The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

Starring Pakak Innuksuk and Leah Angutimarik. In Inuktitut, English, and Danish with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, September 29, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Two weighty films hover over Zacharias Kunuk’s second motion picture, and neither one of them is his Caméra d’Or–winning debut feature, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

Because of its time frame (1912–1922), The Journals of Knud Rasmussen can’t help but make us think of Nanook of the North, as those were the years when Robert J. Flaherty shot his world-famous portrait of the most famous “Eskimo” hunter of all time. And then, because Kunuk’s second movie is primarily about the destruction of traditional Innu culture through the introduction of Christianity, one is reminded of Ceddo, Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Senegalese epic that was largely devoted to the retreat of animism in Africa before the onslaught of Islam.

In other words, while there is far less action in these Journals than there was in The Fast Runner, there’s a hell of a lot more going on.

This time working in even closer collaboration with Norman Cohn (who, without giving up his post as cinematographer, is now also credited as codirector, cowriter, and coproducer of Rasmussen), Kunuk clearly hasn’t lost his ability to tell a multilayered story (despite the tragically early death of his brilliant first scenarist, Paul Apak Angilirq).

Because they speak fluent Inuktitut and aren’t interested in buying furs, Avva (Pakak Innuksuk), the last of his people’s great shamans, takes something of a shine to ethnographer Knud Rasmussen (Jens Jorn Spottag) and his Danish entourage when they walk into his tiny camp. Although they want to know too much too fast, like most white men, they are far more willing to listen to what Avva has to say than any Hudson’s Bay trader or RCMP officer, and this ultimately loosens the shaman’s tongue. In previous years, he might have been more reticent, but with so many of his people breaking taboos (including his own daughter, Apak, who insists on sleeping with the ghost of her late husband and spurning the advances of her living one), it has become increasingly difficult to find sympathetic ears in the Arctic, and lore must go where it can.

As a member of an ethnic group that was disparaged by other First Nations people long before Columbus set sail from Spain, Kunuk knows how important it is for Innu to tell their own stories. In conjunction with Atanarjuat, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen goes a long way toward doing just that. There was, after all, a lot more behind Nanook’s smile than just innocence and nose-rubbing, and these two films give outsiders some idea as to what that something really was.

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