Die weiße Dämmerung

Philip Kaufman is a filmmaker I find fascinating, but few other people seem to share that enthusiasm (or even know who he is). He made some oddities in the 1960s and 1970s, before having an amazing streak between 1978 and 1988, directing: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (an improvement of a remake), The Wanderers (most underrated coming-of-age movie), The Right Stuff (that one's literally perfect), and then The Unbearable Lightness of Being (very different to the book, but great for different reasons). His '90s output - or at least what I've seen - is interesting, but not as impressive; movies like Henry & Jules and Quills are both boundary-pushing and a bit patience-testing.

Anyway, seeking out something that's obscure even by his standards was always going to be interesting. Enter The White Dawn, which can't really be included as part of his hot streak. It is pretty decent for what it tries to do, but it lacks a certain something. Maybe that's the point. Kaufman operates on a strange level most people don't really click with. Even I've only clicked with his stuff a handful of times. But what a handful!

The White Dawn is about three European (I think) men getting stranded in the Arctic and then rescued by an Eskimo tribe. I liked how there was subtitled language for the tribe; perhaps even more of their dialogue than English dialogue. There was also a level of respect or at least empathy that you don't always get in films of this age, dealing with some kind of cultural divide.

I guess it fell apart a bit narratively and pacing-wise. It's sort of just a slice-of-life film, at a point, and in an odd way. It continues on for a bit and then it ends, and I was fighting the urge to drift out of it. I think it falters in some areas but I appreciated the authenticity and the way it looked at a different culture of people. The authenticity also carried over to the look and feel of the film; it's an effectively chilly one.

Truth told there's something about the movie that doesn't work, something that stops it just short of fulfilling the potential promised by the setting, story, and talent involved. The problem is not that there's little of plot to speak of because this is the kind of movie that actually benefits from thin plotting but still something seems to be missing.

It could be that the movie follows in episodic fashion the life and misadventures of three whalers stranded in Arctic Canada who are saved from certain death by a group of Eskimos but does so without urgency, capturing an evocative snapshot of Eskimo life, perhaps very faithfully, but still in a very Discovery Channel kind of way. Sure, bears and sea otters are slaughtered for food, but it's that, natives trying to survive in their natural habitat the only way they know, not castaways desperately trying to survive in a hostile world the only way they can. We don't see the three fishes out of water struggling to survive, most everything (food, shelter, even women) is provided for them by the friendly Eskimos.

It could be that the movie is designed, conceived, as a mood piece yet is shot in a very generic by-the-numbers way. If Philip Kaufman captures no small amount of awe-inspiring shots of the glacial Canadian landscape where the movie was shot, it's because he had little more to do than point the camera at any direction around him to get them. You can imagine how much more potential someone like Werner Herzog could have milked out of a setting like this. The individual shots are good but the way they're strung together is mundane and workmanlike.

It could be that for a grim and visceral 'man in the wilderness' adventure, WHITE DAWN is really not very grim or visceral. Kaufman doesn't allow a sense of urgency frostbitten danger or impending doom to seep in. When the three whalers make a run for freedom with a stolen Eskimo boat only to find themselves stranded in the ice again, an Eskimo conveniently shows up to lead them back to safety. Misguidedly the emphasis here is on picturesque rather than bleak. Compare how the three whalers are treated by the friendly wife-sharing Eskimos to the gruesome fate that is reserved in the hands of Algonquin Indians for the Catholic missionaries in Bruce Beresford's BLACK ROBE and the difference highlights a lot of what makes WHITE DAWN a mostly lighthearted affair.

Still, not unlike Nicholas Ray's THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, a lot of the small vignettes that show the whalers cohabiting with the Eskimos are a lot of fun to watch. Chief among the one where Warren Oates cons a man out of his two daughters in a knife-throwing betting contest. But unlike Ray's movie, THE WHITE DAWN hovers plot less, suspended between beautiful scenery and Eskimo customs, for a little too long.

Perhaps it's the combination of all the above reasons that makes WHITE DAWN an interesting watchable movie, one closer to a hit than a miss. Warren Oates as the grizzly scruffy third mate is a pleasure to watch, this is the kind of character he could play with eyes closed and that's pretty much what he does. And then there's the ending, which I won't spoil, that couldn't have come from anywhere else than typically disillusioned 70's American cinema.

"The White Dawn" unfolds at a pace that I'm pretty sure many young people will be turned off by. There isn't really much of a plot here, for starters, and the movie unfolds at a pretty leisurely pace. Also, there isn't a terrible about of development for the characters played by Oates, Bottoms, and Gossett. But I have to admit that despite all that, I found the movie fairly captivating. The movie is slow, but it has a kind of hypnotic spell that kept me watching. Also, the depiction of the Inuit seems pretty authentic - I'm no expert on Inuit culture, but it sure seemed authentic. (One interesting detail is that it shows that the Inuit didn't have some sort of paradise lifestyle - they had problems like starvation, for example.) If you are looking for a movie that is quite different than usual - both in its subject matter and its telling - this movie is worth a look.

This movie contains what is surely one of the strangest, most unique, and most fascinating scenes in the history of cinematography.

The scene is of an Inuit (Eskimo) ritual. I believe it to be authentic. The screenwriter (who also wrote the original book) lived among and studied the Inuit people for decades and was probably one of the world's foremost (non-Inuit) experts on Inuit culture. Furthermore, the movie was filmed on location and using actual Inuit people as actors.

In the ritual, two girls sit cross-legged on the floor, facing each other. They seal their mouths together and take turns blowing air forcefully across the vocal cords of the other person. It creates one of the eeriest sounds I've ever heard. It's kind of a continuous huffing dronal chant, reminiscent of the background drone of bagpipes but without the shrillness. The strangest aspect of it is that there is an undertone of human voices in the sound. You get the feeling that if you listened hard enough, you could make out actual words. It is like no other sound you've ever heard - hair-raising. Who could have ever imagined that the human body could produce such a sound? Basically what they are doing is playing the other person's body like a musical instrument.

The girls continue doing this, apparently for hours, hardly stopping to take a breath. They've got to be hyperventilating, or experiencing a buildup of carbon dioxide in their lungs and blood, and it is incredible that they can go on and on like this without fainting. They must go into some kind of dizzy trance-like state.

I have never seen or heard of this ritual/technique anywhere but in this movie. I was in Alaska the summer of its Centennial year (1967) and was so fortunate to see a great many demonstrations of Inuit culture as part of the celebrations. But I didn't see anything like this, nor have I come across any description of it in my reading.

This movie would be worth seeing, preserving, and collecting on the basis of this one scene alone! (But actually the rest of it is also worth seeing.)

It's 1896 in the Artic. Four whalers are stranded when their small hunting boat runs into ice and their ship fails to find them. Billy (Warren Oates), Daggett (Timothy Bottoms), and Portagee (Louis Gossett Jr.) leave behind their dead comrade and get rescued by passing Inuits. The Inuits see them as Dog-Children.

The Inuit culture seems authentic. There is a realism in the people and their way of life. The main drawback is the three survivors. They are not appealing characters. One of them needs to be heroic but the opening already lays bare that aspiration. Daggett and Portagee readily abandons a weaken Billy to die in the open. At least, Daggett should go back and try to comfort Billy. It's the same for their ship which searched for only a day or so for their missing crew. It portrays a western culture of personal greed and its corrupting influences. It doesn't mean that the Inuit culture is an utopian one. It is still very much a human world with its own villain. I simply didn't like the characters which detracts from my enjoyment of this film. I wish I like Daggett more.