Of Ice and Men

"Inuit" - culturally indigenous people who inhabit Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Canada, Greenland, Siberia and the United States. "Inuit" translates, more or less, as "the people." "Inuk" is singular for an Inuit individual. In Alaska, the commonly used term "Eskimo" encompasses both Inuit and Yupik (native inhabitants of Alaska and Russian Far East). In Canada and Greenland, the indigenous people prefer the term Inuit.

Even the most naïve observer of history has to scoff at accounts of New World explorers who "discovered" virgin territories already long inhabited by indigenous people. Inevitably, the arrival of Europeans traumatically impacted native ways of life with Western ideals of material wealth and caused mass death with the introduction of Western diseases.

In the icy mists of prehistory, the routine of daily life for natives of the far North was unaffected by mutual trade with adventurous Norsemen. At least a century passed after Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned before the Inuit again encountered Europeans. When Basque fishermen established whaling stations on the coast of Labrador in northern Canada in the 1500s, the Inuit seemingly ignored the whaling operations, although they would raid the bayside outposts in winter for tools.

One of the most reliable documents of early contact between Europeans and Inuit emerged from English seaman Martin Frobisher’s search for the Northwest Passage, the longed-for water route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in 1576. The expedition, which landed in a bay on Baffin Island, encountered the native populace on Resolution Island. There, five sailors, weary of their travels, left the ship in a small vessel and vanished. In the oral tradition of the Inuit, they helped the crewmen, whom they assumed had been abandoned. Frobisher himself (below) shanghaied a reluctant Inuk for the return voyage to England. The unwilling passenger was undoubtedly the first of his kind to see Europe.

By the end of the 18th century, the British, fed up with the seasonal raids of their whaling stations, endorsed the Protestant Moravian Church to establish missionaries in Labrador. The Inuit were subsequently provided with the precious iron they had been looting, material which cost Europeans next to nothing, and the result was a more peaceful coexistence.

In the higher latitudes of the Arctic, Inuit remained in relative isolation during the 19th century. Admiral William Edward Parry (above) commanded a British naval expedition of 1821-1823. Stationed for two winters in Foxe Basin, north of Hudson Bay, the expedition produced the first accurate and sympathetic document of the social, religious and economic ways of life of the Inuit, published in 1824, with illustrations of the people’s day-to-day subsistence (below).

Without a doubt, the most tragic encounter between European seafarers and native Inuit occurred during the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin (below), who had earned the nickname "the man who ate his boots" from an earlier exploration. Overlooking his age, the British gave the 59-year-old Franklin command of a pair of warships, HMS "Erebus" and HMS "Terror," radically modified to endure an Arctic voyage to accomplish the charting of the Northwest Passage. With a crew of 24 officers and 110 men, the two ships left Greenhithe, England, on May 19, 1845. Five crew members were discharged and sent back home when the expedition harbored in Greenland. They were the lucky ones. The last sighting of the Erebus and Terror by Western eyes was in July of 1845 when a passing whaler, "Prince of Wales," witnessed the two ships moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound near Baffin Island.

Doomed from the start, the Franklin Expedition was beset by bad luck, hasty oversights, blatant unpreparedness, and, ultimately, cultural arrogance. In the end, exposure, exhaustion, tuberculosis, pneumonia, lead poisoning and scurvy would claim the lives of all 129 crewmen.

The expedition wintered 1845-1846 on Beechey Island, where three men died of tuberculosis. The two ships eventually became trapped in the ice off King William Island. A note carefully buried on the island recorded the death of Franklin on June 11, 1847. Leading a search for the expedition in 1854, Scottish explorer Dr. John Rae spoke with Inuit hunters who had seen the ships stuck in the ice, as well as a party of white men traveling on foot. According to the Inuit Rae interviewed, some of the sailors had resorted to the "last resource" - cannibalism. The British Admiralty, which regarded the indigenous populace as unreliable savages, refused to accept such unthinkable testimony, condemning the hapless Rae to prejudicial ignominy. Franklin’s enraged wife (not yet aware that she was a widow) initiated a number of subsequent searches for her lionized husband.

After the two ships were clamped in the vise of ice, the sailors, who had made no preparations for an extended trek across a polar expanse, attempted to walk south to safety. Those who managed to return to the ships waited for rescue that never came. Three years into the expedition, Inuit boarded the ships to discover men with faces black with frostbite whose inner mouths were blackened from scurvy, who warned the natives to avoid at all costs the neighboring camp, apparently ostracized for resorting to cannibalism.

Two years later, a pair of Inuit hunters came upon a party of thirty haggard white men trekking south. After being abandoned by the Inuit, who barely had enough food to sustain themselves, these men died one by one along the coast of King William Island.

Finally, in 1857, after six years lost in the Arctic, four lone survivors were still trying to trudge home when they encountered a group of Inuit. The Inuit sheltered the half-dead men for the winter. Come springtime, the white men gave their hosts an officer’s sword as a gesture of gratitude and departed, never to be seen again.

Cultural arrogance probably prevented the crew from seeking aid as quickly as possible from the indigenous people or even attempting to adopt their survival techniques. In the end, exhausted men staggered through ice and snow to their deaths without condescending to ask native Inuit how they could survive in such a wilderness.

Seven decades after those last four souls disappeared into the icy mists of the North, Robert Flaherty, a former prospector and explorer in Arctic Canada, photographed the silent motion picture "Nanook of the North" (1922), historically regarded as the first full-length documentary, recording the day-to-day struggles of the title Inuk and his family.

Filmed on Hudson Bay in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec, the landmark film - which benefits from a 1988 restoration, complete with a new, evocative music score by Timothy Brock (who specializes in composing new soundtracks for vintage silent movies) - alternates between scenes of breathtaking honesty, disarming charm (such as Nanook’s first encounter with an early record player at a white trading post) and benign condescension. Although one of the original onscreen title cards refers to the Eskimos as "the most cheerful people in all the world - fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky," critic Roger Ebert, writing in 2005, noted that "given the harsh terms of their survival, they do indeed seem absorbed by their lives and content in them, which is more than many of us can say…"

There are thrilling depictions of a walrus hunt and a tug-of-war with a wounded seal, along with an intriguing look at the construction of an igloo, complete with ice-block windows. "That walrus fight was the first film these Eskimos had ever seen," Flaherty later recounted, "and, in the language of the trade, it was a ‘knock-out.’ The audience…completely forgot the picture. To them the walrus was real. The women and children in their high shrill voices joined with the men in shouting…to Nanook and his crew as the picture unfolded on the screen…from that time on, they were all with me."

Flaherty would be criticized for staging sequences, although recreating events was accepted for documentary filmmakers at the time. According to some accounts, Nanook was in fact named Allakariallak, and the women shown as his wives, including Nyla, were common-law wives of Flaherty’s. Most sources agree that whoever he was, Nanook, two years after he was filmed, died of starvation when he became lost in a storm.

Modern implements then familiar to the Inuit such as rifles and outboard motors were purposely left out of the motion picture, in favor of presenting traditional methods of hunting, fishing and other customs, all depicted with accuracy and reflecting what one title card describes as the "melancholy spirit of the north."

Flaherty, who, according to his widow, Frances, maintained he was "an explorer first and a filmmaker a long way after," defended his work by stating that a filmmaker has to distort some things to capture their spirit. The movie’s original subtitle was "a story of life and love in the actual Arctic," the emphasis being on a "story" filmed on an authentic location. Frances Flaherty said, "In the Flaherty films, art and science come together."

"The film is not technically sophisticated," Ebert noted. "How could it be with one camera, no lights, freezing cold, and everyone equally at the mercy of nature? But it has an authenticity that prevails…"

The director of the 1955 James Dean-Natalie Wood film "Rebel Without a Cause" might seem an unlikely candidate to make a drama about a fugitive Eskimo, but in 1960, Nicholas Ray directed "The Savage Innocents," starring Anthony Quinn as Inuk, an Inuit hunter whose journey to a white trading post turns tragic when he accidentally kills a priest who rejected Inuk’s traditional offer of sharing his wife and becomes the hunted in a pursuit by Canadian Mounties.

Based on a novel by a Swiss author who had never seen Inuit but was inspired by the 1933 movie "Eskimo" (the first film to win an Academy Award for editing), the international co-production featured location photography in the Canadian Arctic (other footage was shot in studios in England and Rome) and costarred Japanese actress Yoko Tani as Inuk’s wife. Portraying a Canadian trooper, Peter O’Toole suffered the indignity of having his dialogue re-dubbed by another actor and attempted, unsuccessfully, to have his name removed from the credits.

The incredibly versatile Anthony Quinn, a Mexican-born actor whose mother was of Aztec ancestry and father was born in Mexico to an Irish father and a Latin mother, was adept at playing a variety of ethnic types and internationals, from Native Americans, Hawaiian chiefs and World War II Filipino freedom fighters early in his career to a Turkish warlord in "Attila," French painter Gauguin in "Lust for Life," a Bedouin chieftain in "Lawrence of Arabia," a Greek peasant in "Zorba the Greek" (he also twice portrayed characters based on Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis), Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in "Marco the Magnificent," a Russian pope in "The Shoes of the Fishermen," an Italian don in "The Don Is Dead" and "Mobsters," Mohammed’s uncle in "The Message," and Jewish high priest Caiaphas in "Jesus of Nazareth."
Bob Dylan allegedly wrote the song "Quinn the Eskimo (Mighty Quinn)" - first released as a hit single by British band Manfred Mann - in honor of the actor’s role in "The Savage Innocents."

Contact between Inuit and whites, and the inherent conflicts therein, were depicted again in "The White Dawn" (1974), when three Maine whalers in the late 19th century are stranded in the Canadian Arctic and are rescued by a village of Eskimos inhabiting Baffin Island (the picture was filmed on-location on Baffin Island, some 1600 miles north of Montreal). Inspired by a true story, the movie was based on a novel by James Houston (who co-wrote the screenplay), a Canadian artist and writer (below, center) who became an important advocate of Inuit art and introduced printmaking to the Inuit, who dubbed him "Saumik" ("the left-handed one").

Just bordering on typecasting, the three displaced New Englanders are portrayed by Warren Oates, top-billed as the ornery second mate who introduces the naïve hosts to gambling and home-brewed liquor, sensitive Timothy Bottoms as the artistic, sympathetic soul, and Louis Gossett as the carefree harpooner Portagee.

The opening titles for the film proclaim, "Featuring the Eskimo People of the Canadian Arctic," and, indeed, the amateur cast of Inuit consisted of local residents, speaking in authentic dialect (with English subtitles). At first, the condescending Inuit regard the strangers as "dog-children," descendants of the offspring from Eskimo women and the Dog Spirit from an earlier time. It isn’t long before the two civilizations clash with disastrous results. Until then, however, there are memorable scenes of seal- and walrus-hunting, along with igloo-building, all undoubtedly influenced by the stirring documentary footage from "Nanook of the North."

Spectacularly, "The White Dawn" features an unforgettable depiction of traditional Inuit throat singing during a torchlit ritual inside a communal igloo when two young women embrace face-to-face and blow gusts of breath against each other’s vocal chords. The mesmerizing effect is alternately erotic and disturbing (Oates calls the participants "wind witches"), anticipating the climactic confrontation.

Before "The White Dawn," director Philip Kaufman made "The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid" (1972), a mud-and-blood revisionist western starring Cliff Robertson as a visionary Cole Younger and Robert Duvall as a weasely Jesse James. Clint Eastwood, impressed by Kaufman’s unblinking realism, thought he would be a good choice to direct "The Outlaw Josey Wales." However, the star soon grew weary of the filmmaker’s lack of urgency and, in a move that became the stuff of Hollywood legend, strong-armed a mutiny against Kaufman and established himself as director, a move that resulted in the Directors Guild of America creating the rule forbidding one of its members from being replaced by anyone working in any capacity on the film from which they have been removed.

Kaufman weathered the controversy and emerged as one of Hollywood’s most literary-minded filmmakers, responsible for such intelligent cinema as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "The Right Stuff," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Henry & June" and "Quills."

"In standard histories of world cinema," a film critic for The New York Times wrote in 2002, "the Inuit people of northern Canada figure mostly in connection with Robert J. Flaherty’s ‘Nanook of the North,’ an epochal silent documentary…Eighty years later, the voices of the Inuit can at last be heard on screen. ‘The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)’,’ directed by Zacharias Kunuk and based on an ancient folk epic, is the first feature film made in the Inukitut language by an almost entirely Inuit cast and crew."

Set in the Arctic wilderness of eastern Canada at the dawn of the first millennium, "The Fast Runner" depicts an Inuit legend passed down through centuries of oral tradition and first appearing in print in the journals of Captain George Francis Lyon, a British explorer who was searching for the Northwest Passage in the early 1820s. Rivaling Shakespeare in its scope of history and tragedy, it is an epic saga of love and lust, treachery and murder, family rivalry and revenge, all stemming from the curse of a mysterious shaman who leaves ill luck and dissension in his wake.

Before "The Fast Runner," the indigenous people saw their lives and culture interpreted by outsiders. This film might be deemed a response to what director Kunuk called "four thousand years of oral history silenced by fifty years of priests, schools, and cable TV," recreating, at the same time, the mystical essence of shamanism in Inuit life. "We show how our ancestors dressed, how they handled their dog teams, how they argued and laughed," Kunuk said, "confronted evil and fought back."

An important goal of the production (originally conceived by Paul Apak Angilirq, who co-wrote the screenplay but sadly died from cancer before the film was completed) was to integrate the medium of film into the Inuit community to contribute to their survival into the future.

Zacharias Kunuk is himself a Canadian Inuit, born on Baffin Island. In his youth, he carved and sold soapstone sculptures for movie admission money. A carving buddy of his was Natar Ungalaak, who established himself not only as a well-known sculptor but also as an accomplished director and actor, whom Kunuk cast as Atanarjuat, the titular "Fast Runner." (Below, Ungalaak as Atanarjuat, "the fast runner," and costar Pakak Innuksuk as his ill-fated brother Amaqjuak, "the strong one.")

In a performance of guileless honesty, Ungalaak provides the picture with its most indelible sequence, when, naked and barefoot, he is relentlessly pursued by his longtime rival across an unforgiving expanse of ice and water. The New York Times called the moment "something of a classic, a word that will quickly be bestowed upon the film as a whole." According to that reviewer, director Kunuk "accomplished the remarkable feat of endowing characters from an old folk tale with complicated psychological motives and responses. The combination of dramatic realism and archaic grandeur is irresistibly powerful."

A co-production of the National Film Board of Canada, "The Fast Runner" was Canada’s top-grossing movie of 2002, won the Camera D’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival for best first feature film and became so popular with Inuit audiences that the production company considered making Atanarjuat action figures.

"The Fast Runner" was shot on widescreen digital video by Norman Cohn (above, right, with Zacharias Kunuk), one of the few non-Inuit crew members, who also co-wrote and co-produced the picture. The technology, which sidestepped difficulties filmmakers often experience using film in below-zero temperatures, endows the production with a documentary-like urgency that belies the tale’s timelessness. Calling his work "a powerful drama, not a documentary," Kunuk noted, "It demystifies the exotic, otherworldly stereotype by telling a universal story."

Writing in Time magazine, critic Richard Corliss called the film a "ripping yarn and a spectacularly new and odd vision." The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan observed, "Everything combines in ‘The Fast Runner’ to create a film that does not feel acted and rather as if it is simply happening in front of our eyes." The movie, according to Roger Ebert, "is passion, filtered through ritual and memory."

The reviewer for The New York Times, who dubbed the film a "masterpiece," commented, "It’s always interesting when a hitherto unrepresented corner of the world shows up on the screen. Part of the wonder of the movies, even at this late date in their history, is their ability to acquaint us with cultures and places far removed from what we already know. The arrival of a movie that expands the scope of our experience, that immerses us in a radically different point of view, is always a welcome event…"

In 2006, co-directors Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn reunited with a number of the Inuit cast from "The Fast Runner" for "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen." Set in 1922, the film depicts how a small group of Inuit people, including the last powerful Inuit shaman, Aua, confront a world changing with the arrival of Western people, personified by Danish explorer and anthropologist Rasmussen, called the "Father of Eskimology," who was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage on dogsled.