Review: Nunavik doc offers pretty pictures, not much story

Kent Nagano, conductor of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, with throat singers Taqralik Patridge and Evie Mark, at a fall 2008 performance in Nunavik. (FILE PHOTO)

EMANUEL LOWI
Special to Nunatsiaq News

Question: What do you get when you mix seven orchestra musicians, two throat-singers, three northern villages and a man with a video camera?

Answer: You get some pretty pictures and a little unusual music.

What you don’t get, unfortunately, is much of story.

And that’s the problem with Tusarnituuq! Nagano au pays des inuits, the new documentary that premiered Sept. 5 at Montreal’s World Film Festival.

The film records last year’s tour to three Nunavik communities by musicians of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Kent Nagano and featuring the voices of throatsingers Evie Mark and Taqralik Partridge.

Nunavik’s Avataq Cultural Institute fostered the tour.

The idea of grafting traditional Inuit vocals to samplings of classical musicianship sounds neat. And the MSO is to be credited for commissioning a new piece of contemporary music to incorporate the two sonic traditions.

After some footage from the ceremony in Montreal where the tour was launched, brief scenes of the musicians and throatsingers rehearsing introduce us to the players under the direction of Nagano and composer Alexina Louie.

And then it’s off to Nunavik, with the requisite shots of Air Inuit plane inside and out, northern airstrips and airports outside and in, kids double-riding bikes through town and adults motoring around on Hondas.

The orchestra musicians are shown spending a grand total of four whole days in three northern villages, hardly enough to get even a teaspoonful of sand into their shoes.

Any hopes of witnessing the purported “encounter between two universes because of music” — as promised by filmmaker Félix Lajeunesse at the Montreal premiere — seem doomed.

That is not to say there aren’t a few nice moments in this feature.

There is wide-eyed delight evident in the faces of the Inuit children as they hear the big sounds emanating from the acoustic instruments. The strange percussion sound effects get the best reactions from young and old alike.

In Kangiqsujuaq, the symphony musicians are welcomed into the community by Wakeham’s own drum band beating out exotic Brazilian rhythms.

And for a moment aboard the flight between Inukjuak and Kangiqsujuaq, an Inuit woman plays harmonica for the passengers, proving that one does not need a valuable vintage instrument or an isaallaaji in a tuxedo erratically waving his arms to make music that serves.

Viewers of the film are treated to a veritable trove of cross-cultural analysis too. “You eat raw fish, we eat raw fish. Looks like we are cousins,” Avataq president Charlie Arngak explains to Maestro Nagano, a Japanese-American. “And you look like an Asian,” Nagano tells Arngak.

This being said, documentaries set in the Arctic are born with a handicap from the get-go. The tradition of recording in moving pictures the encounter between Qallunaat and Inuit goes way back: the 1922 classic Nanook of The North was the first ever feature-length film of that genre.

In Flaherty’s film, Nanook and his people are amused by the filmmaker’s gramophone and its record discs. Clearly, Inuit heard “civilized” music a very long time ago.

One gets the feeling that the project to make the film about Nagano in Nunavik was compromised by various decisions, and so it comes off more like a simple movie about a grand idea, rather than a grand film about a simple idea, which is what it deserved to be.

The classical material — from Mozart to Stravinsky — covers the alpha and omega of symphonic music, while the contemporary composition with the throatsingers is the stuff of unique originality. In the film, we hear too little of what may have been gorgeous live performances.

Other creative deletions were made too.

In the storyline of Stravinsky’s piece, L’Histoire du soldat, the soldier strikes his bargain with Satan, trading his fiddle in exchange for valuable knowledge of the future.

For southern and European audiences, the Devil would be included easily, as any character in theatre, films and song, because no one actually believes him real.

But for Inuit today, the Devil is alive and well and living in every northern village. So the translation commissars of Nunavik had to downgrade him into a tuurnngaq, Satan be banished.

What’s left is a short hour which may signal briefly that North and South are becoming nearer to each other, while not revealing any insight into the nature of that change or what part orchestral music may play in the exchange.

What’s left is a short hour, which may signal briefly how North and South are becoming nearer to each other, while not revealing any insight into the nature of that change or what part orchestral music plays in the exchange.

Perhaps the filmmaker and his producers knew little of Nunavik before. Perhaps they imagined four days up North might be enough to understand it and explain it. Perhaps, in time, they may be forgiven.

T U S A R N I T U U Q !
NAGANO IN THE LAND OF THE INUIT/ NAGANO AU PAYS DES INUITS

Original English, French, Inuktitut version
English or French subtitles