Cinematographic Explorations
Greenland is a land of firsts. Erik the Red is credited with discovering the American continent when he set foot here in 982 and established a colony. The first Danish film in 1897 was entitled Greenland Dogs Pulling a Sled. Cinema in Greenland is thus closely linked to the interest first shown in it by Danish explorers and ethnographers, fascinated by its wilderness and the Inuit culture that had adapted to it. William C. Thalbitzer, a philologist by trade, filmed selections from life on the island and its folklore: hunters, kayak races, umiaks, etc. Janus Sørensen, Leif Folke, Gunnar Seidenfaden and Ove Simonsen, who filmed in East Greenland in the early 1930s, are just some of the many documentary tapes revisiting these eternal motifs of Inuit culture that survive today. One of these features a rare glimpse of legendary explorer Knud Rassmussen, who was involved in the making of The Palo Wedding (Friedrich Dalsheim, 1934) just before his death. Clearly influenced by Nanouk l'Esquimau (Robert Flaherty, 1922), one of cinema history's greatest classics about an Inuit family in Canada's Nuvatu region, this film offers a fascinating glimpse of traditional Inuit life with a hint of intrigue: bear hunting and a drum duel for the heroine's hand in marriage are among the highlights. Immediately prior to this, Uummannaq and the surrounding area played host to the incredible filming of SOS Eisberg/SOSIceberg (1933), inspired by Alfred Wegener's expedition that cost him his life. Both films were shot simultaneously by Arnold Fanck (German version) and Tay Garnett (English version), with a partially different cast and Leni Riefenstahl in the title role. Miraculously, everyone emerged unscathed from the grueling, accident-ridden shoot. After the war, it was again Danish films that capitalized on the beauty of natural landscapes and the advent of color. Qivitoq (Erik Balling, 1956), for example, is a love story and a quasi-documentary vision, albeit idealized, of daily life on the island and relations between Greenlanders and Danes. The documentary Where the Mountains Float (Bjarne Henning-Jensen, 1962) evokes the shock of modern civilization for a 10-year-old boy, but also the problem of industrial fishing competing with traditional methods. This was the period when French anthropologist Jean Malaurie was making documentaries for ORTF on the Inuit of the world, such as Les Derniers rois de Thulé (1970). Jean Harlez had just preceded him with Igartalik, la vie groenlandaise (1965). The Inuit population's identity crisis and the preservation of Inuit culture were to become major themes in Greenland cinema.
An unfathomable melancholy..
Herbert Achternbusch's anarchistic fantasy finds a haven on the island in Salut la Bavière (1977). 1984 saw the release of one of Greenland's first feature-length fiction films, Tukuma (Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt), in which a young Dane travels to the central-western island of Umanak in search of his missing brother. A local singing star appeared in the film fourteen years before playing the lead role in The Heart of Light (Jacob Grønlykke), the first film shot entirely in Greenlandic, a mystical adventure about the ravages of alcoholism in a country with the highest suicide rate in the world. Ariane Michel's gaze is that of wild, unruffled nature, witnessing the almost fantastic intrusion of a handful of scientists in a mysterious documentary(Les Hommes, 2006). Nuummioq (Torben Bech, Otto Rosing, 2009) offers a melancholy insight into the life of a terminally ill man in his thirties in the capital Nuuk. Partly filmed in Kangek to the south, on the Labrador coast at the mouth of the 160-kilometre-long Nuuk Fjord, The Experiment (Louise Friedberg, 2010) traces the course of this melancholy, as if inseparable from its landscapes, by recounting one of the dark pages in the country's history: the attempted acculturation of Inuit children sent to Denmark for a Danish education. Le Voyage d'Inuk (Mike Magidson, 2010) tells the story of a return to our roots, evoking in small ways the changes brought about by global warming and a world of glaciers and ancestral traditions that we don't know is on the verge of disappearing. These burning questions have given rise to a number of documentaries in recent years, with Greenland as a crucial stop-off point. Global warming with Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, 2012) or Avant le déluge (Fisher Stevens, 2016) or the survival of traditional ways of life in ThuleTuvalu (Matthias von Gunten, 2014), which parallels life in the South Pacific with that of the Qaanaaq community in northern Greenland. Point de fuite (2012) by Stephen A. Smith and Julia Szucs explore the common heritage of the Inuit of the Far North, but also their differences. Malik Kleist's Qaqqat Alanngu (2011), the country's first horror film in the permanent sun of the Arctic summer, uses a figure from local mythology, the qivitoq, a vagabond living on the bangs of society. Tracing the history of one of the country's first rock bands, Sumé - The Sound of a Revolution (2014) provides a comprehensive overview of the island's recent history without ever ceasing to entertain. Sébastien Betbéder recounted the visit of two Greenlanders to Paris, then his desire to shoot on the island in two successive short films before deciding to shoot Le Voyage au Groenland (Sébastien Betbéder, 2016), an amusing comedy that plays on the culture shock of two Parisian thirty-somethings vacationing in Kullorsuaq. SILA (2015, Corina Gamma) is a documentary that boasts stunning images. French(Une année polaire, Samuel Collardey, 2018 shot in Tiniteqilaaq), Greenlandic(Anori, Pipaluk Jorgensen, 2018), Filipino(Nuuk, Veronica Velasco, 2019), American(Greenland - The Last Refuge, Ric Roman Waugh, 2020), Icelando-Danish(Perdus dans l'Arctique, Peter Flinth, 2022), Greenlandic cinema, beyond an uncertain future, shows many signs of vitality.
