atanarjuat
Jan. 8th, 2003 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ilanaramaEverybody who wants to see it has no doubt already seen it, but I'm still going to give
No helicopters blowing up. No cool special effects. No CG creatures. You call this a movie?
Well, yes. One of the reasons I enjoyed Atanarjuat was because it was so un-movielike. At times this was problematic (like, it's nice that when it's supposed to be "dark" inside the tent it actually is dark, instead of like in movie movies when the actress reaches over from her bed and turns off her light and it gets "dark" which means just slightly less light than in daytime, but you can't actually see the actors' faces when it's really dark) but most of the time it was just like wow, I'm there, I'm watching this all really happening, it's not a movie but a window. Those missing teeth were not clever make-up jobs. Animals probably really were hurt in the making of this movie. The camera doesn't skip over the yellow snow.
The Inuit language is entirely opaque. It sounds like slightly inflected mumbling, and the missing teeth don't help. Even when I know what they're saying I can't tell what they are saying.
The music is amazing. I want the soundtrack. Sort of a cross between Gregorian chanting and African drumming. More tuneful than the local Native American stuff.
Only a glimpse of naked breasts, but full frontal male nudity. Just another way in which this movie is different from all other movies.
All the men look pretty much the same, modulo age. Ditto the women. This is not helped by the voluminous furry clothing. It took me about half the movie to tell the leading male characters apart. Fortunately, one of the women has a mole on her nose, else I'd have been really lost.
Vegetarians will probably want to skip this one. In fact, after the third ripping-off-bloody-hunks-of-dead-animal-and-shoving-in-mouth scene, I started considering vegetarianism, too.
For all its strangenesses, though, Atanarjuat is an accessible, understandable movie, because it deals with themes universal to humanity. Be nice to your brother, don't covet thy neighbor's wife, and don't eat the yellow snow.
No helicopters blowing up. No cool special effects. No CG creatures. You call this a movie?
Well, yes. One of the reasons I enjoyed Atanarjuat was because it was so un-movielike. At times this was problematic (like, it's nice that when it's supposed to be "dark" inside the tent it actually is dark, instead of like in movie movies when the actress reaches over from her bed and turns off her light and it gets "dark" which means just slightly less light than in daytime, but you can't actually see the actors' faces when it's really dark) but most of the time it was just like wow, I'm there, I'm watching this all really happening, it's not a movie but a window. Those missing teeth were not clever make-up jobs. Animals probably really were hurt in the making of this movie. The camera doesn't skip over the yellow snow.
The Inuit language is entirely opaque. It sounds like slightly inflected mumbling, and the missing teeth don't help. Even when I know what they're saying I can't tell what they are saying.
The music is amazing. I want the soundtrack. Sort of a cross between Gregorian chanting and African drumming. More tuneful than the local Native American stuff.
Only a glimpse of naked breasts, but full frontal male nudity. Just another way in which this movie is different from all other movies.
All the men look pretty much the same, modulo age. Ditto the women. This is not helped by the voluminous furry clothing. It took me about half the movie to tell the leading male characters apart. Fortunately, one of the women has a mole on her nose, else I'd have been really lost.
Vegetarians will probably want to skip this one. In fact, after the third ripping-off-bloody-hunks-of-dead-animal-and-shoving-in-mouth scene, I started considering vegetarianism, too.
For all its strangenesses, though, Atanarjuat is an accessible, understandable movie, because it deals with themes universal to humanity. Be nice to your brother, don't covet thy neighbor's wife, and don't eat the yellow snow.
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Date: 2003-01-08 11:09 am (UTC)At first the language was, as you say, indistinguishable mutterings ... and then suddenly I began to hear people's names (and notice that the English spellings didn't really capture the name-sounds very well; they were ... well, English approximations; for a while that was distracting). And then the faces, while still very similar, began to be unique -- helped, I think, by my usual habit of watching whole bodies and the ways they move. Different people had different gaits and gestures and timing and so forth.
The music was certainly fitting and lovely, though I found myself wishing it weren't there at times. The part of me that was so enjoying the all-natural lighting also wanted at least the illusion of all-natural sounds. (You have to dub in voices and sound effects (feet crunching on snow, etc.) afterwards; pretty much no getting around that.) So sometimes the music seemed like an unnecessary and jarring overlay.
I was fascinated start to finish and very, very, very glad that I saw it on a big screen.