A collection of essays analyzing the representation of the Arctic region in documentary films. Beginning with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the majority of films that have been made in, about, and by filmmakers from the Arctic region have been documentary cinema. Focused on a hostile environment that few people visit, these documentaries have heavily shaped ideas about the contemporary global Far North. In Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, contributors from a variety of scholarly and artistic backgrounds come together to provide a comprehensive study of Arctic documentary cinemas from a transnational perspective. This book offers a thorough analysis of the concept of the Arctic as it is represented in documentary filmmaking, while challenging the notion of “The Arctic” as a homogenous entity that obscures the environmental, historical, geographic, political, and cultural differences that characterize the region. By examining how the Arctic is imagined, understood, and appropriated in documentary work, the contributors argue that such films are key in contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, from early cinema to the present. Understanding the role of these films becomes all the more urgent in the present day, as conversations around resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage in the Arctic’s representation. “Highly recommended.” —Choice “A thorough exploration of the inexorable links between the circumpolar regions and historic and contemporary documentary filmmaking. It will b valuable to Arctic humanities specialists, particularly as a welcome addition to scholarship on visual depictions of the Arctic by authors such as Ann Fienup-Riordan, Richard Condon, Russell Potter, and Peter Geller, as well as Mackenzie and Westerstahl Steport’s earlier co-edited volume, Films on Ice. It will also be of use to anyone interested in ways of studying linkages between filmmaking, environments, and local and outsider communities.” —Sarah Pickman, Yale University, H-Environment, January 2020

Beginning with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), the majority of films that have been made in, about, and by filmmakers from the Arctic region have been documentary cinema. Focused on a hostile environment that few people visit, these documentaries have heavily shaped ideas about the contemporary global Far North. In Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, contributors from a variety of scholarly and artistic backgrounds come together to provide a comprehensive study of Arctic documentary cinemas from a transnational perspective. This book offers a thorough analysis of the concept of the Arctic as it is represented in documentary filmmaking, while challenging the notion of "The Arctic" as a homogenous entity that obscures the environmental, historical, geographic, political, and cultural differences that characterize the region. By examining how the Arctic is imagined, understood, and appropriated in documentary work, the contributors argue that such films are key in contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, from early cinema to the present. Understanding the role of these films becomes all the more urgent in the present day, as conversations around resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage in the Arctic's representation.

A comprehensive study of films made in and about one of the world's most breathtaking landscapes - the ArcticThe 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.

For centuries, the Arctic was visualized as an unchanging, stable, and rigidly alien landscape, existing outside twenty-first-century globalization. It is now impossible to ignore the ways the climate crisis, expanding resource extraction, and Indigenous political mobilization in the circumpolar North are constituent parts of the global present. New Arctic Cinemas presents an original, comparative, and interventionist historiography of film and media in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia, Canada, and the United States to situate Arctic media in the place it rightfully deserves to occupy: as central to global environmental concerns and Indigenous media sovereignty and self-determination movements. The works of contemporary Arctic filmmakers, from Zacharias Kunuk and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril to Amanda Kernell and Inuk Silis Høegh, reach worldwide audiences. In examining the reach and influence of these artists and their work, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport reveal a global media system of intertwined production contexts, circulation opportunities, and imaginaries—all centering the Arctic North.

From the unprecendented and innovative perspective of Christian theology, this book investigates how cinema audiences wrestle with their religious beliefs and values. Deacy reveals that movies raise vital questions about the spiritual landscape and normative values of western society today.