If this is your land, where is your camera?: Atanarjuat, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and post-cinematic adaptation

Abstract

As unique examples of the contemporary, transnational art film, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn’s Atanarjuat (2001) and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) are stylistically distinct, their formal differences traceable to each film’s provenance as an adaptation of a specific type: Atanarjuat adapts an Inuit myth; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen sections of the ethnographer’s actual journals. At the same time, as remediations of radically different media forms, these films can be read according to the categories outlined by Jan Assmann, respectively, embodying ‘the normative and formative values of a community, its “truth”’, answering the questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What shall we do?’. These films also correspond to Astrid Erll’s categories of memory-productive and memory-reflexive film, respectively, reflecting formally and thematically upon Inuit cultural memory in the digital era. This article explores the myriad implications for cultural memory of this marriage of cutting-edge digital video technology with ancient themes and folkways, in effect a pre-literate ‘oral’ culture translated seemingly wholesale to the screen. I consider these Inuit films in terms of the question of cultural memory as it becomes trans-cultural, and national cinema as it becomes trans-national, while the local and ‘indigenous’ find representation at a level of global legibility.