(Article changed on March 10, 2013 at 12:52)
(Article changed on March 9, 2013 at 17:53)
Winter wilderness by Nomadic Lass
Would you believe that there are areas in the world seemingly untouched as of yet by global warming, and unconcerned about the prospect?
But these Asian-looking people are
presented only in passing.
Herzog's focus is the 24/7
subsistence-dominated lifestyle of the totally isolated Russians of the central
Siberian village of Bakhtia, all three hundred of them accessible by boat in
the summer and helicopters year round, who find contentment in building every
element in their lifestyle from scratch--animal traps, canoes, trappers' hovels
that shelter them in the -50 degrees Fahrenheit, lengthy winters. Might they
have learned these skills from the Ket? One of them is shown constructing a
canoe for the "newcomers." Gennady tells the producers that he's been in the Siberian Taiga since
1970.
Free time is rare; true to the Russian
tradition, the people celebrate [a secular brand of] Christmas on what we call
Epiphany, the "last day of Christmas," January 6. The children drape themselves
in glitter and move with music in a hand-built community room, the only public
facility presented. There are no post offices, convenience stores, restaurants,
or churches. There is no government except for a campaigner singing off a boat
in the summer to solicit votes--of entertainment value to the children, whose
parents have better things to do.
There are no taxes.
The trappers come home to celebrate the New
Year--reunions with family are poignant--and leave after Christmas.
No dogsleds though. The one modern
convenience is snowmobiles; the faithful dogs run alongside voyages as lengthy
as 75 miles without stopping. I did notice some electric lighting in the hall
of the Christmas celebration, which the filmmaker did not emphasize.
Winter is spent trapping--mainly small
furry creatures like the ermine, found frozen and bent in half, whose value,
Gennady laments in one of his few allusions to life outside of Bakhtia, has
decreased due to excessive, astronomical inflation. Winter is generous to the
Bakhtians, with copious supplies of fish, especially large pike, immediately
accessible beneath the thick ice of the Yenisei River. Summer is the time for
hoarding and preparing winter provisions, which consist mainly of fish and some
wild fowl; no gardens are evident. Nor are swimsuits. The people wear some sort
of outwear even under sunny skies that last 20 hours a day.
The English-speaking narrator's voice is
plaintiff and condescending--nothing unusual for this film genre. These people
probably recapitulate life during the Ice Age [yes, there were humans who
weathered this grim era--did they know it was grim?], he says.
As we take in the joy of a
subsistence-dominated lifestyle, I wonder if the producers were more interested
in the indigenous, displaced Ket, victims of this microscopic imperialism. I
was. The material above about the Ket is taken from a language list I edited
for Oxford University Press more than a decade ago. Among these lists that
comprise the 6800 languages of the world, some of them have died out since
then. There would be dialects or tongues spoken by one survivor, or five, or
ten, or one hundred.
But how did I get to this digression?
Because, though reviewers call this a
beautiful portrait of the simple life amid scenery to die for, the Ket steal the show. Because Herzog displays their remarkable lifestyle
I like to believe that Herzog and
colleagues portrayed them just long enough to break our hearts. Methods and
primitive technologies date back centuries and sometimes, the producers note,
millennia. The technologies, though mostly wooden--a metal trap I recall from
the fifties is modern in this context--came from somewhere, from people used to
inhabiting this land.
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