The Fast Runner – Atanarjuat walked away from this year’s Genies with the achievement in editing award among its half dozen statuettes. What makes that particularly impressive is not only that the Igloolik Isuma/National Film Board coproduction is the first-ever Inuit feature and shot on video, but also that the cutting credits include two of the film’s coproducers, director Zacharias Kunuk and cinematographer Norman Cohn.

According to Cohn, the editing process on The Fast Runner was a four-stage endeavor. The first two cuts of the movie, which chronicles conflicts within an Inuit camp on Sony DVW-700WS Digital Betacam, were performed in Igloolik, Nunavut. Director Kunuk spearheaded the assembly cut, with Cohn coming on board for a more refined cut performed on an analog system.

The movie then traveled to Montreal for its third round of editing on Igloolik Isuma’s Avid with Marie-Christine Sarda, followed by an online session at Multivet Media. The last step of the process was the creation of a digital Betacam, color-corrected, sound-mixed master, which Cohn describes as the final version of the movie as a video. The NTSC digi-beta master was then transferred to 35mm motion picture print stock at Digital Film Group in Vancouver.

According to Cohn, he and Kunuk are accustomed to editing their own video projects, having previously worked together on three documentaries and the 13-part docudrama Nunavut (Our Land). With the addition of Sarda, who impressed them with her experience on NFB projects, Cohn and Kunuk believed that editing the ambitious feature themselves was well within reach.

‘When you are video-makers rather than filmmakers you almost always assume that you will be doing your own editing,’ says Cohn.

The production, taking advantage of the lower cost of tape, shot more than 70 hours of footage, which would eventually be scaled down to a 172-minute cut. There were several scenes conceived in the script by the late Paul Apak Angilirq (also one of the film’s producers) that ended up on the proverbial cutting-room floor. Whereas one page in a screenplay usually equates to one minute of screen time, Cohn explains that many pages of Angilirq’s screenplay translated into two or three minutes of tape.

‘We had written a longer film than we realized,’ admits Cohn. ‘We ended up cutting out a couple of fairly large pieces of the story, but this was for artistic and narrative reasons more than anything, so I think the film actually improved.’

Without those cuts, the film would have run closer to four hours, which, being a producer, Cohn realized would be difficult for an audience to accept.

‘It’s hard enough to defend a film that is nearly three hours,’ says Cohn. ‘I don’t think we would have been taken seriously if the film had been nearly four.’

Hybrid techniques

Cohn says he, Sarda and Kunuk used a hybrid of styles to create The Fast Runner’s dramatic pace. The editors fused some degree of traditional Hollywood esthetics with ‘certain kinds of aboriginal and Inuit values of storytelling, looking at the world, time and the rhythm of life.’ He cites the decision to capture on video, with its ability to better depict realtime (which the film does in portions) as a major influence on the editing process.

‘Video has given people the opportunity to rethink how you can transmit the illusion of reality, by not necessarily cutting everything up into pieces,’ Cohn says. ‘Our cinematic style, which is really a video style from an editing point of view, and our indigenous cultural subject matter happen to have come together to produce a particular way of shooting and editing this movie.’

Cohn acknowledges that there are probably fewer cuts per minute in the deliberately paced The Fast Runner than in most any other narrative feature.

‘We [sought to] engage people’s attention at a higher level than what Hollywood’s quick cutting style normally allows,’ he says. ‘It leaves more room for the viewer. It makes people feel like they are more in the action, that they are more active, rather than passive, participants in the film viewing experience.’

The Fast Runner will be released in domestic theatres by Odeon Films on April 12. -www.isuma.ca

-www.nfb.ca

-www.multivet.com

-www.digitalfilmgroup.net