Isuma: Inuit Video Art

Isuma: Inuit Video Art. By Michael Robert Evans. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 236. Glossary, notes, references, index. $95.00 clotii, $29.95 paper); The Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanariuat. By Michael Robert Evans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Pp. xxii + 176. Illustrations, series editors' introduction, list of characters, guide to pronunciation, glossary, notes, bibliography, index, photographs. $19.95 paper.)

For many urban authences and film critics in the mainstream news media, the Inuit film Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner appeared as a complete surprise. As the first Inuit-made feature-length drama, the film's story, landscape, aesthetics and cultural orientation felt completely new to many viewers outside of the arctic. The film awards at festivals around the world, including the Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival and multiple Canadian "Genie" awards, received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times and other major publications, and turned a profit in its theatrical run, an especially remarkable feat for a nearly three-hour film shot entirely in the Inuktitut language.

But Atanarjuat is actually a very old story, a legend grounded in die small arctic community of Igloolik, in Nunavut, Canada. And the filmmakers - members of the Isuma production company - had already been making films together for more than twenty years. Their films are aesthetically sophisticated in terms of cinematography, performances, sound, narrative structure, pacing and other audio-visual and technological elements. And Isuma's films, along with those of other Indigenous media organizations outside of the arctic (such as CAAMA in Australia) , are also important in the context of broader international movements for Indigenous rights and control over Indigenous images in mass media. Isuma's ongoing projects also link Inuit video production with the millennial impact of new media. Isuma maintains extensive websites for its films, including Atanarjuat, and recendy launched Isuma TV, a multi-channel online streaming video site for Indigenous films. These strategic internet expansions bridge remote communities in a global network and make Indigenous audiovisual storytelling much more widely available.

Michael Robert Evans has written two books, one about the people and work of Isuma, and the other a focused study of their signature feature film, Atanarjuat. Both books reveal the strengths of Evans' training in journalism and folklore; they are written with a clear style, effective description, and a feel for storytelling, making the books accessible for a broader authence than is usual for scholarly studies. Isuma: Inuit Video Art describes the work of Isuma and its key members, Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn, and Pauloosie Qulitalik, during die period just before A tanariuat was completed. Based on Evans' nine months of fieldwork in Igloolik, Isuma describes the work of the Isuma company from a number of angles: as a form of cultural expression or folklore, as a form of resistance to the colonizing practices of the surrounding Canadian society, and as the result of a unique production practice that honors and disseminates ttaditional knowledge while also strengthening the local economy.

Evans opens with a useful overview that positions Inuit video in relation to Inuit art and to theories of folklore and mass media articulated by Dell Hymes, Linda D�gh, Henry Glassie, Richard Bauman and others, as well as scholars in visual anthropology such as Faye Ginsburg. Evans situates Inuit media in the context of both mass media and folkloric performative variants not just because of its content but also, crucially, because of Isuma's processes of production and reception. He argues that Isuma's videos function simultaneously as cultural Uansmission through storytelling performance, material culture, and folklife. His discussion of the video makers' relationships with their authences is particularly nuanced, and in re-defining film as a form of performance, his analysis suggests a re-definition of the field - what folklore is, how it is transmitted - in light of developments in film and technological methods of storytelling and transmission.

Evans also devotes a full chapter to the variants of the Atanarjuat legend. These and other chapters in the book are characterized by long quotations from interviews with the Igloolik director, actors, crew, and elders, and these passages constitute one of the greatest strengths of the book. Evans privileges the voices and viewpoints of the filmmakers and participants themselves, foregrounding their own words about their work and modeling the kind of respectful listening that should characterize viewers' and scholars' approaches to these film productions. This depth of fieldwork is common in anthropology and folklore but rare in cinema studies, making Evans' oral history work particularly valuable for this book's interdisciplinary authence of film scholars.

Evans carefully parses the relationships between the various media companies in Igloolik, including the local office of the Inuit Broadcasting Company (IBC) where both Zacharias Kunuk and the late Paul Apak began their video production careers, the Isuma production company that Kunuk and Apak started together after leaving the IBC, and the Tariagsuk Video Centre, created by Isuma but often functioning separately as a community videography group. He also investigates the complex histories, funding details and ongoing conflicts between Isuma, with its local production practices and Inuktitut-language film projects, and soutiiern funding and broadcasting entities such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Telefilm, and the Cable Fund (now Canadian Television Fund), which are based in Ottawa and operate in accordance with a southern (non-Inuit) socio-political system. This focus on northern and southern (Igloolik and Ottawa) funding conflicts is important. The details of these relationships and funding resources matter because they reveal the larger Inuit struggle to control their own representations and the flow of media into and out of their community. It is a struggle with high stakes: who will tell Inuit stories, and in what language? Who will control the content, form, scope and authence of Inuit film and video productions? Evans describes the way Isuma 's productions have intervened in both global cinema trends (with Atanarjuat) and Arctic politics (with videos such as the 1998 Arvikl, a film documenting an Inuit perspective on the hunting of bowhead whales). The information about the money and power behind the scenes in the production addresses the contextual politics and economics of media production in remote communities, the shape of media infrastructures, and their importance to media producers and consumers outside of the mainstream circulation of American-dominated film and television.

Evans' second book on Inuit video, The Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat, is intended to accompany viewing of Atanarjuat and provides essential contextual and cultural information about Inuit spirituality, material culture, and the production company supporting the film. The first chapter offers a brief historical overview of the Igloolik area since European contact, a description of contemporary Igloolik, and a description of the three video production groups in Igloolik. Certain chapters, such the "People and Path of Isuma" and "The Legend and Its Variants" condense or repeat material covered in more depth in Isuma: Inuit Video Art. Other chapters, such as those on spirituality and lifeways, describe cultural practices underpinning the traditional Inuit life and the specific story represented in Atanarjuat, opening up these elements of the film for outside authences. Especially important is Evans' presentation of Kunuk's motives in making the film: "to express his respect for elders and ancestors; to counteract the misleading or misguided depictions of the Inuit offered by soutiiern filmmakers, explorers, and missionaries; to reclaim for the Inuit some of the right to tell their own stories; to demonstrate the viability of an Inuit approach to the working world; to bring a valuable livelihood to many people in Igloolik; to keep the Inuktitut language alive; to share Inuit values and thoughts with the rest of the world" (62).

Some confusion may result from Evans' descriptions of scenes that were eventually cut from the final film. And readers pursuing further research could have benefitted from mention of recent scholarship on Atanarjuat by scholars such as Michelle Raheja, Sophie McCaIl, Shari Huhndorf, Faye Ginsburg, and Lucas Bessire, as well as closer attention to the film's visual strategies. Ultimately, these are small points given the usefulness of this study. The book is intended for crossover to the broader public and is the first book devoted solely to a single feature film made by an Indigenous director. It is also the first in a new book series on Indigenous Film - with each book addressing a film by or about Indigenous peoples - from the University of Nebraska Press (this writer's book is forthcoming from the same series) . Evans' books are much-needed additions to the fields of folklore, visual anthropology, Indigenous studies, and film studies, especially given the paucity of single-tide studies of Indigenous films and production groups. The Fast Runner will provide essential classroom support for teaching this rich and complex film, while Isuma: Inuit Video Art should be required reading for anyone studying folklore and media and especially Indigenous media.

[Author Affiliation]

Joanna Hearne

University of Missouri-Columbia