Output:
What the Cinema Should Do
Words: Rob Nilsson
The brilliant Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner shows what can happen when artists stick to their principles, their visions, their deepest instincts. Perhaps the makers of Smoke Signals now understand that it doesn't do to pander to commercial interests or politically correct formulas. The Fast Runner succeeds because it shows human nature in its most vivid and unalloyed form.
The characters in the film are filled with humor, joy, cruelty, daring, cowardice, duplicity, nobility, kindness and epic vision all bundled together. We see sex, murder, bodily function, ribald humor, raw human feeling free from sentimentality. We see complex human negotiation where crime, punishment, reconciliation, sexual betrayal, purgation of evil and refreshment of the social order is allowed to exist in its simplest and most profound forms.
Yes, the Inuit myth purported to be at the root of the film has been shaped to fit the tastes of a modern liberal audience, but every age tacks its political bent onto its creation myths. I can't object when the experience and meaning, if altered, retain their cathartic power. In addition, The Fast Runner takes many sacred cows of modern life and shows them for what they are.
For example, the film puts the lie to the modern psychoanalytic penchant for human improvement. It shows that people change, they flip-flop from kindness to attempted murder and back again and then laugh with their intended victims about how the plot failed. Selfish people can be filled with humor. They can even enjoy their cupidity... admit it and laugh in the face of those who want to explain their victimization. Even noble people have their frailties, their moments of betrayal. But in the end people are starved for justice... and justice in the very long view never escapes memory.
Also The Fast Runner shows that every form of society -- be it a sunburnt band of outsiders seeking the limits of artistic expression, a tribal group trying to survive on the outskirts of an acquisitive world economy, a city state, or a modern industrial nation -- must have ceremonies to re-weave social fabrics which have been frayed by the unpredictable idiosyncrasies of human lust and greed.
There must be vows; there must be oaths. There must be wise counsel where the contradictory souls of men can be forgiven, and a new beginning allowed. There must be grace. The elders must have the wisdom to see that you don't get rid of evil, madness, cruelty, mayhem. You abandon them in your time... to be explored by those coming up who will never mature if they don't walk those mystic paths, understand those dark passageways in some way for some time.
What The Fast Runner also shows is that what we think of as character in most Western movies, particularly American ones, is paper thin and usually vitiated by its role in plot. Our filmmakers think they understand people... and that stories pose the real mystery. They think all we want to know is "what's going to happen." But what we really want is to feel connected to the mysteries posed by our human existence. What we really want is to be transformed.
