ABSTRACT
F ilm, as it is transformed by digital videotechnology, persists as the dominant narrative medium into the twenty-first century,
remaining, too, “one of the most powerful
media” for ensuring “the continuation of older
myths, even as it alters them.”1 In this essay I
consider the Isuma “Fast Runner” trilogy in
terms of its transmediation of both sacrifice, on
the one hand, and communion, on the other. I
focus on the second, central film in the trilogy,
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006),2 for
its elegiac yet resolutely un-Romantic treatment
of these themes. Such transmediation is achieved
through the seemingly incongruous yoking of
state-of-the-art digital video with the codes of
an oral memory based in the film’s representation
of manually reproduced material forms and
repeated, even ritualized, practices. Sacrifice sig-
nifies here initially in symbolic or specifically
theological senses, the latter exemplified in a
Christian context in Jesus’ paradigmatic act of
self-sacrifice. At the same time, however, these
Inuit narratives also embrace a more colloquial
metaphorical notion of “self-sacrifice.” Commu-
nion, as a form of symbolic sacrifice, on the
other hand, signifies both as the ritualistic attenu-
ation of the Last Supper, commemorating the
Christian sacrifice, and also in relation to such
etymologically linked concepts as community
and communication. The treatment of sacrifice
and communion in the Isuma films, in other
words, is symptomatic of what S. Brent Plate
calls the “transmediation” of specific religious
themes in contemporary cinema (6-8).
