The White Dawn

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.)

have some respect for and knowledge of tribal cultures where the shamans have authority, the people are "tuned in" to the natural world, and "nature magic" is understood on a gut level by everyone from childhood onward. I saw this film many years ago and loved it; it's still excellent. If you like it, you may want to read "The Heart of the Hunter" by Laurens Van Der Post, a classic about the Bushmen in South Africa. This film will be of value to anyone who has someone in their family who's made a mess of his or her life because of alcohol. Grab the drinker and make him or her watch it and that person may get a sense for how destructive that behavior is. Anyone who wants to learn about the Bear Spirit will learn something here as well.

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.

I saw this film last year at the Chicago International Film Festival with Philip Kaufman and Prof. Annette Insdorf presenting and I was totally blown away. It is both a beautiful love story between a white man and an Inuit woman and a big, spectacular adventure film. There are some amazing scenes, one involving polar bear (this scene alone is amazing and worth seeing the film for) , seal hunting, walrus hunting, boating in the treacherous ice-floes, etc. The performances are excellent from Timothy Bottoms , Warren Oates, Louis Gosset, Jr. and the wonderful actors of the Inuit community. The film continually takes your breath away and has some of the most beautiful love scenes I've ever seen. It's apparently based on a true story of the first encounter of the Inuit with the Dog Children (us). The film has some heartbreaking scenes (which I won't discuss) and the acting by the untrained Inuit actors is truly spectacular. I can't recommend this film enough.

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.