At dawn this morning, I completed the new version of The Blinding Sea, which investigates the relationships and sharing of knowledge between the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen and the Inuit of Gjoa Haven, Nunavut in Arctic Canada.
In November 2023, I showed the film several times in Nunavut, and learned so much from my conversations with Inuit there (some of whom appear in the film), that I decided to take The Blinding Sea back and make substantial changes. It is, in fact, a new film, and one that reflects the values of mutual respect, experiential learning and the role of women as vectors of knowledge (which helped Amundsen along) as opposed to book learning and speculative theorizing (which proved disastrous to other polar explorers of his era).
Amundsen was the first to lead an expedition by sea through the Northwest Passage, the first to reach the South Pole, the second to lead an expedition by sea through the Northeast Passage, and the first confirmed to have reached the North Pole. Without his two-year apprenticeship with the Inuit of Gjoa Haven, Amundsen could never have achieved such success as a polar explorer.
I call it The Blinding Sea because I shot the film myself on the Southern Ocean between Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula (as in the photo above), as well as on an icebreaker overwintering on the Beaufort Sea, in several different Inuit communities in Nunavut, in Alaska, the Yukon, Quebec, Scotland, Ireland, England, Belgium and Norway, meeting up with descendants of polar explorers whether Inuit or European.
In taking the photo above, I stuck my camera out an open porthole on the three-masted bark Europa. I remember being chewed out by the captain, Klaas Gaastra, who said this was a very dangerous thing to do. Not because we would somehow sink right then and there on the Southern Ocean, but rather because a rogue wave (like the one above) could wreck my camera! Fortunately, this did not happen!
The Blinding Sea is an unusual work, in the sense that it is both an extreme eye-witness adventure film as well as a rigorously-researched work of scholarship on the meeting-ground of Nordic and Indigenous knowledge. In making the film, I have drawn on many years of experience at the university of the wilderness, as well as my postgraduate studies at McGill (in the History and Philosophy of Science) and Oxford (in Medical Sciences), and extensive research in archives in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Russia.
The Blinding Sea is also unusual in another sense: this has proven to be an interactive film, because I have learned tremendously from audiences, and have made changes to new versions as I went along. For example, in giving lectures during the research phase of the film at the Sorbonne, Cambridge University and Ohio State University. Then in showing the film to diverse audiences from Berkeley in California to the Sons of Norway in Minnesota and the University of Vermont, from Gjoa Haven in Nunavut to the Cinémathèque Québécoise and the Université du Québec à Rimouski, from University College London to Université Paris Cité, Université Grenoble-Alpes and the Norwegian Film Institute. One of the key people to give me valuable feedback has been Mary Simon, currently Governor General of Canada and a member of the Inuit nation, who provided suggestions after seeing an initial draft, then more recently (in her official capacity) thanked me for my personal contribution to the Truth and Reconciliation process in Canada.
The marketing campaign per se will get underway in a few weeks, and once I get my mind clear, I will continue writing a biography of Amundsen.
Many thanks to my superb editor Guillaume Falardeau, to my sound designer Julien Bouchard, and to Marie Frenette who sings so beautifully on the sound track and supervised other music recordings in studio. I am dedicating The Blinding Sea to her.
