kunuk was hesitating over the lengthy Italian-themed menu. “What are you having” he asked. “Veal cutlets,” I said. He opted for beefsteak, medium. The wine was Zinfandel Primitivo.

Earlier on that February evening, Kunuk had been standing before a packed auditorium at the Ontario College of Art and Design (ocad). The inaugural guest of the 2006 Art Creates Change lecture series, he introduced excerpts from two of his earlier video works, an episode from his thirteen-part television series, Nunavut (1994”“1995), and My First Polar Bear (2000), a documentary about the importance of the animal in the arctic hunting tradition, as well as a clip from the documentary on the making of his much-anticipated second feature, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Kunuk’s first feature, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2001. Shot last year in Igloolik, Rasmussen will open the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Based on an Inuit legend, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner tells the story of two families driven apart by a shaman’s prophecy and the struggle of the next generation as they unwittingly make the same mistakes as their forebears and perpetuate the curse. As Kunuk wrote, “Atanarjuat wasn’t the only legend we heard but it was one of the best—once you get that picture into your head of that naked man running for his life across the ice, his hair flying, you never forget it. It had everything in it for a fantastic movie—love, jealousy, murder, and revenge, and at the same time, buried in this ancient Inuit “action thriller,’ were all these lessons we kids were supposed to learn about how if you break these taboos that kept our ancestors alive, you could be out there running for your life just like him!”

On first viewing, Atanarjuat is perplexing. The opening is elliptical, stirring a nagging sense that readers of subtitles are being left out of the whole picture. A group of Inuit is inside what appears to be a cave; the only light comes from flickering seal-oil lamps. A cackling old man in the midst of a slightly apprehensive group compares his coat with that of a younger man; the old man is a stranger. Then two men are tied together to perform some kind of test of strength. One dies. A younger man then accuses the survivor of murder.

Unlike the typical foreign-language film-viewing experience, the number of syllables uttered by Atanarjuat’s actors doesn’t correspond with the basic sentences printed along the bottom of the screen. The actors are inexpressive compared with those in mainstream movies, particularly in the close-up, the shot that lifted the cinematic form from carnival curiosity to mass entertainment. Indeed, the whole film defies classical shot structures: typically, there is no establishing master shot but rather one continuous shot that is broken by jump-cuts and cutaways. As for what is actually happening, no one gets it the first time through: Something bad is taking place but you’re not certain what it is. Yet the rhythm, once established, is mesmerizing. It’s like listening to Kunuk speak, like being there.

You don’t have to travel to Igloolik to appreciate the art of Zacharias Kunuk but it helps, if only to apprehend the vast whiteness that is his canvas. I did last April, to visit the set of Rasmussen, 3,000 km north of Toronto. I asked him if we could have some time together. He nodded, told me where to go, what time. A couple of hours later, I was watching him smoke endless cigarettes in a barely insulated back room of his modest Igloolik home.

Spend some time with Kunuk and be prepared to wait. It’s a matter of pacing. Ask him a question and he looks elsewhere. He thinks about it so long you might think he didn’t understand you. Seeing him outside of his milieu one suspects he’d rather be home. Admirers greet him with outstretched hands but his expression is neutral; they gush and he nods once. When asked, during the questions after the talk at ocad, if he would consider living and working in any other environment, he replied, “I want to stay. I know the area. I don’t picture myself making other people’s stories.” Later, during one of the evening’s many smoke breaks, he just said it outright: “I want to be hunting with my friends in “”27?c.”

t’s not possible to write about Kunuk without introducing his partner, Norman Cohn. Cohn was not at dinner; he was in Paris presenting Rasmussen to potential international sales agents. An American, Cohn was a hippie videographer in the 1970s—he has shown his work at the Venice Biennale and the Art Gallery of Ontario—until he became bored with the self-referential nature of video art. In the early 1980s, while living in Montreal, he happened on the video work of Kunuk and Kunuk’s late mentor, Paul Apak, and found, as he puts it, “partners with similar vision and shared goals despite wide cultural differences.” That’s something of an understatement: Cohn was born in Manhattan—” 103rd and Broadway”—in 1946; Kunuk was born in 1957 in a sod hut in Kapuivik and didn’t move to a settlement until he was nine.

Igloolik is an island community off the coast of the Melville Peninsula, and it makes a compelling local case study. In 1973, and again in 1977, local residents rejected government offers to deliver English-language radio and TV by satellite. “We saw what happened to other communities who had it,” said Kunuk. “It changed their lives. They stopped visiting each other.” With the introduction of consumer video cameras, however, Kunuk recognized the potential of recording his father’s hunting stories and the elders’ storytelling. The 4,000-year-old way of life of the Inuit was in danger of extinction, and Kunuk’s project was to recreate it as it was lived with the specific intention of perpetuating the traditional ways. A talented sculptor, Kunuk sold some carvings in Montreal in 1981 and came home with a camera and recorder and the community’s first television. His initial efforts were in black and white because he could not figure out the controls. Apak, the local producer for the fledgling Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, hired him as a cameraman in 1983.

Cohn travelled to Igloolik in 1985 to give a camera workshop and stayed on to live. He has collaborated with Kunuk and Apak on every project since—they founded Igloolik Isuma Productions in 1990—including Atanarjuat, released three years after Apak died. Nonetheless, Cohn stands back and allows Kunuk to have the spotlight. Kunuk is the official director of Atanarjuat but both men share nearly every job category and Rasmussen’s credit roll will reflect that: co-screenwriters, co-producers, co-directors. Lately, Cohn has also handled the videography.