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Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now

Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019)

Jenni Niska

Résumé

This article examines the ways in which the river in the film Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019) medially constructs the Arctic from a female Inuit point of view. I argue that the cinematic techniques of the film mobilise the Inuit cosmological concept of Imaq (Water), thereby forming continuities between bodies of water – human and environmental – and revising the colonial trope of female Indigenous bodies as an extension of land to be conquered. The article examines scenes where the female Inuit body is paralleled to the riverscape and argues that these parallels visually construct a female gaze directed back at the colonial projections of Arctic people(s) while envisioning a connection of body and land that is based on hybridity and renewal. The choice of cinematic techniques speaks back to the violence of Canadian colonial images, challenges the narratives of disappearance and decay in relation to indigeneity, and imagines an Indigenous Arctic that is globally connected.

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  • 1 Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, Arnait Video Productions, 2019.

1Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu’s film Restless River (Nunavut/Canada, 2019) begins and ends with a superimposition of two bodies of water.1 After a close-up shot of a pair of eyes opens the scene in the film’s first seconds (Figure 1), the image fades into a forward-moving drone shot of a snow-covered tundra landscape. The camera traverses the tundra, moves gradually upwards and finally reaches the river of the film’s setting. A portion of the Kuujjuaq river of Nunavik in the Canadian Arctic stretches across the screen in a decelerating drone shot, flowing in icy blue shades through the white landscape. The film cuts back to the pair of eyes, this time superimposed on an image of rippling water that fills the entire screen. While the eyes remain in place, the film cuts from the waterscape in the background to a view across the fast-flowing whitecapped river. This opening introduces the viewers to a powerful double image: two overlapping bodies of water, one of an Inuk woman and the other that of the Kuujjuaq river. This scene returns as a mirror image at the end of the film, closing the narrative bracket by inverting the sequence: the same pair of eyes is superimposed on a more peaceful view of the river and remains in view as the riverscape dissolves before the credits appear (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Opening scene. Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, 2019.

Figure 2. Closing scene. Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, 2019.

  • 2 Rachel A. Qitsualik, “Inummarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought”, in Nilliajut: Inuit Pe (...)

2This bookend sequence condenses the issues that interest me in this article. Drawing attention to questions of the gaze and emphasising the role of the viewer, it provides a lens through which to view Restless River. The Inuit eyes set the tone for an interpretation of the film, reminding the viewer of the specific context needed for a nuanced reading and thereby offering a potent comment on the reception and analysis of Indigenous images globally. The river that is superimposed on the eyes signals connections between the land and the human body through water. I argue that the cinematic techniques in the film mobilise the Inuit cosmological concept of Imaq (Water), thereby forming continuities between bodies of water – human and environmental – and revising the colonial trope of Native-female-body-as-land.2 Instead of the violent and regulatory move that the use of the trope in colonial imagery makes, the juxtaposition of body and land in Restless River is regenerative, revealing the hybrid and multiple continuities that a feminine, Indigenous Arctic holds. These continuities encompass film imagery, and while this film is about the proliferation of human life, it is also about the proliferation of Indigenous images. In its appropriation of cinematic technology, the film bears witness to the violence of Canadian colonial history, challenges the narratives of disappearance and decay in relation to indigeneity, and imagines an Indigenous Arctic that is globally connected.

  • 3 Gabrielle Roy, Windflower, translated by Joyce Marshall, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1994.

3The film takes up the narrative of the 1970 novel by French Canadian author Gabrielle Roy, La rivière sans repos (translated into English as Windflower) and revises its imagination of Inuit life under increasing Western influence.3 The narrative of both works hinges on Canada’s colonial history and the tension and uneasy oscillation between local customs and the imported ways of life that the Inuit communities face. The restless river of the film’s title is a metaphor for the life of the protagonist that we can read as representative of the changes taking place in her community on a larger scale. The protagonist Elsa is raped by an American soldier stationed at her home village Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq), and she gives birth to a blue-eyed, blond-haired son who becomes a source of wonderment in the Inuit community. Elsa is deeply divided between raising her son according to the values of Western ‘modernity’ and by following the ways of her community. She works as a housekeeper for the family of the police officer posted in her village while her parents care for her son Jimmy. The first half of the film portrays her adapting to Southern-imported customs and scolding her mother for observing local caring practices with Jimmy rather than adopting ‘modern’ ones. After hearing that the family she is working for will move back down South and that there are plans to move the village to the other side of the river, she becomes disillusioned with this new way of life and joins Isaki, her father’s cousin, to live off the land away from the village. Isaki welcomes Elsa and her son and teaches him subsistence practices. Their life on the land is interrupted when Jimmy contracts pneumonia and they have to return to the village to seek medical help. Shaken by the experience, Elsa decides to stay in the village with Jimmy. The last third of the film shows Jimmy growing up among the other Inuit youth in the village, nevertheless pondering over his origins. When he reaches his own conclusions about his father after a discussion with an evasive Elsa, he becomes increasingly disturbed and escapes on a cargo flight to join aviation school, as we learn at the end of the film. The last moments of the film show Elsa continuing her life after coming to terms with Jimmy’s departure, working enough to sustain her basic needs. In a meaningful dialogue between Elsa and the priest who encourages her to strive for more in her life, she declares: “I’m happy with my life,” to which he responds “Yes. I can see that.”

  • 4 Roy, Windflower, p. 1.

4While the novel carefully depicts the various elements at play in these tensions and grounds the characters’ experiences in the river landscape, it retains traces of colonial discourse. The descriptions of landscape as well as people lean on troubling notions of wilderness, expressed at the very beginning of the narrative: “The rugged land, so naked under its persistent sky, had no shelter anywhere to offer love. […] Human beings coupled at times like animals, as they chanced to meet, on the harsh moss of the tundra, exposed to the pitiless sky.”4 The ending of the novel ultimately reproduces a narrative of damage and decay in the portrayal of the protagonist’s demise after the loss of her son as well as the connection to her community. The film, however, departs from the novel’s vision of an inevitably damaged future and reimagines this ending in its more nuanced closure. Restless River thus addresses the multiple impacts of colonial violence but also speaks to the adaptability, dynamism, and futurity of Indigenous bodies, communities, and cultural products.

Imaq or Water in the Context of Inuit Cinema

  • 5 Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport, “Arnait Video Productions: Inuit Women’s Collective (...)

5My interpretation of the cinematic river rests on the crosscurrents of Inuit cosmology and posthuman as well as new materialist thinking. While my own background as a Finnish scholar is not based in Inuit worldviews, the latter offer a necessary lens onto Inuit works that I attempt to understand with humility and respect. In order to provide cultural and theoretical contexts for this converged reading, I engage with the history of female Inuit filmmaking, the concept of Imaq in Inuit cosmology, and the posthuman figuration of watery bodies. As the filmmaking collective behind Restless River is dedicated to “the politics of affiliation between indigenous and settler cultures”5 and as I operate under the conviction that Indigenous knowledges and posthuman literary criticism can be mutually informative, this article builds a tentative bridge between these epistemologies in its reflection on the watery reimagination of the Arctic that the film produces.

  • 6 Jerry White, “Frozen but Always in Motion: Arctic Film, Video, and Broadcast”, Velvet Light Trap, v (...)
  • 7 White, “Frozen but Always in Motion”, p. 56.
  • 8 For more detailed accounts of the history of Inuit cinema, see e.g. Marian Bredin, “‘Who Were We? A (...)

6The history of Inuit filmmaking constitutes an adaptation of oral storytelling and cultural practices into a reappropriated form. Southern technologies in the form of cinematic equipment and techniques as well as Southern-produced images of the Arctic have been claimed and transformed by Inuit creators since the 1970s, when the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) organised film production training initiatives. Jerry White locates the origins of Inuit filmmaking in the NFB-assisted films of Mosha Michael, made before the creation of IBC or Isuma Productions.6 Examining Michael’s films Natsik Hunting (1975), The Hunters/Asivaqtiin, and Whale Hunting/Qilaluganiatut (both 1977), which portray traditional hunting practices, White draws attention to the aesthetic and photographic sensibility of Michael’s work and argues that the filmmaker “is asking his viewer to see film here, not simply to see a hunt.”7 The formation of Igloolik Isuma Productions in 1990 set up Igloolik as the centre of Inuit filmmaking. The release and ensuing global acclaim of Isuma’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner in 2001 marked a historical moment for Arctic Indigenous cinema, with an adaptation of a traditional Inuit story at the centre of the whirlwind.8

  • 9 “About Us”, Arnait Video Productions. https://arnaitvideo.ca/about-us/ , accessed 6 April 2023.
  • 10 See MacKenzie and Stenport, “Arnait Video Productions”.
  • 11 Davinia Thornley, Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism: Filming on an Uneven Field, (...)
  • 12 Corinn Columpar qtd. in Thornley, Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism, p. 24.
  • 13 For more information on the filmmaking of Arnait, see Dianne Chisholm, “The Enduring Afterlife of B (...)

7The Arnait Video Productions Collective was created in 1991 by Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Madeline Ivalu, and Mary Kunuk with the aim of teaching filmmaking to women in Igloolik.9 Their work centres Inuit women’s perspectives in order to challenge male normativity and bring multiplicity to images of the Arctic. Arnait foregrounds female experiences and practices (such as in the practices relating to the seal oil lamp in Qulliq, 1993), thereby adding a missing piece to the Inuit cinematic landscape previously dominated by Isuma’s male hegemony.10 In their collective production process, where non-professional actors not only play important roles but also actively participate in the filmmaking by shaping their characters through improvisation, the filmmakers of Arnait are practicing a collaborative, dynamic, and communal form of cinema production. In addition to this collaborative production mode, Arnait attempts to make their films as accessible as possible by using nonprofit video-on-demand streaming platforms, making many of them freely available on their own website as well as that of Isuma Productions. With the exception of Cousineau, who is French Canadian but moved to Igloolik in 1991, Arnait’s core team consists of female Indigenous filmmakers who expressly engage non-Indigenous elements in the stories they work with. The source material for several of their films are non-Indigenous-authored texts and some films have Indigenous/non-Indigenous directorial teams. In her discussion of the cross-cultural collaborative production mode that Arnait engage in, Davinia Thornley urges critics to move on from the categorisation inherent in the question “Is it or is it not an indigenous production?”11 and instead focus on “a horizon of aesthetic and political possibility”12 that films like Arnait’s offer.13 The collective’s production and distribution modes powerfully contribute to the plurality, hybridity, and global outreach that the narrative of Restless River specifically deals with. In this film, the globally connected, Indigenous, and feminine Arctic is envisioned through water – specifically the river.

  • 14 Bertrand, “Le collectif Arnait”, p. 46.
  • 15 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London, Bloomsbury, 2017.
  • 16 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 3.

8Water is prevalent in Arnait’s work and the riverscape of Restless River thus constitutes an important elemental landscape onto which the film’s narrative is mapped. Karine Bertrand, in considering Arnait’s participation in the indigenisation of the cinematic medium through a distinctly feminist approach, points out that the film Before Tomorrow (2008) uses fluid imagery in its depiction of the Arctic landscape. Focusing on scenes that take place in a cavern or under water, she links this imagery to the idea of a protective womb.14 While Bertrand draws a connection between a type of imagery (fluid) and spatial setting (under water) that is central to my work, her evocation of the womb in relation to water conjures a configuration of space that relies on heteronormative reprosexuality. While Bertrand analyses space in Arnait’s film in terms of a quasi-sacred femininity, I find interpreting the waters in Restless River through the concept of Imaq as well as Astrida Neimanis’s posthuman figuration of the gestationality of water more productive.15 Imaq, or Water, is life in its primal form that affirms proliferation and is present in both animal and human life. The formulation of a posthuman watery gestationality foregrounds a facilitative mode of being and considers human reprosexual wombs as “but one expression of a more general aqueous facilitative capacity.”16 In my study, framing the Arctic in Restless River as a space of hybrid continuities and global connectivities does not rely on an exclusively feminine or reprosexual wateriness, but on one that is more expansive and transformative.

  • 17 Qitsualik, “Inummarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought”, p. 30.
  • 18 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 30.
  • 19 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, pp. 28-9.
  • 20 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.
  • 21 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.
  • 22 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 86.
  • 23 The generative powers of water manifest in a feminine form in other Indigenous Arctic cultures, too (...)

9In her outline of an Inuit conceptualisation of sovereignty, Rachel A. Qitsualik introduces the “triune complex of Water-Land-Sky” that provides a framework to consider relations between “environmental forces, but also psychological and spiritual ones” in Inuit thought.17 According to this elemental articulation of cosmology, all life is composed of three elements – Water, or Imaq; Land, or Nuna; and Sky, or Sila – in different admixtures. The balance of these elements in a human is what constitutes a ‘person’, and incidentally, the film collective Isuma takes its name from the concept that refers to “the personal thoughts and feelings unique to an individual”– a result of the interaction between Imaq (Water) and Nuna (Land).18 The watery prevalence in Arnait’s work, and in Restless River in particular, invites a more detailed look at the significance of water in this elemental framework. Qitsualik writes that while water is associated with life in most cultures, Inuit identify this element with a specific kind of life: it is “associated with the raw and basic qualities of animal life – the source of sustenance itself; and by extension, appetite. [...] Via this symbolism, by implication, Water is at once primal passion and the very twitch of life.”19 The expression that this element takes in a human being is reflected in what is called “uumaniq, the simple stuff of life common to both animals and humans.”20 Uumaniq maintains a desire for continued living. Importantly, Qitsualik writes that “it is animal instinct – an acceptable fact and necessity for living existence, bearing none of the shame or vileness with which it is traditionally viewed in Abrahamic thought.”21 Approaching this type of wild water without the discomfort or moral structures that patriarchal systems attempt to govern it with holds similar potential to the watery bodies outlined by Neimanis when she writes about water’s queer repetitions. Aligning her thinking with that of Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze, she points out that “while the water that moves through these cycles is always ‘the same’, it is by no means undifferentiated. What repeats is always difference.”22 While Imaq articulates the fundamental necessity of the proliferation of life,23 the difference inherent in every watery repetition underpins the continuities and connections considered in this article.

  • 24 Keavy Martin, Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature, Winnipeg, University of Manito (...)
  • 25 See, among others, Christopher Neil, Noel McDermott and Louise Flaherty, Unikkaaqtuat: An Introduct (...)
  • 26 Neil, McDermott and Flaherty, Unikkaaqtuat, pp. 65-70.

10Water courses through different kinds of bodies in the history of Inuit storytelling, and many stories perform an articulation of Imaq and uumaniq, or “the simple stuff of life common to both animals and humans.” One of the best-known Inuit unikkaaqtuat – “traditional stor[ies]” or “stories that go on for a very long time”24 – is the one about Sedna or Nuliajuk, the mother of sea mammals living at the bottom of the sea, which exists in various versions.25 It explains how the animals that constitute an important part of Inuit diet came to be and connects a watery environment to a mother figure. According to this story, the severed fingers of Avilayoq were transformed into seals and whales when her father chopped them off after throwing her out of his kayak during their escape from her husband in order to save himself, fearing the latter’s revenge. The transformation of human bodies into animal ones or objects is a recurring element in Inuit tales and very often involves a watery connection. Another unikkaaqtuaq about the origin of fog involves the transmutation of a human body into a hydrological element.26 It tells the story of how an Inuk hunter escapes from an akla (land bear) or Nareya the Giant – depending on the variant of the story – by creating a river between himself and the antagonist in pursuit of him. When the pursuer asks how he managed to cross the river, he responds that he drank all the water until he was able to wade through. The pursuer, taking this advice, attempts to drink the river empty and bursts, creating mist and fog. While this story conveys an important lesson about using one’s intelligence to overcome danger, it also explains the phenomenon of fog through the dissolution of a body into the hydrosphere of the earth. Both stories involve an elemental connection between a human body and a watery environment – but one that is also violent. These stories of watery bodies never offer a comfortable transformation from one element to another, something that is very relevant in relation to Restless River.

Watery Land-Body Connections through the Inuk Female Gaze

  • 27 A reference to Zacharias Kunuk’s 1985 film.

11Bertrand’s evocation of an embodied landscape rests on the conflation of the feminine with sexual reproduction, with woman as womb, and thereby risks overlooking both the violence and the complexity often inherent in these watery networks. Neither the unikkaaqtuat mentioned above nor the narrative of Restless River shy away from the opposing forces at play in the transformations that occur through water. Indeed, the film offers a powerful commentary on colonial violence both in its embodied, material form and in its cultural manifestation in the violence of colonial image-production. The powerful double image of eye and water in the opening scene melds the Inuk body and the riverscape, a move reminiscent of but decidedly dissimilar from the colonial trope of linking distant, exotic lands to Indigenous female bodies in an act of control and regulation. Crucial to the departure from colonial aesthetics here is that it is the eye, of all body parts, that we see superimposed on the watery landscape. The eye does not look directly at the viewer but slightly towards the right of the screen in a contemplative manner: it is as though its possessor is also dwelling on the riverscape visible to the viewer. Together with the human voice that whispers in Inuktitut in the background, the scene clearly informs the viewer that this river-story is told “from Inuk point of view.”27 In addition, this narrative that engages with various manifestations of colonial violence is told from a female point of view.

  • 28 Shari M. Huhndorf, “Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1987–1922 (...)

12The female gaze becomes crucial in a scene at the beginning of the film where the filmmakers provide a commentary on cultural colonialism in the interaction between Elsa and her mother. After Elsa has returned home from the movies, she is daydreaming in her bed, watching the movement of the shadows on the ceiling that are cast by the windswept branches outside. Her mother’s reproaching voice, speaking in Inuktitut, is heard in the background: “Daughter, how many more times will you go see the movies? Might as well move into the movie hall! You could join them on the screen. Become a flat image on the wall too.” While she is saying this, the viewer is transported into Elsa’s mind as the shadows on the ceiling transform into a black-and-white film scene with a soundtrack suddenly audible in addition to the mother’s reprimands. Parental worry about the possibly detrimental effects of a modern pastime is here coupled with a specific reference to the Inuit context: becoming “a flat image on the wall” echoes the colonial history of image-production in the Arctic, where Indigenous people were reduced to stereotypes of an exotic wilderness, a medial practice that Shari Huhndorf traces to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922).28 In engaging with film, the mother seems to say, her daughter risks surrendering herself as the object of Southern projections. However, the eye of the opening scene already puts this comment into perspective: it is the protagonist’s – and, by extension, the filmmakers’ – eyes that are doing the looking here and the gaze that she exercises on herself is more complex than simply one of subjugation.

  • 29 Huhndorf, “Nanook and His Contemporaries”, p. 148.

13The force of the female Inuk gaze becomes most powerful in a scene in which Elsa, heavily pregnant, returns from the clinic to encounter the American soldiers on her path. She stops, turns to the soldiers, who are out of focus, and pulls down her hood, turning her head slowly and deliberately to stare at each of the uniformed figures walking by. The scene then cuts to the soldiers’ faces partly obscured by their balaclavas; in a series of decelerated extreme close-ups, the question of the gaze is amplified as we see the soldier’s eyes, directed at the camera, move across the screen to be followed by the next. Some of the soldiers appear hostile, some lower their gaze. This is a striking moment of Indigenous feminist filmmaking whereby Elsa returns the gaze, without shame, and confronts the soldiers’ varying demeanors and their very personhood. While Nanook of the North could be seen as an unintentional portrayal of Allakariallak’s amusement at the expectations of Southern audiences, Restless River determinedly turns the camera around and places the American colonial presence as the object of the gaze.29

14In this self-reflexive move where the filmmakers place their work alongside earlier images of the Arctic, river water is employed as a metaphor of mediation. Immediately before the scene with the imagined cinema on the ceiling, a sequence interweaves the movements of river water, wind, and cinematic images. This sequence is set in motion by a hand-held shot of Elsa and her father as they set out on the Kuujjuaq river on their umiaq. After a medium shot of Elsa’s father at the stern, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Elsa sitting on the bow. Everything is mobile: the umiaq, the people in it, as well as the camera itself. The waves in the river propel the image into a continuous up-and-down movement. This flowy movement is continued in the following shot, where a hut, Elsa’s home, is portrayed next to a row of bushes that move in the wind. The next shot shows Elsa looking at the wavy shadows cast by the branches onto the ceiling in a play of light. Throughout this sequence, a string quartet plays a series of intervals, providing a soundtrack that parallels the oscillating movements in (and of) the images. The river is the visual catalyst for a flow that is transferred to the current of air, which in turn sets into motion the branches and, finally, Elsa’s imaginary cinema. Here, the intermedial transfer from one medium to another expands and involves water and air in addition to image and sound. However, it is the river that provides the impetus and starting point for this process of medial transformation.

15The river in the film becomes not only an extended metaphor for the cinematic medium, but also an articulation of Inuit cosmology. Qitsualik’s definition of Imaq as the basic element that concerns itself with the proliferation of life provides the undertow to the film’s aestheticisation of continuity. The key scene where the expression of Imaq is at its most potent is the one where Elsa gives birth to her child. After the anticipatory atmosphere in scenes that depict Elsa’s pregnancy, the transition to the birthing scene is marked by the cut of an axe that initiates a filmic cut as Elsa’s father is chopping ice in the foreground of the image outside their home. The sudden thud of the axe on ice is combined with an echoing clang that continues reverberating across the cut. This transition and sound bridge marks the onset of labour that the ensuing sequence aesthetically constructs in parallel with images of breaking river ice. The following drone shot passes over rugged ice formations on the river, accompanied by low sounds of cracking ice sheets. These rumbling sounds are gradually joined by the sound of a woman breathing. After a close-up of Elsa at the clinic and a shot in which her mother joins her beside the bed, the sound of breathing is expanded to that of throat-singing or katajjaq, an Inuit practice typically involving two women.30 With the continued throat-singing in the background, the scene cuts back to the earlier drone shot, this time slowly tilting upwards to reveal a panoramic view of a snowy tundra with the frozen river in the foreground. The throat-singing is replaced by Elsa’s mother singing a lullaby in Inuktitut, and gradually the landscape shot is complemented by the superimposed shot of Elsa and her mother at the clinic. This superimposition aligns the curves of the snowy hills with Elsa’s reclined, pregnant body under the white sheet, creating continuity between the human body and the body of water, both in different states of latency (Figure 3). The prolonged creaking sound of the slowly breaking river ice, Elsa’s breathing, and the mother’s singing in Inuktitut sonically underscore the juxtaposition of the Inuk female body and the Arctic riverscape.

Figure 3. Superimposition of bodies of water. Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, 2019.

  • 31 Susan Hawthorne, “Land, Bodies, and Knowledge: Biocolonialism of Plants, Indigenous Peoples, Women, (...)
  • 32 Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity”, Am (...)

16Constructing the Arctic landscape through the female Indigenous body in this scene constitutes a powerful move of self-determination and self-definition and repurposes a widely used colonial trope. Mediations of the Arctic that reproduce colonial imagery frequently connect Indigenous bodies and lands in a specific way: the colonial male gaze places both the human and the environmental body as an object of conquest. Colonial violence – both physical and cultural – is predicated on the violability of Indigenous bodies and lands. Cultural imageries make manifest the ideologies and power imbalances that are behind many current environmental justice issues. Susan Hawthorne, in discussing the ways in which bioprospection claims are currently made on biological resources, emphasises the continuation of colonialist practices in contemporary knowledge-based economy with regard to Indigenous lands and bodies.31 In biocolonialist projects today, the colonisation of land is analogous with the colonisation of bodies of women and Indigenous people: female Indigenous bodies are subjected to a similar conception of ‘resource’ as other environmental entities. However, the colonial ideologies behind these damaging projects are countered by increasing Indigenous resistance and resurgence. Thus, Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson state that these practices of reclaiming “in response to the dispossessive forces of settler colonization, in both historical and current manifestations, employ measures and tactics designed to protect Indigenous territories and to reconnect Indigenous bodies to land.”32 The identification of body and land that Arnait express in their films counters the colonial land-body trope and participates in this project of reconnecting Indigenous and environmental bodies.

17In the metaphorical connection of land and body that Restless River produces, the violability of an Inuk woman’s body, while addressed at the beginning of the narrative, gives way to a land-body connection that is predicated on renewal. The warning that Elsa’s mother voices about the dangers of becoming a flat image on the wall echoes through the birth scene, particularly as she appears as part of this layered land-body composition. The two layers of images as well as the sonic layer with the mother’s singing all work to quell the mother’s earlier fears: this scene, overseen by Elsa’s eyes from both ends of the narrative, is anything but a “flat image.” It reappropriates the colonial framing of a female Indigenous body and the land as violable and instead imagines a regenerative, embodied, matrilineal landscape without reducing this feminine landscape to a female reproductive body. As I will argue later, the watery connections in the film open this continuation to multiplicity and hybridity.

18The inexorable continuation of life articulated by Imaq reaches its culmination as the birthing scene progresses. In an accelerating sequence where blurred and oblique close-up shots of Elsa’s strained face take turns with images of sharp ice formations and melting walls of ice, the film parallels its imagination of childbirth with the spring thaw. The end of the scene consists of another drone shot that passes over a mound of ice as the sound of throat-singing intensifies. Behind the wall of ice, a riverscape of the melted, free-flowing Kuujjuaq opens and the harmonious melody of a string quartet is heard. The next shot presents Elsa smiling, indicating a successful delivery. The final shot of the sequence follows a quickly flowing stream through boreal forest viewed from the air, conclusively framing the successful childbirth in the image of a release of waters. Although the context of the pregnancy in the film is one of colonial violence, the birth of Elsa’s son is presented as a potentially redemptive event. The birthing scene thus mobilises Imaq by using the riverscape to convey childbirth as “the very twitch of life” – an event of creation in all its complexity.

  • 33 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.
  • 34 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.

19The continuation of life that takes place through water underpins the entire film, as river water becomes the key element in the scene discussed above. However, this crucial moment also brings together the other elements outlined in Inuit cosmology. Nuna – the Land itself – is the element that is associated with inua or human awareness that is also latent in anything that a human awareness contemplates. The most important concept in the triad, Sila – Sky – is the element associated with anirniq or breath and expresses “a life-breath merely borrowed from the Sky […] for a period of time.”33 Thus, Sila as a super-concept is “both immanent and transcendent in scope” and refers to a higher spirit somewhat similar to the Hindu concept of Brahman.34 In the birthing scene of Restless River, the expression of Nuna is present in the continuity between the pregnant body and the snow-covered land, while Sila manifests itself in the throat-singing, the breathing accompanying childbirth and the use of aerial shots. The entire constellation of Inuit elemental cosmology as outlined by Qitsualik thus attends this moment of transformation. The fact that water forms but one part – albeit a crucial one – of this moment in a cycle of renewal foregrounds the complexity and hybridity fundamental to renewal and repetition.

Watery Transformations and Indigenous Images

  • 35 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 97.
  • 36 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 182.

20Although my analysis of watery continuities in Restless River foregrounds a scene of childbirth, the film’s commentary on proliferation and transformation is not reducible to human reproduction taking place in heterosexual relations. The hybridity fundamental to watery continuities is theorised by the posthuman figuration of bodies of water and their facilitative capacities as outlined by Neimanis. Tracing her argument from Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return and Luce Irigaray’s feminist critique thereof, she conceptualises the queer element inherent in watery repetitions: “Water, in all of its repetitions – in fact because of its compulsion to repeat – is in the first place facilitative and gestational. Each moment of water will inevitably give itself over to the elaboration of something different, something new.”35 The existence as bodies of water in what she terms the “hydrocommons” consists of ongoing flows through porous bodies of all kinds, and this existence is predicated on unexpected transformation and change. Additionally, queering watery gestationality necessitates an understanding of the proliferation of life as more complex than that taking place through human reproduction and involving other relations of care than those found in human, heterosexual relations. Neimanis suggests that the figuration of “bodies of water” might create “a more capacious aqueous imaginary for being responsive to other human and non-human bodies” than any conceptualisation of modern water, or indeed Anthropocene water, might enable.36 Thinking about the watery continuities in Restless River through the figuration of a queer and expansive watery gestationality draws attention to the way water is inherent in the propagation of all organisms exposed to mediation and particularly to the fact that every instance of procreation is at once a repetition and a transformation. This simultaneous replication and remodeling that is at the heart of watery life cycles is also a central mechanism in the production of images.

  • 37 Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas, p. 77.
  • 38 Bredin, “Inuit Memory and Arctic Futures”, p. 43.

21Indeed, while the birthing scene in Restless River is certainly about childbirth and the proliferation of human life, it is also about the proliferation of images. After all, the eyes bookending the cinematic narrative frame it as a commentary on visual media about the Arctic. The gaze of Inuit eyes as well as references to Arctic image-production direct our attention to the film’s self-reflexive statements about mediality: much like Mosha Michael’s work, this film not only asks us to see the Inuk body and the Arctic landscape, but also to see film. These images produce a renewed vision of Inuit life and of filmmaking in the Arctic, both of which are products of hybridity and complex continuities. The collaborative production mode also matches the idea of multiplicity inherent in the images it creates. Restless River – via its narrative content, form, and production mode – thus participates in the conversation about the global impact of Indigenous cinema. Writing about Isuma, Huhndorf states her reservations about the possibility of Indigenous media to resist reinforcing the representational practices of dominant societies in the sense that they are unable to determine how these images are received by global audiences.37 Marian Bredin, on the other hand, responds to these reservations by pointing out the multiplicity of popular audiences and stressing the active agency of viewers; she asserts that Isuma’s filmmaking is leading all audiences toward decolonisation.38 Through its statement about the dynamism of female Indigenous media-making, the work of Arnait, and specifically Restless River, makes a similarly strong decolonial move in redirecting the flows of Arctic images.

  • 39 Roy, Windflower, p. 136.
  • 40 Roy, Windflower, p. 148.

22The ending of the film specifically engages with Indigenous futurity and the future of Indigenous filmmaking in the way it departs from the novel’s closure. Aviation, air, and the motif of flying – all materialisations of the concept of Sila – course through the film in tandem with watery imagery. Together they form a chain of intermediality. While Jimmy’s departure to pursue a life as a pilot at the end of the narrative is constructed in both novel and film as a result of his discomfort with his background, the consequences it has for Elsa are framed very differently in the two works. At the end of the novel, the sorrowful Elsa distances herself from her community, deteriorates both physically and mentally, and is mostly seen wandering alone, “avoiding groups and keeping for as long as possible close to the river.”39 At the very end, as members of her community are looking for her to pass on the news of her son flying a plane over the village, “[t]hey discovered her in a place they had already passed once without seeing her, sheltered from the wind behind a raised patch of rock, her face devoid of expression.”40 She seems to materially merge with the landscape, but in a very different way than in Restless River as she becomes part of a lifeless mineral existence, her entire body drying up from sorrow and despair. The film’s ending, by contrast, portrays her in good health, sitting on a rock on the shore of the Kuujjuaq river, contemplating the sunny riverscape as two girls bring her news of her son:

  • 41 The dialogue is in Inuktitut, subtitled in English.

Girl: Did you hear, did you hear on the radio?
Elsa: My radio is broken. What is it?
Girl: You didn’t hear the man on the plane? He said hello to you.
Elsa: He said hello? To me?
Girl: He said: Say hello to her, I love her, my dear little mother.
Elsa: The man in the plane, did he sound happy?
Girl: Yes.41

  • 42 Roy, Windflower, p. 151-2.

23Elsa laughs, takes out of her bag a handful of plant filaments or flower seeds, and blows them in the wind. The novel describes her gathering up “plant filaments, as delicate, soft, and silky as the hair of a child, that are made to carry migratory seeds far into the distance. She would […] blow upon them, her ruined face smiling to see them rise and scatter into the evening.”42 Although the two narratives bear a resemblance, the cinematic Elsa is not ruined at all, but laughingly shares the flower seeds with the girls in another act of Indigenous feminine futurity. The flower seeds, migrating according to the direction of the wind, will travel to unknown places and hopefully take root there, starting new lives. Elsa’s scattering of flower seeds becomes a vehicle for her acceptance of her son’s life that will possibly remain unknown to her. Reflecting this scene back to the birthing scene makes apparent the feminine continuities in the film: in both scenes, the proliferation of life – in human or plant form – takes place among Inuit women. The closing scene returns the narrative to the opening scene, as the riverscape is once again complemented by the superimposed eyes, this time over a calm and sunny riverscape instead of the whitecapped, restless river of the opening. The river fades out and only the eyes remain in place. In its return to the beginning, this ending refers to the emphasis on circularity and cycles in many Indigenous worldviews, employed in oral storytelling practices and inherent in conceptions of temporality. In addition to the circular ending, the eyes closing the scene become the signature of female Indigenous filmmaking.

24The Indigenous, feminine Arctic that Arnait Video Productions imagine in Restless River is expansive, open to hybridity, and globally connected, employing the elemental concepts of Inuit cosmology – Imaq, Nuna and Sila – to evoke these connections. The inclination towards the continuity of life in all living beings is expressed in the concept of Imaq, which is aestheticised in the birth scene through the parallel between the waters in a pregnant body and the river water freed by the spring thaw. Sila, referring to both spirit and air, is cinematographically mobilised in the predominance of aerial shots used in landscape imagery, but also in the motif of flying in the various instances in the film where planes are flying over the community. The materialisation of Sila in aviation finally motivates the conclusion of the narrative as Elsa’s son escapes his background to become a pilot, flying away from his community like the flower seeds at the end of the film. Lastly, Nuna expresses human awareness between the groundwaters of Imaq and the airy spirit of Sila. The flower seeds implicate Nuna in the narrative: the migrating seeds are from the land, and as the film creates a visual parallel between the land and the female body, both the plant and the human are portrayed as coming from the same source. The fact that the seeds are blown away in female company becomes paramount not only in relation to the birth scene but also to the film as a whole: Restless River is a flower seed that the creators of Arnait distribute to the winds of global cinema spectatorship. The product of labour – human, plant, film – has come into being through complex watery currents, migrates across the world, and will hopefully become another node in a plural network of life-affirming planetary relations.

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Notes

1 Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, Arnait Video Productions, 2019.

2 Rachel A. Qitsualik, “Inummarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought”, in Nilliajut: Inuit Perspectives on Security, Patriotism and Sovereignty, edited by Scot Nickels, Karen Kelley, Carrie Grable, Martin Lougheed and James Kuptana, Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, 2013, pp. 23-34. See also the definition of the term ‘imaq’ in the Inuktut language database Uqausiit: The Inuktut Grammar Dictionary. https://uqausiit.ca/node/8458 , accessed 6 April 2023.

3 Gabrielle Roy, Windflower, translated by Joyce Marshall, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1994.

4 Roy, Windflower, p. 1.

5 Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport, “Arnait Video Productions: Inuit Women’s Collective Filmmaking, Coalitional Politics, and a Globalized Arctic”, Camera Obscura, vol. 31, no.3, 2016, p. 153.

6 Jerry White, “Frozen but Always in Motion: Arctic Film, Video, and Broadcast”, Velvet Light Trap, vol. 55, no.1, 2005, pp. 52-64.

7 White, “Frozen but Always in Motion”, p. 56.

8 For more detailed accounts of the history of Inuit cinema, see e.g. Marian Bredin, “‘Who Were We? And What Happened to Us?’: Inuit Memory and Arctic Futures in Igloolik Isuma Film and Video”, in Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport (eds.), Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 33-44; Michael Robert Evans, Isuma: Inuit Video Art, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s Press, 2008; Shari M. Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture, Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2009; Katarina Soukup, “Report: Travelling Through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies”, in Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 31, no.1, 2006, pp. 239-46; White, “Frozen but Always in Motion”.

9 “About Us”, Arnait Video Productions. https://arnaitvideo.ca/about-us/ , accessed 6 April 2023.

10 See MacKenzie and Stenport, “Arnait Video Productions”.

11 Davinia Thornley, Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism: Filming on an Uneven Field, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2014, p. 24.

12 Corinn Columpar qtd. in Thornley, Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism, p. 24.

13 For more information on the filmmaking of Arnait, see Dianne Chisholm, “The Enduring Afterlife of Before Tomorrow: Inuit Survivance and the Spectral Cinema of Arnait Video Productions”, in Études/Inuit/Studies, vol. 40, no.1, 2006, pp. 211-27; Karine Bertrand, “Le collectif Arnait Video Productions et le cinéma engagé des femmes inuits: guérison communautaire et mémoire culturelle”, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, vol. 44, no.1, 2017, pp. 36-53; and Davinia Thornley, Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism: Filming on an Uneven Field, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

14 Bertrand, “Le collectif Arnait”, p. 46.

15 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London, Bloomsbury, 2017.

16 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 3.

17 Qitsualik, “Inummarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought”, p. 30.

18 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 30.

19 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, pp. 28-9.

20 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.

21 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.

22 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 86.

23 The generative powers of water manifest in a feminine form in other Indigenous Arctic cultures, too. As Daria Burnasheva states, in Sakha culture, all water bodies (rivers, lakes, and seas) are referred to as ebe, ‘the grandmother’, and warrant respect accordingly. Daria Burnasheva, “Understanding Climate Change from an Indigenous Paradigm: Identity, Spirituality and Hydrosocial Relations in the Arctic”, in Lassi Heininen, Heather Exner-Pirot and Justin Barnes (eds.), Arctic Yearbook 2020, Akureyri, Arctic Portal, p. 143.

24 Keavy Martin, Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature, Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 2012, p. 43.

25 See, among others, Christopher Neil, Noel McDermott and Louise Flaherty, Unikkaaqtuat: An Introduction to Inuit Myths and Legends, Iqaluit, Inhabit Media, 2011, pp. 37-43.

26 Neil, McDermott and Flaherty, Unikkaaqtuat, pp. 65-70.

27 A reference to Zacharias Kunuk’s 1985 film.

28 Shari M. Huhndorf, “Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1987–1922”, Critical Inquiry 27, 2000.

29 Huhndorf, “Nanook and His Contemporaries”, p. 148.

30 “Katajjaniq”, Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec. https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/detail.do?id=3&methode=consulter&type=imma , accessed 6 April 2023. See also “Inuit Vocal Games”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2006. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuit-vocal-games-emc , accessed 6 April 2023.

31 Susan Hawthorne, “Land, Bodies, and Knowledge: Biocolonialism of Plants, Indigenous Peoples, Women, and People with Disabilities”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 32, no.2, 2007, p. 314.

32 Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity”, American Quarterly, vol. 68, no.2, 2016, p. 254.

33 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.

34 Qitsualik, “Inummarik”, p. 29.

35 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 97.

36 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 182.

37 Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas, p. 77.

38 Bredin, “Inuit Memory and Arctic Futures”, p. 43.

39 Roy, Windflower, p. 136.

40 Roy, Windflower, p. 148.

41 The dialogue is in Inuktitut, subtitled in English.

42 Roy, Windflower, p. 151-2.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1. Opening scene. Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, 2019.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2188/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 1,1M
Légende Figure 2. Closing scene. Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, 2019.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2188/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 1,2M
Légende Figure 3. Superimposition of bodies of water. Marie-Hélène Cousineau & Madeline Ivalu (dirs.), Restless River, 2019.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2188/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 929k
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Référence électronique

Jenni Niska, « Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019) »Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 17 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2022, consulté le 24 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2188 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.2188

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Auteur

Jenni Niska

Jenni Niska is a PhD Researcher at Tampere University, Finland. In her PhD project about Arctic rivers in contemporary film and literature, she explores how recent literary and cinematic works construct the Arctic through the motif of the river on the level of narrative content as well as on medial and material levels. She puts into dialogue works that imagine the Arctic from the outside and works that originate from within the circumpolar regions, revealing clashes and convergences in these narratives and foregrounding the importance of lived Arctic riverscapes. Her work is informed by both ecomaterialist and spatial theories as well as Indigenous epistemologies. She grew up on the Finnish side of the Tornio River Valley, which informs her interest in transnational Northern rivers.

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