MONTREAL -- There is something appropriate about the opening film of a Canadian film festival being a chilling experience, and the French-Canadian co-production ''Kabloonak, '' which opened the 18th Montreal World Film Festival, quickly had the audience shivering.
Set in the Canadian Arctic, the movie deals with the experience of director Robert Flaherty (Charles Dance), considered the father of documentary, as he filmed his epic work ''Nanook of the North'' in the 1920s.
Claude Massot's film is skimpy on biographical information and dramatic motivation, but it does present its own documentary-like view of the arduous task Flaherty set for himself. The film details these harrowing conditions with evocativeness, and its stunning visuals re-create the landscape in all its harshness.
The heart of the film is in the depiction of the relationship that develops between Flaherty and his principal subject, Nanook. The men, from obviously different social and societal universes, develop a bond in their mutual adventures that is actually quite touching. Dance, in his second turn as an historical filmmaker (he earlier played D.W. Griffith), brings his usual intensity to the sketchily written role, and he is ably matched by Adamie Inukpuk, who brings warmth and humor to the role of Nanook.
The film carefully mines the primitive ways of the Eskimos for their inherent humor for modern audiences, but it also makes clear their essential dignity. The ending will produce more than a few audience sniffles.
The film will have a tough commercial road because it neither fully succeeds as an adventure story nor as an insightful portrait of Flaherty's obsession.
KABLOONAK
Presented by Ima Prods. and Bloom Films
CFP Canadian Distribution
Producers Georges Benayoun, Paul Rozenberg, Pierre Gendron
Direction Claude Massot
Screenplay Claude Massot, Sebastien Regnier
Director of photography Jacques Loiseleux, Francois Protat
Art direction Valodia Aronine, Gilles Aird
Editing Joelle Hache
Cast:
Robert Flaherty Charles Dance
Nanook Adamie Inukpuk
Nyla Seporah Q. Ungalaq
Mukpullu Natar Ungalaq
Aviuk Matthew Jaw Saviakjuk
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
Set in the Canadian Arctic, the movie deals with the experience of director Robert Flaherty (Charles Dance), considered the father of documentary, as he filmed his epic work ''Nanook of the North'' in the 1920s.
Claude Massot's film is skimpy on biographical information and dramatic motivation, but it does present its own documentary-like view of the arduous task Flaherty set for himself. The film details these harrowing conditions with evocativeness, and its stunning visuals re-create the landscape in all its harshness.
The heart of the film is in the depiction of the relationship that develops between Flaherty and his principal subject, Nanook. The men, from obviously different social and societal universes, develop a bond in their mutual adventures that is actually quite touching. Dance, in his second turn as an historical filmmaker (he earlier played D.W. Griffith), brings his usual intensity to the sketchily written role, and he is ably matched by Adamie Inukpuk, who brings warmth and humor to the role of Nanook.
The film carefully mines the primitive ways of the Eskimos for their inherent humor for modern audiences, but it also makes clear their essential dignity. The ending will produce more than a few audience sniffles.
The film will have a tough commercial road because it neither fully succeeds as an adventure story nor as an insightful portrait of Flaherty's obsession.
KABLOONAK
Presented by Ima Prods. and Bloom Films
CFP Canadian Distribution
Producers Georges Benayoun, Paul Rozenberg, Pierre Gendron
Direction Claude Massot
Screenplay Claude Massot, Sebastien Regnier
Director of photography Jacques Loiseleux, Francois Protat
Art direction Valodia Aronine, Gilles Aird
Editing Joelle Hache
Cast:
Robert Flaherty Charles Dance
Nanook Adamie Inukpuk
Nyla Seporah Q. Ungalaq
Mukpullu Natar Ungalaq
Aviuk Matthew Jaw Saviakjuk
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
- 8/29/1994
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
As part of its archaeological vocation, Women in Film and the AFI's presentation ''A Festival of Women Directors'' is enabling the 1930 documentary ''The Forgotten Frontier'' by filmmaker Marvin (Mrs. Jefferson) Patterson to receive its long-delayed Los Angeles premiere a mere 61 years after it was made.
With a structure that seems inspired by the work of Robert Flaherty, the film opens up a unique viewpoint on the past, both in terms of its subject -- volunteer nurses working in the Appalachians -- and its perspective. (It screens Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at the AFI.)
Perhaps because it was used as a fund-raising tool, the silent documentary opens with a party of charity operators arriving by train at the whistlestop of Hazard, Ky., where they mount mules and horses to complete their journey. Patterson, however, soon drops this travelogue approach to get to the heart of her matter, an examination of the work and environment of the young single women who offer medical care to the indigent of the backwoods.
Patterson shuffles an artful combination of vistas, which encompass the beautiful, lonely countryside, with lamp-lit close-ups of the nurses at work, healing the sick and injured and recording their experiences in long reports. Although the sequences are staged, they convey an air of authenticity, and the cameraderie among the women is clearly genuine.
In the filmic flourish most clearly indebted to Flaherty, Patterson has enlisted the hill people in re-creations of the accidents and injuries that bring them to the nurses' care, including a mock-up of a gun battle.
In a poignant scene that captures a sense of the region's stoicism, Patterson plays out a vignette of an isolated widower who must bring his sick, and perhaps dying, baby twins from deep in the hills to a medical station where, because of the needs of his older children and the great distance from his home, he must leave them indefinitely.
A brief, black-and-white flickering of history, ''The Forgotten Frontier'' sheds light on two aspects of American history that spend too much time in the darkness, the continuing deprivations of Appalachian citizens, and the unheralded contributions of women in the healing arts.
THE FORGOTTEN FRONTIER
Director Marvin Patterson
Cinematographer Marvin Patterson
From the collection of Marvin Breckenridge Patterson
Black and white
Running time -- 60 minutes
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
With a structure that seems inspired by the work of Robert Flaherty, the film opens up a unique viewpoint on the past, both in terms of its subject -- volunteer nurses working in the Appalachians -- and its perspective. (It screens Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at the AFI.)
Perhaps because it was used as a fund-raising tool, the silent documentary opens with a party of charity operators arriving by train at the whistlestop of Hazard, Ky., where they mount mules and horses to complete their journey. Patterson, however, soon drops this travelogue approach to get to the heart of her matter, an examination of the work and environment of the young single women who offer medical care to the indigent of the backwoods.
Patterson shuffles an artful combination of vistas, which encompass the beautiful, lonely countryside, with lamp-lit close-ups of the nurses at work, healing the sick and injured and recording their experiences in long reports. Although the sequences are staged, they convey an air of authenticity, and the cameraderie among the women is clearly genuine.
In the filmic flourish most clearly indebted to Flaherty, Patterson has enlisted the hill people in re-creations of the accidents and injuries that bring them to the nurses' care, including a mock-up of a gun battle.
In a poignant scene that captures a sense of the region's stoicism, Patterson plays out a vignette of an isolated widower who must bring his sick, and perhaps dying, baby twins from deep in the hills to a medical station where, because of the needs of his older children and the great distance from his home, he must leave them indefinitely.
A brief, black-and-white flickering of history, ''The Forgotten Frontier'' sheds light on two aspects of American history that spend too much time in the darkness, the continuing deprivations of Appalachian citizens, and the unheralded contributions of women in the healing arts.
THE FORGOTTEN FRONTIER
Director Marvin Patterson
Cinematographer Marvin Patterson
From the collection of Marvin Breckenridge Patterson
Black and white
Running time -- 60 minutes
(c) The Hollywood Reporter...
- 11/14/1991
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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