Transcending the Sublime: Arctic Creolisation in the Works of Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah

This chapter examines the aesthetic strategies and political impetus of contemporary film artists who challenge the notion of an Arctic explorer as a heroic white male, striding forth on his own to conquer the white sublime. Focusing on Isaac Julien’s video and art installation True North (2004) and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010). Luthersdottir foregrounds the myriad ways in which these films and art works partake in a creolisation of the white Arctic. The chapter thereby foregrounds an overlooked and complementary historical and cinematic record, which is explicit about the significance of identity politics and colonial legacies in the north, rather than reifying established representational norms.

The Changing Polar Films: Silent Films from Arctic Exploration 1900–30

This chapter discusses not only the first known examples of film shot in the polar region, but also elucidates the role polar expedition films played as cinema was becoming of broad attraction globally. Analysing footage from archives around the world, Diesen contextualises how mass media and technological developments for capturing and relaying to the world feats of exploration, often in the service of nationalism or personal gain, have come to shape the perception of the Arctic region to this day. Case studies in this chapter includes: documentation and media coverage of the Baldwin-Ziegler, Nobile, and Amundsen-Ellsworth Expeditions, including films by Anthony Fiala, Walter Wellman, George Hubert Wilkins, Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev, and Oskar Omdal and Paul Berge. Diesen also considers the propagandistic value of these films for various nation states and their mass media appeal for news companies.

The Tour: A Film About Longyearbyen, Svalbard. An Interview with Eva la Cour

In this chapter, Johanne Haaber Ihle and Eva La Cour discuss how historical assumptions of visual anthropology, present in many earlier films of the Arctic, are both upheld and challenged by modes of participant-observer in contemporary nomadic life in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. In La Cour’s film The Tour (2012), the nomads are taxi drivers, tourists, scientists, and miners, whose stories are offset against a partially obscured and dramatic Svalbard landscape, to challenge precisely the notion that the landscape and location bear intrinsic meaning separate from cultural and aesthetic traditions of representing it.

Cinema of Emancipation and Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

This chapter offers stylistic and thematic analyses of the cinematography and strategies of visual storytelling of Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001). Bohr provides an alternate reading of the Igloolik-based group Isuma’s best-known and Cannes award winning film. Bohr identifies distinctive narrative techniques and cultural themes of the film, which tie it both to traditional Inuit myths and legends and to European art cinema, concluding by highlighting the ways in which Atanarjuat situates local practices in a global popular culture framework. Drawing on the concept of Fourth Cinema first proposed by Barry Barclay, Bohr positions Atanarjuat in the relation to emerging global international indigenous feature film production as well as to Michelle Raheja’s concept of visual sovereignty.

Frozen in Motion: Ethnographic Representation in Donald B. MacMillan’s Arctic Films

This chapter examines the explorer Donald MacMillan, who accompanied Robert Peary during the 1908-09 Polar expedition, and took tens of thousands of still photographs and exposed nearly 100,000 feet of motion picture footage during his long career as explorer, scientist, lecturer, and ethnographer. Four of MacMillan’s edited single-reel films – Hunting Musk-Ox with the Polar Eskimo (date unknown), Travelling with the Eskimos of the Far North (1930), Eskimo Life in South Greenland (filmed during a 1926 expedition), and Under the Northern Lights (circa 1928) –survive. Genauer’s chapter argues that MacMillan disavowed narrative and generic conventions of ethnographic representation, which allowed his films to break from the supposed verisimilitude characteristic of contemporary explorer films.

From Objects to Actors: Knud Rasmussen’s Ethnographic Feature Film The Wedding of Palo

This chapter examines one of Denmark’s best-known ethnographic fiction feature films, Knud Rasmussen’s The Wedding of Palo (1934), directed by Friedrich Dalsheim, and shot in Western Greenland. While in many ways a documentary in the salvage ethnography tradition of the first part of the twentieth century, and sharing many similarities with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Volquardsen examines the significance of this film for the contested geopolitical status of Greenland in the early 1930s. Foregrounding the venerable status of Knud Rasmussen as an explorer and ethnographer in Danish history, this chapter shows how the film continues to be both cherished and mocked as a thwarted historical document for the Greenlandic population. The legacy of this film, showcasing seal-hunts, kayaking tricks, and domestic and cultural traditions (including drum-dancing), has remained significant and occupies a complex position in Denmark-Greenland cultural relations.

The Creative Treatment of Alterity: Nanook as the North

This chapter examines the many re-iterations of Robert Flaherty’s influential film Nanook of the North (1922) to show how this key documentary film has been re-imagined and re-articulated in documentaries such as Claude Massot’s Nanook Revisited (1990), feature length fictional accounts of Flaherty’s journey north such as Massot’s Kabloonak (1994), indigenous media such as the National Film Board of Canada’s Netsilik series (1967), IMAX films like To the Arctic (2012) and experimental cinema such as Philip Hoffman and Sami van Ingen’s Sweep (1995). Through the analysis of these varied works, MacKenzie delineates how the continual re-iterations of Nanook of the North play and complex and conflicted role in the popular imagination of the Arctic.

Hollywood Does Iceland: Authenticity, Genericity and the Picturesque

This chapter addresses the use of location substitution by Hollywood in Iceland. Ranging from films as diverse as Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus (2012) and Lee Tamihori’s James Bond vehicle Die Another Day (2002), Nordfjörd considers how the landscape of Iceland is configured as beautiful, sublime, and fantastical. At the same time, he shows, they become generic background fodder for Hollywood cinema, precisely because of their seemingly otherworldy characteristics. By way of comparison, Nordfjörd argues that these ‘otherworldy’ Arctic environments are rarely mobilized as local sites in icelandic film production, and when they are used in films such as Dagur Kári’s Nói the Albino (2003) and Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever (1995) they are aesthetically far away from realism.

The Threat of the Thaw: The Cold War on the Screen

This chapter examines how the Arctic was figured as a porous sheet of ice separating the East and West Blocs during the Cold War and held a privileged position in Hollywood and Soviet filmmaking from the 1950s to the 1980s. Stenport’s case studies range from early alien invasion films such as The Thing From Another World (1951), USSR national icebreaker epics such as The Red Tent (1969), political thrillers such as Ice Station Zebra, 1968), Oscar winning ‘Real Life Adventures’ Disney documentaries such as Men Against the Arctic (1955) to television series such as The Big Picture (1951-1964). Stenport examines a wide swath of cinematic forms from the U.S., the USSR, Sweden, and Norway not previously analysed in tension with one another, showing how these are put to environmental and ideological uses.

Arctic Carnivalesque: Ethnicity, Gender and Transnationality in the Films of Tommy Wirkola

This chapter examines the way in which Sámi filmmaker Tommy Wirkola ironically appropriates contemporary Hollywood films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003-4) to create ironic, postmodern genres films that address questions of ethnicity and gender. Iversen examines the way in which Wirkola’s films made in Norway such as Kill Buljo: The Movie (2007) and the ‘Nazi zombie horror splatter comedy’ Dead Snow (2009) appropriate the horror genre to tell stories about traumatic events in Northern Norwegian history -- such as the German invasion during Second World War -- while incorporating visual references to European and Scandinavian art cinema. Iversen also analyses the representations of masculinity in Knut Erik Jensen’s Cool and Crazy (2001).