Isuma—Inuit Video Art (review)

In 2001, a virtually unknown director, Zacharias Kunuk, accepted the Cannes Film Festival's coveted Camera d'Or Award for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the first Inuit-made, Inuktitut language feature film. Produced by Isuma Productions in Igloolik, Nunavut, Northern Canada, Atanarjuat tells a mythic story based on an Inuit legend. The film is set in the expansive landscape of the Canadian Arctic, but its story emerges from deep within the emotional landscape of its characters. Audiences had never seen anything like it before.

Michael Evans' elegantly written book, Isuma: Inuit Video Art, tells the multilayered story of the people behind Igloolik Isuma Productions and the rich, culturally influential body of work they produced over a period of more than twenty-five years that paved the way for the production of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

Evans considers the work of Isuma Productions through a very broad lens, exploring the complex weave of cultural, historical, and political forces that shaped the company's development and that made the path to cultural expression through video inevitable. The steps along that path are revealed in extensive interviews with key members of Isuma: director Zacharias Kunuk, videographer Norman Cohn, elder and actor Paulossie Qulitalik, and others from the Igloolik community.

Evans spent nine months living in Igloolik, observing, interviewing, and working with the Inuit video makers of Isuma and other local production groups. He viewed almost all of the videos that Kunuk and members of his group produced from the late 1980s to the present. His discussion of these works provides an essential context for understanding the cultural and political impact of Isuma's work and its place in the evolution of Inuit art. Nevertheless, neither these videos nor Atanarjuat are the central focus of Evans' study. Rather, the videos serve as the ethnography's reference texts. At its center, Isuma—Inuit Video Art is a book about the people behind the videos. It is a rare, insider's view.

The first chapter of Isuma sets the historical and cultural frame of the work. In pre-contact times, art was pervasive. It was present in every aspect of daily life, from highly decorated hunting implements to carved ritual items. Inuit art reflected the natural world and was an intrinsic part of subsisting in the far North. The arrival of Europeans and their trade-goods economy early in the twentieth century challenged the holistic nature of Inuit art as people began to produce carvings and other objects for barter and trade. Changes in technology eventually encouraged experimentation with new art forms such as video. Evans argues that video is as authentic an Inuit art form as the decorating of subsistence tools by hunters of long ago: "Inuit videography is no less Inuit because it is created with electronic machinery. It is no less art because it is shown on television. It is art, and it is important, because it represents a sincere human effort to communicate that goes beyond surface messages to embrace deeper and more profound truths" (7).

Evans goes on to argue that cultural videography also constitutes folklore, in spite of the fact that some practitioners are still uncomfortable with the idea of mass media being included within that genre. Although the distribution or performance of video does not fit traditional small group models, Evans maintains that "The scope of the eventual audience cannot determine whether something is folklore; it is the small group present at the moment of creation that matters" (36).

Video stories are not transmutable. Unlike oral folklore, they play exactly the same way each time they are shown. What introduces a new folkloric variant, Evans argues, is the viewing situation. "The audience, setting, reason for a showing, and other contextual, event-centered factors, all new with each showing of the video, in essence complete a new performance of the videography process and thus result in a new experiential variant" (44). For Evans, the process of video production, which is almost always cooperative, is primary; the...