Is it that good? Zacharias Kunuk's Arctic epic is drawn from an ancient Inuit legend, filled with the kind of archetypes and conflicts that also comprise the worst of potboilers: two brothers battle an evil, invisible shaman for decades; vengeance is everywhere. There is a scene, an escape by a naked man across seemingly limitless tundra, that is only the highlight of so many moments that seem to capture the most primal of fears and fables. On a recent visit to Chicago, Kunuk took time out for a smoke during my interview time, during which non-Inuit co-producer, cinematographer, co-writer, co-editor, production manager Norman Cohn and I compared the thirty-year history of subversive video to the hundred years of cinema and the 4,000-year history of Igloolik, population 1,200, where Kunuk, Cohn and the other members of the Igloolik Isuma Production company have been making Inuit-style drama since 1989. (Twenty or so shorts preceded "The Fast Runner.") Cohn was one of the first generation of "video freaks," who believed that social change could come from guerrilla video. With the introduction of the bulky black-and-white video Porta-pak in the 1970s, anything seemed possible. "Film and television tools were accessible to everyone now, to yippies, poor people living in slums. There was the promise of public access channels. Every step offered a promise of a social change," Cohn says. But that never materialized, despite the efforts of groups like Global Village, Ant Farm and TVTV. Cohn tried to make a living in the 1970s as a freelance video maker and find out what the medium was capable of. "And to go out and change the world if we could."

"Ten years later, Zach went through the same thing," Cohn says. "They were a third world culture living at the end of the world, applying video to the way they saw they world in many of the same way I was five thousand miles away." Both Kunuk and Cohn attended a conference in Canada, not knowing that each was hoping to meet the other. "That point in my life had come to an end, what art could do for the world. I was lonely and isolated, it was the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, Michael Milken, social change disappeared as a concept, much less as a way of making a living. I scammed my way North," Cohn says. "The filmmakers who were ordinarily hired to build a video-making culture were retired TV guys who make straight, imitation TV. It's the same reasons missionaries got to Igloolik last, whalers never got there, it's a dead-end spot right at the top of the world."

Cohn compares the Inuit work, patient and mysterious, to most movies made on this continent. "You turn off the sound, most movies are incomprehensible." In 1983, he says, he was stuck making "narcissistic, intellectual, self-referential conceptual video art." But then he saw work by Kunuk and his peers, "two Inuit guys at the north pole doing the same kind of work I wanted to make."

What kind of work is that? "Very visual and sensual worlds, not conveyed in words." Cohn describes the style of Inuit storytelling and teaching as one that is "always a non-didactic, non-interventionist way of doing a thing, as storytellers, as parents and children, as elders teaching youngers. Children are taught what they can handle. The children are told what they're about to experience. It's a form of respect. You assume you'll know how to do a thing watching and listening. You and I grew up on the explaining culture, we, you and I, grew up on, the culture of conventional explaining. Video is not audio with pictures."

There was also "a sense of using video as a horizontal process to express positive values to move forward, which were values of the video movement, which are the values of the Inuit way. To be nonjudgmental is a very Inuit value," Cohn says. "People don't explain themselves. I've been in Inuit houses someone gets, up, visits, leaves, doesn't say hello, good-bye, they visit silently, there's no 'what's bothering them?'" How is this reflected in the work? "It's a matter of witnessing. Witnessing the world in order to understand its function."

Cohn explains the patience of the culture this way: "You can't rush animals or weather. You don't want to be anxious: 'When's this blizzard going to end? When's it going to end?!' It's an amazingly sensible and humane culture. It's no accident they're still functioning."

Kunuk comes into the conversation at the end of my allotted time, but Cohn and I are too much in the explaining mode. With a budget of $2 million (Canadian) and a $130,000 video camera, "The Fast Runner" "did it so well they don't know we gate-crashed the film world!" Cohn says. Of their style of production, he says it's not film versus video at all. "It's the culture, it's not a machine. Thirty-five millimeter comes with ninety-five people in a military hierarchy. Video? You don't need it. You just produce a story."

"The Fast Runner" changes your world June 28.

Also by Ray Pride

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The greatest strength of "Minority Report" is that it elaborates Dick's seething paranoia with science fiction's genre conventions, in order to reflect disturbing social themes that are relevant today.
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SUMMER FILM PREVIEW 2002: June
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