Films on Ice Cinemas of the Arctic

The first book to address the vast diversity of Northern circumpolar cinemas from a transnational perspective, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic presents the region as one of great and previously overlooked cinematic diversity. With chapters on polar explorer films, silent cinema, documentaries, ethnographic and indigenous film, gender and ecology, as well as Hollywood and the USSR's uses and abuses of the Arctic, this book provides a groundbreaking account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present. Challenging dominant notions of the region in popular and political culture, it demonstrates how moving images (cinema, television, video, and digital media) have been central to the very definition of the Arctic since the end of the nineteenth century. Bringing together an international array of European, Russian, Nordic, and North American scholars, Films on Ice radically alters stereotypical views of the Arctic region, and therefore of film history itself.

Scott MacKenzie teaches in the Department of Film and Media, and is cross-appointed to the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, at Queen's University, Canada.

Anna Westerståhl Stenport is Associate Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Media and Cinema Studies, and Director of the European Union Center, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Introduction: What Are Arctic Cinemas?

Part I. Global Indigeneity; 1. 'Who Were We? And What Happened to Us?': Inuit Memory and Arctic Futures in Igloolik Isuma Film and Video
2. Northern Exposures and Marginal Critiques: The Politics of Sovereignty in Sami Cinema
3. Frozen in Film: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies
4. Cultural Stereotypes and Negotiations in Sami Cinema
5. Cinema of Emancipation and Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
6. Cosmopolitan Inuit: New Perspectives on Greenlandic Film
7. Arctic Carnivalesque: Ethnicity, Gender and Transnationality in the Films of Tommy Wirkola

Part II. Hollywood Hegemony
8. Fact and Fiction in 'Northerns' and 'Early Arctic Films'
9. California's Yukon as Comic Space
10. 'See the Crashing Masses of White Death': Greenland, Germany, and the Sublime in the 'Bergfilm' SOS Eisberg
11. The Threat of the Thaw: The Cold War on the Screen
12. Hollywood Does Iceland: Authenticity, Genericity and the Picturesque
13. White on White: Twenty-First Century Norwegian Horror Films Negotiate Masculinist Arctic Imaginaries

Part III. Ethnography and the Documentary Dilemma
14. The Creative Treatment of Alterity: Nanook as the North
15. From Objects to Actors: Knud Rasmussen's Ethnographic Feature Film The Wedding of Palo
16. Arctic Travelogues: Conquering the Soviet North
17. A Gentle Gaze on the Colony: Jette Bang's Documentary Filming in Greenland 1938 - 9
18. Exercise Musk-Ox: The Challenges of Filming a Military Expedition in Canada's Arctic
19. The Tour: A Film About Longyearbyen, Svalbard. An Interview with Eva la Cour

Part IV. Myths and Modes of Exploration
20. The Changing Polar Films: Silent Films from Arctic Exploration 1900 - 1930
21. The Attractions of the North: Early Film Expeditions to the Exotic Snowscape
22. Frozen in Motion: Ethnographic Representation in Donald B. MacMillan's Arctic Films
23. 'My Heart Beat for the Wilderness': Exploring with the Camera in the Work of Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Jenny Gilbertson, Margaret Tait, and other Twentieth-Century Scottish Women Filmmakers
24. 'Here will be a Garden-City': Soviet Man on an Arctic Construction Site
25. Transcending the Sublime: Arctic Creolisation in the Works of Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah
26. DJ Spooky and Dziga Vertov: Experimental Cinema Meets Digital Art in Exploring Polar Regions

Contributors
Index