Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
2002 · Zacharias Kunuk · Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner on Sightlines
A man runs naked across sea ice. The camera runs with him, down at his level, close enough that you get his breathing before you get his pursuers. No helicopter ever lifts to show you the ice from above. For nearly three hours Zacharias Kunuk declines the shot that every Arctic picture had trained audiences to expect, and the refusal is not modesty. It is the argument.
What Kunuk and his cinematographer Norman Cohn invented is a camera that lives in the settlement. Handheld, at the height of the work, inside the sod house where a seal-oil lamp is the only light, moving among dogs and sleds and butchered meat the way a person moves through a place they know. Igloolik's elders and craftspeople built that place — the sod and snow houses, the caribou-skin clothing, the harpoons — and they also governed how every object and gesture should look. So the frame is not a window onto a culture. It is a thing the culture made.
Deleuze gives us a way to say what that produces.
Start with what he called a cinema of the body: films that stop using bodies to move a plot along and let the body carry time itself. Attitudes, postures, ordinary acts held long enough to be felt as duration. Atanarjuat is built out of this. Shelter goes up. Game is butchered. A dog team travels. The editing keeps the rhythm of the task rather than the rhythm of the story, so the drama accumulates out of lived detail before it erupts into anything.
Then the duel. Two men take turns striking each other in the head until one goes down. The film never explains the rule; it shows the standing and the taking of turns. Deleuze has a precise word for a posture that makes a whole social relation visible: the gest. Everything about that order — rivalry, consent, the limit that keeps rivalry from becoming murder — is compressed into two bodies holding still and abiding by a count. Cut away to explain it and the gest dissolves into information.
Why bother with the vocabulary? Because without it, a viewer raised on plot files the shelter-building and the butchering under "atmosphere," which is a polite word for skippable. Deleuze's reading flips the weight. Those stretches are his dead time, and they are not the film's padding. They are its subject. The murder plot is what interrupts them.
That places the film precisely in film theory. Bazin praised Flaherty for refusing to cut — for insisting that the waiting at the seal hole stay in one shot, because the waiting was the point. Atanarjuat keeps that ethic exactly and moves the camera to the other side of it. Nanook of the North established the method: reconstruct an Arctic life already going out of practice and have the people who live it perform it. Kunuk answers Flaherty debt for debt and inverts the vantage, trading salvage-ethnography for a legend the community reconstructs and performs itself. Palos Brudefærd had already put an all-Inuit cast into a traditional rivalry drama on location in 1934. Rouch's Moi, un Noir let subjects improvise fictional versions of their own lives. Dead Birds proved ritual and material culture could hold a screen at unhurried length. The Battle of Algiers showed what non-professionals drawn from the actual community, plus a handheld documentary-grade camera, do to reenactment. Isuma takes all five and points them at oral legend rather than at recent history.
Which brings us to the concept this film most fully earns. Late on, Deleuze argued that political cinema had changed its job. Classical political film addressed a people it assumed already existed. Modern political film starts from the opposite condition: the people are missing, because colonization has made them a minority and handed the making of their image to somebody else. So the task stops being representation. Cinema has to contribute to inventing a people instead, and Deleuze called that operation fabulation — legending — catching real people in the act of telling the story that makes them a people.
In Igloolik this is not a figure of speech. Igloolik Isuma Productions was founded in 1990 by Kunuk, Cohn, the writer Paul Apak Angilirq, and the elder-actor Pauloosie Qulitalik, as an Inuit-owned company built so the North would not be filmed by outsiders. Apak Angilirq wrote the screenplay from a legend the region's elders carried orally. The community supplied the performers and sewed the clothes. The film does not document a culture; it performs one back into practice, on camera, at length. And the concept pays for itself by dissolving a bad question. "Authenticity" sounds like accuracy, and accuracy is a standard any outsider can meet with a decent research budget. Fabulation is something else: the filmed people are the authoring people, and the legend is the instrument.
Cohn, worth noting, is American. Deleuze anticipated that too — free indirect discourse, the author stepping toward his characters while the characters step toward the author, until what gets said belongs to neither alone.
None of this makes the film difficult. Its plot is ancient and tight. A camp is thrown into disorder by an unseen malevolent force, and that disorder is a genuine synsign, an encompassing situation pressing on everyone until somebody acts. Atanarjuat against Oki is a binomial, force against force, with Atuat between them. Large-form action at full strength. The malign force is never located anywhere in space: an absolute out-of-field, a beyond that the frame cannot point to.
Then the ending does something the structure does not authorize. A binomial demands a killing blow. The film declines it. Discord is expelled, the community is reknit, and revenge goes unpaid. That is the invention worth naming — an action plot run at bodily tempo and closed with a refusal to act.
One question the film leaves open: when the sod houses go up again and the skins are sewn again, is that the record of a past or its resumption? Isuma kept asking. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, four years later, brings the same cast and the same durational method to the moment of contact itself, and takes as its subject the very ethnographer whose Palo film had been one of Atanarjuat's templates. The filmed become the ones filming the filmer.
The digital video matters to all of it. The format made long takes cheap, let a small local crew work fast in brutal cold, and rendered the snow glare and the low sun with a texture the film keeps rather than hides. This is one of the places where digital stops being a budget compromise and becomes a cinema celluloid could not practically have supported.
So watch the duel again and count the turns. Then watch the run, and notice that the camera never rises to make his suffering beautiful. It stays down on the ice at the level of his feet. That is the film's politics, and it is in the lens, not the subtitles.
Concepts in play
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Editing that keeps the rhythm of the tasks depicted — building shelter, butchering game, traveling by dog team — with Cohn's handheld camera at the level of the action; Ungalaaq's performance registering as bodily fact in the sustained ice-running sequence.
- the gest — The staged ritual duel — men taking turns striking each other until one falls — shown as concrete practice rather than explained, so the whole social order of rivalry and consent sits in the posture.
- dead time (temps mort) — The near-three-hour runtime as editorial statement: scenes allowed to breathe at the tempo of daily labor, refusing the compression of conventional feature storytelling in favor of oral narration.
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — An Igloolik oral legend carried by elders, scripted by Paul Apak Angilirq and performed by the community that owns it — Isuma's method of re-enacting traditional life with local, largely non-professional performers.
- the people are missing — Isuma founded in 1990 as Canada's first Inuit-owned independent production company, out of the movement to put production tools in Inuit hands rather than have the North filmed by outsiders; the first feature written, directed, produced and acted entirely in Inuktitut.
- free indirect discourse (political) — Authorship distributed across Kunuk's direction, Cohn's participatory video-artist camera, Apak Angilirq's screenplay, and Igloolik elders and craftspeople governing how every object and gesture should look — an insider's rather than an outsider's view.
- the encompasser (synsign) — The prologue's camp thrown into disorder by a malign spiritual force — an encompassing situation of ruptured communal harmony that presses until acts transform it.
- binomial — The rivalry of Atanarjuat and Oki over Atuat, escalating from jealousy through the ritual duel to attempted murder, flight and pursuit.
- action-image, large form — The mythic arc of transgression, violent rupture, flight, survival and a return that restores order — but with the resolution declining the pure revenge ending in favor of expelling discord and reknitting the community.
- out-of-field, absolute — The unseen malevolent force and the curse that set the tragedy in motion, never localized in the film's space — the shamanic dimension that earns the 'fantasy' label.