The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006, Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn) (Patreon)

43/100

My sincere apologies to this film, which I have treated quite unfairly—first by avoiding it for 14 years (after missing the NYFF press screening), mostly because I didn't much like Atanarjuat; then by foolishly attempting to use it as a distraction late on Election Night (couldn't stop my mind from wandering or my hands from grabbing my phone every few minutes, wound up watching it in a dozen chunks over nearly as many hours); and now, finally, by sitting down to write something during the seemingly endless wait for the presidential race to be officially called, at a time when it's still hard for me to concentrate. Given those circumstances, I feel some reluctance to call Knud Rasmussen incoherent, though it helps to learn that others, like Variety's Leslie Felperin (who deemed it "structurally lumpy"), lodged similar complaints at the time of its premiere. Took me well over an hour to grasp the ostensibly central spiritual/religious conflict, which Kunuk and Cohn do a poor job of foregrounding, and certain aspects, like the recurring ghost sex, still seem largely irrelevant even in retrospect. Rasmussen, his journals, and his fellow white dudes play a bizarrely negligible role. I can see in hindsight why there's so much emphasis on communal singing, but the framing device makes it come across more like an Inuit Distant Voices, Still Lives (which was my main point of interest). Also, here's another sad reminder of how terrible digital cameras initially were—night scenes shot within igloos are often barely visually legible. As with Nanook of the North, I very much enjoyed watching the construction of said igloos, and was fascinated by scattered details of early-20th-century Inuit life. (Gotta say dog-sledding seems like more hassle than it’s worth.) And the ending got to me, in part because it finally makes clear what the film's supposed to be about. Maybe I'd have picked up on that much earlier had I not been fretting about Nate Cohn's Georgia needle? I'm not likely gonna watch this again to be sure that it gets a fair shake, but I will at least feel kinda guilty.