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..."Drums..." boundaries between verite methods and participatory filmmaking, resulting in an intimate, collaborative portrait of the creative and spiritual aspects of Yup'ik life. Since its 1988 release, the film has garnered numerous honors, both nationally and internationally, including Best Documentary, Best Documentary Director, and Best Cinematography at the 1998 Festival of the Native Americas. "Drums ..." was named to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in November of 2006, joining Hollywood blockbusters like Gone with the Wind and Rocky. The film is one of a small number of documentaries to have been included in the Registry, and only the second Alaskan-produced film to have been so honored (the first being the 2002 selection of The Chechahcos, a 1924 silent film produced by Austin Lathrop). Nearly 1000 films were nominated with The Drums of Winter for the 2006 Registry, but only 25 were chosen, ranging from silent films and early features, to well-known titles such as Fargo (1996), Blazing Saddles (1974), Halloween (1978), Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), and Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989).
I recently spoke with the filmmakers of The Drums of Winter, Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling about the making of the film, its significance as an ethnographic documentary, and the importance of its inclusion in the National Film Registry. For both, the drive to chronicle Yup'ik life has a long history, born from the lack of self-representation and voice evidenced in documentary films about indigenous and non-Western peoples.
Sarah: In the 60s, I was studying anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. I was very aware of the politics of power, and I had just seen a number of films made in North Vietnam, and I was aware of how profoundly I was changed by seeing "the enemy'--their films, which were lovely, lovely films--I suddenly realized that the way I was understanding Vietnamese culture was basically through our government and that nobody was speaking to me directly. No Vietnamese were directly speaking to me. We had these illicit films, or illegal, from the North, and I was very moved by them, very moved by seeing farmers talking about what it's like to have American bombers flying over them and things like that. Simultaneously, I was in anthropology classes, and I was looking at the classics--Gardner's Dead Birds, Marshall's The Hanters, and things like that, and I was thinking, 'My God, there's nobody in these films who are representing themselves or speaking for themselves. The whole thing is this kind of fantastical imaginary, carved out by the filmmakers.' So, I really started thinking about what it would be like to have films made by people who had no empowerment in their lives. And that stuck with me, and instead of becoming an anthropologist, I became a filmmaker--for much the same reasons, I think, that I would have been an anthropologist, which is that I was really interested in getting different societies to understand each other in a really value-based way, culture-based way, not a political way.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For Kamerling, who would later become her partner in the Alaska Native Heritage film Project, this crisis of representation was even more direct and personal.
Len: In the mid-'60s, I took a year off from college and joined VISTA, and I ended up in a small Yup'ik village in Southwest Alaska, where I had my worldview turned around rather dramatically. I was a New York City kid, and I was suddenly in this native village. I was seeing all my expectations reversed, because I had seen all those horrible documentaries about the North and other places, and I expected the "Noble Savage" and "man against nature" and that's not what I found at all. I found people with a real reciprocity with nature and the landscape, and so, I made those discoveries over that year, and got to know people who were very much a part of this reciprocity, worked hard as subsistence people, and it opened a window into a whole other way of thinking about the world.
During this year, I did a lot of thinking about why I had never seen any films that really got it 'right' about this quality of life there, about the sort of quiet, everyday routines that I thought had the most to say about what the culture was about. I started to see films after I did go back to school that gave me ideas, like Asen Balikci's "Netsilik" series. That was very exciting because it was the most radical thing I had ever seen. It did away with the narrator and any mediation for the viewer. Although I had no training in anthropology, and was not out to make ethnographic films, whatever that is, I was definitely interested and moved by those films, and wanted to move in that direction--some amalgam of film and anthropology.
During the next several years, Elder and Kamerling each followed separate paths into filmmaking. Kamerling returned to the Arctic, and made his first film, The People of Tununuk in a small Yup'ik village on Nelson Island, off the Bering seacoast, in 1972, while Elder worked with Timothy Asche and John Marshall at the Center for Documentary Anthropology.
The two filmmakers met at the University of Alaska and began working together, and where Elder became a "participant observer" in the community of Emmonak.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
S: At that time, I decided there was no way I could make films in Alaska because I really didn't understand the culture, I hadn't lived in it, I hadn't lived it in a daily way, I had no knowledge of it. So, in 1972, I took a teaching job, and went to Emmonak, which is where Drums of Winter was made. There were no local high schools in the villages in Alaska. This is over 400 villages. There were no high schools anybody could go to, they had to go to boarding schools. So there was just beginning a strong movement for Alaska native autonomy that paralleled the Red Power movement. The village of Emmonak, in the name of this one very famous person now called Molly Hooch, who was a young high school girl--held a class action suit that the high school children of Emmonak should have the same opportunity as every other American to go to high school in their own town. So, the state agreed, didn't go into the lawsuit, and instead said "Okay, we're going to build high schools in every major village, which meant something like 75 villages. And the first year, to show good faith, we're going to start a school. So I was the one who became the school. I went there, and I taught high school--all the grades and all the courses. I became the principal and only teacher at Emmonak high school. That's how I got there. I taught school in same plain little house that I lived in, and got to know the village very well because I was there for over a year.
ESKIMO DANCING: UNDERSTANDING THE INNER LIFE OF EMMONAK
It was during this time that Elder became increasingly interested in what was known as "Eskimo Dance"--a vibrant form of cultural expression which, while not widely embraced, was nonetheless persistent, and deeply embedded in the everyday life, history, and cultural identity of the community.
S: I heard there was this thing called Eskimo Dancing. That's what they called it, Eskimo Dance. At the time it was not very vital. People occasionally referred to it. I didn't really even know about it the first three months I was there. When I first started paying attention to it, about every few weeks, I would go to this local Pentecostal missionary to speak English. I would want to speak fluent English and read a newspaper, and they'd have maybe a week or two-week old newspapers hanging around their house, and I'd go over there for tea, and they would missionize me and preach to me. They were really nice people and gave me homemade bread and week-old Anchorage newspapers. I asked the wife if she'd ever been to this Eskimo Dancing, and she got very upset and said that I should never go, because the evil was there, and if I went, even if I was innocent, the evil spirits there would enter me, and it was a very dangerous place to be because the devil and his spirits were floating around the old traditional dance house, so I immediately went.
I was warned that you shouldn't go there before the men are finished with their steam bath because, as in the film what we see in the beginning of their steam bath, they take all their clothes off and they're sitting there with this fire going and they're sitting in there sweating, and as a woman, you can't go in there with a bunch of naked men. And people told me it was a sacred house and that I needed to be respectful when I went there. I remember my heart was really beating the first time I went. I asked a friend to go with me. I went with a young woman--she didn't go too often, but she said she'd take me. I went a few times with friends, and then I started going by myself. The first time I walked in there, it was sort of an underground place that didn't look like a house, it was half buried, and during the day it had no activity at all. I went in in the nighttime, and there's this entryway which is very dark and has no light--and you go in, and all of a sudden, you're in this place that's maybe 20x20, and this low light and this unbelievable music and dancing and this vitality and this energy, and this loud, fantastic beat and there's like eight drums and the voices are beautiful and there are children in there, and old people in there, extended families in there, and I was so overcome with the beauty of it a and the intimacy of it and at that moment said I have to make a film of this. It was such an extraordinarily beautiful place--secret place--in this village. It wasn't secret to anybody there, the residents knew about it, but it was secret to the outside world. So that's when I really said to myself that I wanted to make a film there. I knew no one had ever filmed Yup'ik dancing anywhere in the world. I thought it would be valuable...
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