Cinematographic Explorations
Greenland is a land of firsts. Erik the Red is credited with discovering the American continent when he set foot on it in 982 before establishing a colony. The first Danish film in 1897 was called Greenland Dogs Pulling a Sled. Thus the cinema in Greenland is intimately linked to the initial interest of Danish explorers and ethnographers who were fascinated by its wilderness and the Inuit culture that had adapted to it. William C. Thalbitzer, a philologist by trade, for example, films selected pieces of life on the island and its folklore: hunters, kayak races, umiaks, etc. Janus Sørensen, Leif Folke, Gunnar Seidenfaden, Ove Simonsen, who filmed East Greenland in the early 1930s, are some of the authors of the multitude of documentary tapes revisiting these eternal motifs of Inuit culture that still exist today. One of them presents a rare glimpse of the legendary explorer Knud Rassmussen, who was involved in the development just before his death of the Marriage of Palo (Friedrich Dalsheim, 1934). A film very visibly influenced by Nanouk the Eskimo (Robert Flaherty, 1922), one of the greatest classics in the history of film about an Inuit family in Canada in Nuvatu, it presents a fascinating glimpse of the traditional Inuit way of life by instilling a semblance of intrigue: bear hunting and a drum duel to get the heroine's hand are among the most striking scenes. Just before that, Uummannaq and its surroundings had been the scene of the incredible filming of SOS Eisberg/SOSIceberg (1933), inspired by Alfred Wegener's expedition that cost him his life, two films 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 escaped unscathed from a gruelling shoot, full of accidents. After the war, it was still Danish films that capitalized on the beauty of natural landscapes and the appearance of colour. Qivitoq (Erik Balling, 1956) gives them a good deal of space and is divided between a love story and a quasi-documentary, albeit idealized, vision of daily life on the island and the relationship between Greenlanders and Danes. The documentary Where the Mountains Float (Bjarne Henning-Jensen, 1962) evokes the shock of modern civilization on a 10-year-old boy, but also the problem posed by industrial fishing that competes with traditional methods. It was at this time that French anthropologist Jean Malaurie made documentaries for the ORTF on Inuit around the world, such as Les Derniers rois de Thule (1970). Jean Harlez had just preceded him with Igartalik, la vie groenlandaise (1965). The identity crisis of the Inuit population and the preservation of Inuit culture would become the major themes of Greenland cinema.
An unfathomable melancholy..
Herbert Achternbusch's anarchistic fantasy finds a haven on the island in Salut la Bavière (1977). In 1984, one of the first Greenlandic fiction feature films, Tukuma (Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt), was released, in which a young Dane travels to the island of Umanak in the centre-west in search of his missing brother. A local singing star appears there fourteen years before taking the lead role in The Heart of Light (Jacob Grønlykke), the first film shot entirely in Greenlandic, an adventure film with mystical overtones that evokes the ravages of alcoholism in a country with the highest suicide rate in the world. Ariane Michel's vision is that of wild and imperturbable 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 plunge into the life of a terminally ill thirty-year-old man in Nuuk, the capital. Filmed in part in Kangek in 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 inseparable from its landscapes, by recounting one of the black pages of the country's history: the attempted acculturation of Inuit children sent to Denmark to receive a Danish education. Inuk's Journey (Mike Magidson, 2010) tells the story of a return to the roots, evoking in small touches the changes caused by global warming and a world made up of glaciers and ancestral traditions that we do not know if it is on the verge of disappearing. These burning issues have given rise to numerous documentaries in recent years, with Greenland being a crucial stage. Global warming with Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, 2012) or Before the Flood (Fisher Stevens, 2016) or Survival of Traditional Lifestyles in ThuleTuvalu (Matthias von Gunten, 2014) which parallels life in the South Pacific with that of the Qaanaaq community in northern Greenland. Vanishing Point (2012) by Stephen A. Smith and Julia Szucs explores the common heritage of the Inuit of the Far North, but also their differences. Malik Kleist is the director of the country's first horror film under the permanent sun of the Arctic summer, Qaqqat Alanngu (2011), which uses a figure from local mythology, the qivitoq, a wanderer living on the fringes of society. By retracing the story 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 film 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 obviously magnificent images. French(Une année polaire, Samuel Collardey, 2018 shot in Tiniteqilaaq), Greenlandic(Anori, Pipaluk Jorgensen, 2018), Filipino (Nuuk, Veronica Velasco, 2019), Greenland cinema, beyond an uncertain future, shows many signs of vitality.
