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Group Hunting on the Spring Ice
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Filmmaker Name:
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Quentin Brown
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Film Length:
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95 min
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Film Year:
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1967
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Duration:
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91-119 min
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Decade:
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1960s
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Series:
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Netsilik series
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Secondary Creator:
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ethnographic direction by Asen Balikci
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Color:
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color
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Region:
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Arctic
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Subject:
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Indigenous Studies
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Group Hunting on the Spring Ice
Part 1 (34 min)
Late June, and much of the land is bare. There are sounds of running water, and melt ponds shine everywhere. The woman carries heather and moss to camp and the man makes a whirling bullroarer for the boy. Another child pretends to drive a dog sled. A woman is working sinews into bowstrings, while another is busy with a seal skin. A woman prepares to cook a meal and a man makes a bow from bone and sinews. It is a demanding task to combine such materials into a strong supple weapon; the result is pleasing to the man. The next day the men move out on the sea ice with a dog to look for seal pups.
Part 2 (28 min)
The men are out on the sea ice and the women work at the tasks of camp. Seal skins are pegged to dry in the sun and a woman, baby on her back, picks over a pile of gulls. The birds are skinned and then go into the pot with water from a melt pond. A baby sucks on a bone. The people eat, and then the women visit an old man in his tent. Now the women are out gathering moss for the fires and we see the birds and flowers common to the area. A woman skins a seal pup while another sews skins for a tent. The children play at making camp, and some of the older girls pretend to nurse the fat pups. Then the adults join the fun, playing at juggling.
Part 3 (33 min)
The men are moving about on the sea ice, probing for unsafe ice and watching for seals. The snow cover is nearly gone now, and the breathing holes have widened. The men sit and wait. One makes a strike with his harpoon and others come to watch. They are ready to eat and relish the good warm blood and the liver. Another hunter succeeds, and then another but this one loses his catch when his thong breaks and the seal slides back into the water. But the party has three seals in tow when they return to camp, and soon the women have the meat exposed and all eat. Then the blubber is packed into the sealskin bags and the men haul it away to the cache.
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.
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