Zacharias Kunuk’s and Norman Cohn’s follow-up to Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner chronicles the investigations of anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, and his research into Inuit folklore, culture, and history during the 1920s. MUBARAK ALI offers a reading of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.


The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (or, more accurately, A Series of Events Reported in the Journals of Knud Rasmussen, as the opening titles specify and the film’s structure comes to reveal), the follow-up to Zacharias Kunuk’s and Norman Cohn’s celebrated collaborative debut Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, opens with a prelude whereby stasis and monochrome takes the place of movement and colour: a prefiguration of the process of change which the film will subsequently document. The film is, of course, based on the journals of the Danish-Inuit anthropologist, Rasmussen, who led an historic journey of ethnographic investigations, named ‘The Fifth Thule Expedition’, to Arctic Canada in the 1920s, exploring and documenting Inuit folklore, culture, and history during a transitional period when the Inuit people encountered Christian missionaries. The overall perspective of Kunuk’s and Cohn’s film, however, skews towards Rasmussen’s subjects, especially the respected shaman Avva (Pakak Innukshuk) and his self-willed daughter, Apak (Leah Angutimarik), who are caught in this division between the old and the new.

With Journals..., Kunuk and Cohn have done away with almost all traces of the primary storytelling structure of Atanarjuat, liberating the film to explore the ebbs and flows, moods and rhythms of these intermittent encounters, which have been distilled to fascinating conversations within the cramped spaces of Avva’s warmly-lit sod-hut, interrupted only when the camera ventures outside in the snow-covered landscape to observe daily life in the colony, usually accompanied by Avva’s fantastic narrations of his experiences as a shaman, a position which now nears extinction due to encroaching Christianity. Any action and emotion is to be found in the wind, the ancient stories and songs, and the weathered faces in close-up. Within this drift, is Apak’s suspension between heaven and earth: she detests her new husband and uses her own shamanic powers to have sex with her dead husband, the distorted visual and sonic properties of the latter sequences constituting the film's sublime incongruity. It’s difficult not to see this ‘love triangle’ as an abstraction of that in The New World, to which Journals... has often been compared to (any similarities between the two films, however, remain superficial).

The entire filming project, afforded currency by the digital photography, essentially creates a dialogue between these silent primitive landscapes (and whatever tales contained therein) and the filmmakers and largely non-professional Inuit actors, who have recreated something of meaning that vanished almost a hundred years ago, through the sheer act of filming and performing: a re-birth within the recreation of death, if you will. And this death – of tradition, of a time – is manifested in the film’s magnificent final sequence as Avva, after his family’s inevitable acceptance of Christianity, mournfully farewells the spirits who have guided him all his life; the same spirits who are visible throughout the film in the background as silent but solicitous creatures, as they now weep and make their reluctant egress into the vastness of a white horizon.