Bibliographic record
Abstract
Isuma: Inuit Video Art. By Michael Robert Evans. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 236. Glossary, notes, references, index. $95.00 clotii, $29.95 paper); The Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanariuat. By Michael Robert Evans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Pp. xxii + 176. Illustrations, series editors' introduction, list of characters, guide to pronunciation, glossary, notes, bibliography, index, photographs. $19.95 paper.)For many urban authences and film critics in the mainstream news media, the Inuit film Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner appeared as a complete surprise. As the first Inuit-made feature-length drama, the film's story, landscape, aesthetics and cultural orientation felt completely new to many viewers outside of the arctic. The film awards at festivals around the world, including the Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival and multiple Canadian Genie awards, received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times and other major publications, and turned a profit in its theatrical run, an especially remarkable feat for a nearly three-hour film shot entirely in the Inuktitut language.But Atanarjuat is actually a very old story, a legend grounded in die small arctic community of Igloolik, in Nunavut, Canada. And the filmmakers - members of the Isuma production company - had already been making films together for more than twenty years. Their films are aesthetically sophisticated in terms of cinematography, performances, sound, narrative structure, pacing and other audio-visual and technological elements. And Isuma's films, along with those of other Indigenous media organizations outside of the arctic (such as CAAMA in Australia) , are also important in the context of broader international movements for Indigenous rights and control over Indigenous images in mass media. Isuma's ongoing projects also link Inuit video production with the millennial impact of new media. Isuma maintains extensive websites for its films, including Atanarjuat, and recendy launched Isuma TV, a multi-channel online streaming video site for Indigenous films. These strategic internet expansions bridge remote communities in a global network and make Indigenous audiovisual storytelling much more widely available.Michael Robert Evans has written two books, one about the people and work of Isuma, and the other a focused study of their signature feature film, Atanarjuat. Both books reveal the strengths of Evans' training in journalism and folklore; they are written with a clear style, effective description, and a feel for storytelling, making the books accessible for a broader authence than is usual for scholarly studies. Isuma: Inuit Video Art describes the work of Isuma and its key members, Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn, and Pauloosie Qulitalik, during die period just before A tanariuat was completed. Based on Evans' nine months of fieldwork in Igloolik, Isuma describes the work of the Isuma company from a number of angles: as a form of cultural expression or folklore, as a form of resistance to the colonizing practices of the surrounding Canadian society, and as the result of a unique production practice that honors and disseminates ttaditional knowledge while also strengthening the local economy.Evans opens with a useful overview that positions Inuit video in relation to Inuit art and to theories of folklore and mass media articulated by Dell Hymes, Linda Degh, Henry Glassie, Richard Bauman and others, as well as scholars in visual anthropology such as Faye Ginsburg. Evans situates Inuit media in the context of both mass media and folkloric performative variants not just because of its content but also, crucially, because of Isuma's processes of production and reception. He argues that Isuma's videos function simultaneously as cultural Uansmission through storytelling performance, material culture, and folklife. His discussion of the video makers' relationships with their authences is particularly nuanced, and in re-defining film as a form of performance, his analysis suggests a re-definition of the field - what folklore is, how it is transmitted - in light of developments in film and technological methods of storytelling and transmission. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.228 | 0.050 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".