Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk, the two guys responsible for the masterpiece - Atarnajuat – Fast Runn
er, have done it once again. Before Tomorrow is their third (the second being The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and so, their rule-breaking cinematic conventions are becoming more familiar: a languid cadence, protracted narrative recitations of long ago events, Innu actors speaking Inuktitut, the vistas of ice and snow and sea and sky across the seasons, Inuit stoicism, a Kurosawa appreciation for long reminiscences, wondrous brutal landscapes. How has anyone ever survived here? This time we’re offered a haunting bleak drama set in the middle of the 19th Century. Director Marie-Helene Cousineau will be our guest, Sunday in the Comedy Nest. Her co-director Madeline Ivalu also star in the lead role as the grandmother. Before Tomorrow tells complex grim grandmother-grandson tales (with her own grandson in the co-starring role) of life and death on the tundra barrens, in the years before tye invasion of Chistianity and the white man, as the two of them struggle for survival.Because the Cohn - Kunuk cinematic conventions are so arrestingly different from any other movie you’ve every seen, Before Tomorrow in all probability will not find much favour with Montreal’s movie-going public, and as a consequence, not last very long at the AMC
. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen was in and out in less than a week. So we gotta see these gems while we have the chance. A pity. We gull ourselves into accepting these movies as gritty ethnographic documentaries, where in fact, they are honest-to-goodness movies, well-written, beautifully directed, cast with professional Inuit actors, performing without guile: sincere, honest, revealing. In Before Tomorrow for example, the McGarrigle sisters, in English and French provide counterpoint ballads.
What sticks is their cinematic daring and originality, the justaposition of strange against familiar, mythic against everyday. A people, so ordinary, so exceptional, surviving millenia on that endless tundra. These are memorable cinematic documents, movies that stick years after the more celebrated ones are long forgotten.
. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen was in and out in less than a week. So we gotta see these gems while we have the chance. A pity. We gull ourselves into accepting these movies as gritty ethnographic documentaries, where in fact, they are honest-to-goodness movies, well-written, beautifully directed, cast with professional Inuit actors, performing without guile: sincere, honest, revealing. In Before Tomorrow for example, the McGarrigle sisters, in English and French provide counterpoint ballads.What sticks is their cinematic daring and originality, the justaposition of strange against familiar, mythic against everyday. A people, so ordinary, so exceptional, surviving millenia on that endless tundra. These are memorable cinematic documents, movies that stick years after the more celebrated ones are long forgotten.
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