Post Description

Sarah Elder & Leonard Kamerling - At the Time of Whaling (1974)

At the Time of Whaling
by Sarah Elder & Leonard Kamerling (and the village of Gambell, Alaska)

USA / 1974 / color / 38 min.

DVD at DER

Finally my last Leonard Kamerling & Sarah Elder upload from the Alaskan Eskimo Series. A marvelous community based film project from 1970s Alaska. Times have been changing there over the last 30-40 years, faster and with more cultural, social, and ecological impact than in most other regions of the world.

Synopsis:
Gambell, Alaska is a Yup"ik-speaking Eskimo community on St. Lawrence Island on the Bering Sea. Here, as on the coast, sea mammals are still the major source of food. During their three-week Spring migration through the Bering Channel, whales are hunted using a combination of traditional organization and recently introduced technology such as motors and darting guns. A bowhead whale weighs about one ton per foot, and may reach seventy feet in length. Working together, even fifteen Eskimo skin boats with up to ten persons on each boat cannot assure a safe venture or the taking of a whale.

From a rooftop several men with binoculars view the sea ice for open water and other signs of migrating whales. Conditions are good as the men hoist their sails. Someone spots a whale and shouts the news through the CB radio, and the other boats drop sail, rev up their motors, and join the first boat. Together the fifteen boats capture the whale and tow it to the shore ice, where the men begin the three-day task of butchering and distributing the meat to the crew and to another village on the island. An old man recounts the way whaling used to be.





Language English, Yup"ik
Subtitlesincluded: English (hardcoded)
Sourcedvdrip
Rip SpecsFile Format -> AVI
Play Time -> 38mn 44s
Total File Size -> 472 MiB
Total Stream BitRate -> 1 702 Kbps

Codec (FourCC) -> XVID
Frame Width -> 640 pixels
Frame Height -> 480 pixels
Frame Rate -> 23.976 fps
Display Aspect Ratio -> 4/3
Codec Settings (Packet BitStream) -> No
QF (like Gordian Knot) -> 0.204
Codec Settings (BVOP) -> No
Codec Settings (QPel) -> No
Codec Settings (GMC) -> No warppoints
Codec Settings (Matrix) -> Default (H.263)
Video Stream BitRate -> 1 500 Kbps

Codec -> AC-3
Audio Stream BitRate -> 192 Kbps
Audio Stream BitRate Mode -> CBR

Thanks to poster :)