The Archive and Reenactment: Performing Knowledge in the Making of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

Abstract

The production of the film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), made by the Canadian Inuit production company Igloolik Isuma Productions, can be seen as a site where archival and performance-based knowledge integrate and inform each other. Journals was made in Igloolik, Nunavut, with the participation of local Inuit residents whose reenactment of a traditional way of life in and for the production of the film serves a pedagogical function. By documenting these activities on the company's website, Isuma emphasizes the way their practice activates and continues traditional knowledge in the present rather than merely creating a record of the past. Both the film and the website further highlight performance, especially oral storytelling, as a means of transmitting history that challenges the dominance and authority of ethnographic documents and archival knowledge. At the same time, however, archival materials such as photographs, reports, and artifacts were an important resource in the film's production process. By simultaneously prioritizing performance practices and incorporating archival resources, the making of Journals negotiates different ways of knowing and preserving the past through its reenactment.