At the Autumn River Camp

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Price: $320.00

Filmmaker Name:	Quentin Brown
Film Length:	59 min
Film Year:	1967
Duration:	46-75 min
Decade:	1960s
Series:	Netsilik series
Secondary Creator:	ethnographic direction by Asen Balikci
Color:	color
Region:	Arctic
Subject:	Indigenous Studies

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At the Autumn River Camp

Part 1 (color, 26 min)

It is late autumn and the family travels through soft snow and builds karmaks, shelters with snow walls and a roof of skins, in the river valley. The geese are gone but some musk-ox are seen. The man makes a toy sleigh from the jawbones of a caribou and hitches it to a puppy. Next day the women gather stocks of moss for the lamp and the fire. The men fish through the ice with spears. The woman cooks fish while the men cache the surplus. Then the family eats in the karmak.

Part 2 (color, 33 min)

The men build an igloo and the household goods are moved in. They begin the complicated task of making a sleigh, using the skins from the tent, frozen fish, caribou antlers and sealskin thong. The woman works at a parka, using more caribou skin, and the children play. Now the sled is ready to load and soon the family is heading downriver to the coast.

Films in the Netsilik series

At The Autumn River Camp
At The Caribou Crossing Place
At The Spring Sea Ice Camp
At The Winter Sea Ice Camp

Building a Kayak

Fishing at the Stone Weir

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Jigging for Lake Trout

Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice

About the Netsilik series

These films reveal the live reality of traditional Inuit life before the European acculturation. The Netsilik of the Pelly Bay region in the Canadian Arctic had long lived apart from other people and had depended entirely on the land and their own ingenuity to sustain life through the rigors of the Arctic year.

The filming was done during the summers of 1963 and 1964 and in the late winter of 1965 under the ethnographic direction of Dr. Asen Balikci of the University of Montréal, assisted by Guy Mary-Rousseliere, O.M.I., both anthropologists of wide Arctic experience. Quentin Brown was Producer-Director, and Kevin Smith the Executive Producer for the series. A minimum of cultural reconstruction was required during the filming; the Netsilik families readily agreed to live in the old way once more and showed considerable aptitude in recalling and representing the earlier ways of life.

Note on Term "Eskimo":

The films in this series make use of the name "Eskimo." While once broadly applied, it is a perjorative term and considered offensive. While the inception of the word is a matter of debate, it is no longer used or applied in our film catalog. The context in which the term appears in this series is an acknowledged relic of a colonial past, presented in its original version. DER apologizes for any offense caused.

At the Autumn River Camp

Directed by

Quentin Brown

Produced by

Kevin Smith

Cinematography by

Richard Bergman

Film Editing by

Elvin Carini

Jack Hirschfeld

Sound Department

Jacques Drouin