The Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat

Series Editors' Introduction

xi seRIes edItoRs’ IntRoductIon Randolph Lewis, David Delgado Shorter We are proud to have Michael Evans’s “The Fast Runner ”: Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat as the first entry in the new book series, Indigenous Films. For the past three years we have sought out scholars we consider uniquely qualified to write about a particular film as a portal to the Native culture it depicts. The series will feature concise books on individual Native films, including The Fast Runner, Whale Rider, Dances with Wolves, Black Robe, Smoke Signals, Apocalypto, Little Big Man, Navajo Talking Picture, Pocahontas, and other films made by or about indigenous people. Each book in the series will provide an affordable and accessible companion to an important film that is often taught in history, anthropology, folklore, or Native American studies but for which there are few existing supporting materials or companion pieces to help instructors and students access the key issues in the film. We want each book to be written in an accessible manner and to examine the film from a number of angles that should stimulate classroom discussion, but also to engage a larger critical conversation about the power and potential of indigenous media. Our ultimate goal is to challenge the Eurocentrism that often afflicts the study of cinema, and to initiate conversations about the promises and challenges of indigenous media now emerging around the globe. The Fast Runner is an ideal place to begin. Along with Smoke Signals, The Fast Runner remains one of the key texts in the burgeoning field of indigenous media. We believe that this extraordinary film represents a breakthrough in terms of autonomous production , aesthetic ambition, and critical reception. How many films have received rave reviews from Margaret Atwood (“like Homer with a video camera”), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Chirac, and Roger Ebert? The Fast Runner is unusual in attracting the attention of novelists, scholars, politicians, and general film audiences, all of whom seem to view it as a watershed moment in the history of indigenous filmmaking, not simply for Inuit people but for Native xii | Series Editors’ Introduction film in the broadest sense. Almost every major reviewer fawned over it and what it seemingly represents: an epic film that artfully married the latest in video technology with the traditional storytelling of the Inuit. Reading Michael Evans’s book confirmed our sense that The Fast Runner is one of the most significant films yet produced by indigenous filmmakers. Beyond its role as a touchstone for Native film, The Fast Runner also has great significance to Canadian media: it led Canadian films at the box office in 2002, and has since been selected as one of the top ten Canadian films of all time. Clearly, a great deal can be said about this film. The relationship between The Fast Runner and its represented subject, Inuit culture, is worthy of much discussion across a wide range of academic disciplines, including Canadian studies, visual anthropology, ethnohistory, film studies, indigenous studies, and religious studies. We encouraged Michael Evans to write this book after reading his earlier work on indigenous media. We believed he was ideally positioned to do so: almost no one else has the ethnographic experience with Inuit media that he has acquired (he lived there for the better part of a year, working with the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation). Almost no one else has thought about Inuit media and their role in Inuit culture in the folkloric way that he has. Based on extensive research and personal connections in the Arctic, as well as a wealth of cultural knowledge and considerable sensitivity, his book is a uniquely well-informed, thoughtful, and illuminating look at Inuit creativity in the age of electronic media. Evans shows how The Fast Runner’s producers, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, handled their complex intercultural collaboration with extraordinary skill, resulting in a film that can serve as a model of autonomous media production for indigenous people. One of our goals for this series was to encourage teachers to use more Native film in the classroom. With its short chapters and clear prose style, Michael Evans’s book strikes an appropriate balance between scholarly depth and narrative flow, making it both teachable in the undergraduate classroom and readable by the nonspecialist. Series Editors’ Introduction | xiii Anyone interested in the intricacies of a great story—and the legend of Atanarjuat certainly qualifies—will enjoy this book. As editors...