Films on Ice

Scott MacKenzie is Professor of Film and Media, Queen’s University. His books include: Cinema and Nation (2000); Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95 (2003); Screening Québec (2004); The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (2013); Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (2014); Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (2015); Arctic Environmental Modernities (2017); Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (2019); and Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (2019). Anna Westerstahl Stenport is Professor and Chair of the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has written extensively about Nordic cinema, media, visual cultures, culture, drama, and literature. She is the author of Nordic Film Classics: Lukas Moodysson’s ‘Show Me Love’ (Washington, 2012) and co-editor of Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (with Scott MacKenzie, Edinburgh, 2015) and Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (with Lilya Kaganovsky and Scott MacKenzie, Indiana, 2019).

• Introduction: What Are Arctic Cinemas?Part I. Global Indigeneity1. ‘Who Were We? And What Happened to Us?’: Inuit Memory and Arctic Futures in Igloolik Isuma Film and Video2. Northern Exposures and Marginal Critiques: The Politics of Sovereignty in Sami Cinema3. Frozen in Film: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies4. Cultural Stereotypes and Negotiations in Sami Cinema5. Cinema of Emancipation and Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner6. Cosmopolitan Inuit: New Perspectives on Greenlandic Film7. Arctic Carnivalesque: Ethnicity, Gender and Transnationality in the Films of Tommy WirkolaPart II. Hollywood Hegemony8. Fact and Fiction in ‘Northerns’ and ‘Early Arctic Films’9. California’s Yukon as Comic Space10. ‘See the Crashing Masses of White Death…’: Greenland, Germany, and the Sublime in the ‘Bergfilm’ SOS Eisberg11. The Threat of the Thaw: The Cold War on the Screen12. Hollywood Does Iceland: Authenticity, Genericity and the Picturesque13. White on White: Twenty-First Century Norwegian Horror Films Negotiate Masculinist Arctic ImaginariesPart III. Ethnography and the Documentary Dilemma14. The Creative Treatment of Alterity: Nanook as the North15. From Objects to Actors: Knud Rasmussen’s Ethnographic Feature Film The Wedding of Palo16. Arctic Travelogues: Conquering the Soviet North17. A Gentle Gaze on the Colony: Jette Bang’s Documentary Filming in Greenland 1938–918. Exercise Musk-Ox: The Challenges of Filming a Military Expedition in Canada’s Arctic19. The Tour: A Film About Longyearbyen, Svalbard. An Interview with Eva la CourPart IV. Myths and Modes of Exploration20. The Changing Polar Films: Silent Films from Arctic Exploration 1900 – 193021. The Attractions of the North: Early Film Expeditions to the Exotic Snowscape22. Frozen in Motion: Ethnographic Representation in Donald B. MacMillan’s Arctic Films23. ‘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 Filmmakers24. ‘Here will be a Garden-City’: Soviet Man on an Arctic Construction Site25. Transcending the Sublime: Arctic Creolisation in the Works of Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah26. DJ Spooky and Dziga Vertov: Experimental Cinema Meets Digital Art in Exploring Polar RegionsContributorsIndex

Gathering leading scholars across the three continents meeting in the Arctic, MacKenzie and Stenport open up the utopian, dystopian and heterotopian dimensions of Arctic film, a shimmering, crystalline view not only on the contest over the meanings of polar space, but onto the possibilities for reconceptualising world cinema.