The Hunter Who Happens to Make Movies

Since hunting is of necessity central to traditional Inuit culture, Kunuk’s early works are in essence wildlife films. For a southern audience, a wildlife film has a specific connotation: animal preservation. From the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom to the more rarefied musings of Jane Goodall and David Attenborough, beyond a certain First World sentimentality, all have in common that the only killers are animals.

n the cool arctic world of Zacharias Kunuk, animals are in focus all right—within the crosshairs of a rifle. Viewed in an uninterrupted stream of videotape, one ticks off the checklist of species killed in action: whale, polar bear, walrus, caribou, seal, Arctic hare, loon, and salmon. Even the caribou’s parasites wind up in a human gullet; the hide, flopping amply now that its owner is in a pot, abounds with lice, a delicacy favoured by children.

Kunuk understands the high-contrast value of blood on snow. The tableaux he presents would disgust a vegetarian: these are family picnics from a horror film, the rich gore spread like a floor-level buffet. In episode nine of Nunavut, entitled “Aiviaq” (Walrus Hunt), the camera watches over the shoulders of two hunters at the prow of an open boat putt-putting toward an ice floe. Occupying the centre of the screen are two walruses, a behemoth bull and his cow, like fat tourists lounging on a beach about to be set upon by cannibal pirates. “Want to shoot” asks one hunter. “You haven’t shot one in a while.” The gun kicks, the cow drops, her mate stands oblivious. Then he too is dispatched, his huge bulk rolling into the sea, blood jetting into the surface foam.

In My First Polar Bear, the bear is hunted over a number of hours, run down and tired out; the sled dogs are baying for his blood. Then the prey is within range. The bullet registers as an insult, the bear turning on one of the circling dogs as though it had bitten him. The animal urgency starts to register when the bear begins vomiting blood. The bear staggers, fatally punch-drunk, then collapses. What follows is an ana­tomically exhaustive lesson in butchery. The hunters approach the massive animal and roll him on his back, compare his paws with their measly mitts, then pull out their knives and help him out of his birthday suit. The moment comes when the bear’s stomach is cut open and its contents sluice out, revealing an intact seal flipper. Kunuk’s unblinking camera completes the circle: What goes around comes around. “We show it as it happens,” Kunuk said.

The steak consumed, the internationally renowned filmmaker retired to the patio for an Export A. Another dinner guest asked him how old the bear was. Kunuk shook his head. “No idea.” How much does a bear like that weigh He shook his head. “No idea.” What sort of rifle do you use “A point two-forty-three.” Kunuk is not an animal expert. He’s an expert at killing animals and harvesting their bounty.

Cohn describes Kunuk as a hunter who happens to make movies. Indeed, it’s tempting to describe Kunuk in cuddly terms until you’ve seen him plug a bobbing seal at fifty metres with his rifle. Kunuk’s view through the camera is similarly uncompromising. Cohn has spent the better part of twenty years in the company of Kunuk, and no one knows him better. “The idea that the job of a filmmaker is to travel would to him seem sort of insane,” said Cohn, when I visited his Igloolik shack last April. “Our style is inside looking out rather than vice versa, the community expressing itself to itself and others are welcome to watch.”

While Kunuk the hunter continues his traditional craft—for hunting as practised by the Inuit is an art—Kunuk the filmmaker understands the vitality of change. “Atanarjuat was timeless,” said Kunuk in an interview last year in Igloolik. “It could have happened 1,000 years ago, it could have been 500 years ago. In that time period nothing had changed, people had the same clothes, the tools were the same.” With The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, he said, “we’re moving closer to our present. The next thing to do was a real story, not a legend.”

Between 1921 and 1924, Knud Rasmussen, a Danish ethnographer of one-half Greenlandic Inuit extraction, travelled by dogsled with a variety of companions from Thule, Greenland, to Nome, Alaska. Recounted in the Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition—he had made four earlier journeys around Greenland and established a reputation as a peerless Arctic traveller—Rasmussen’s mission was to study and catalogue the life, customs, rituals, songs, and dialects of the natives he encountered. Unique among the Western explorers who travelled through these lands, Rasmussen was conversant in a Greenlandic variant of Inuktitut. Coincidentally, Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty’s pioneering documentary set among the Inuit of northern Quebec, premiered in New York City in 1922.

rue to form, Kunuk and Cohn reversed the perspective. The story is told from an Inuit point of view, through the eyes of the local inhabitants who received these curious visitors. By no means first contact—that came as early as 1576, when British explorer Martin Frobisher arrived in Baffin Island—it was nonetheless a fulcrum moment in Inuit history, when the natives were under intense pressure even from within their own ranks to abandon both their traditional lifestyle and their shamanistic belief system and adopt Western norms, particularly Christianity.

Like Atanarjuat, Rasmussen is structured around the tension between two families, each led by a rival shaman. One, Umik, cravenly embraces Christianity as a means of increasing his influence in the community; the other, Aua, rejects the notion for the simple reason that he has all the help he needs. Kunuk and Cohn make no bones about proselytizing on behalf of shamanism. In the screenplay, Aua’s spirit helpers are as real as anyone else in the story. Not that Kunuk doesn’t accept the validity of Christianity. On the contrary, he said, “Jesus was just another shaman who walked on water.”