{"id":1658,"date":"2016-07-28T11:46:52","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T11:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=1658"},"modified":"2017-03-05T19:28:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T19:28:31","slug":"scott-mackenzie-anna-westerstahl-stenport-eds-films-ice-cinemas-arctic-edinburgh-edinburgh-university-press-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/volume-12-no-1-2017\/book-review-volume-12-no-1-2017\/scott-mackenzie-anna-westerstahl-stenport-eds-films-ice-cinemas-arctic-edinburgh-edinburgh-university-press-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Mackenzie & Anna Westerst\u00e5hl Stenport (eds.), Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Load-bearing concepts are those that enable us to think (or conceptualize) something else.\u00a0 [Any] mediation\u2014between disciplines or subdisciplines, between interests within a field, and certainly between historical moments\u2014can only be the result of the construction of a shared discourse within which a consensus must be sought for the use of specific words (hence, concepts).\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0—\u00a0Peter de Bolla, \u201cMediation and the Division of Labor\u201d<\/p>\n

In Films on Ice<\/em>, \u201cArctic Cinemas\u201d is offered as a load-bearing concept upon which varying forms of Arctic filmmaking hitherto regarded as discrete traditions can be placed in dialogue, challenging, as the introduction claims, the very notion of \u201cArctic\u201d as an unified concept and conventional views of film history, at the same time. By proposing \u201cArctic Cinemas\u201d as a new lens through which to view the diverse film histories of nations and peoples spanning the vast Arctic region, including those that might seem more dissimilar than similar on first consideration\u2014Inuit and S\u00e1mi cinemas, Scottish women filmmakers, and Norwegian horror flicks, to point out a few\u2014Films on Ice <\/em>stakes an innovative claim concerning the \u201cdialogue between insiders and outsiders\u201d that occur across the Arctic region (1). In so doing, the collection of essays recasts ground that has been stereotyped by the glare of otherworldly ice, Eurocentric-ethnography and the sublime.<\/p>\n

While \u201cArctic Cinemas\u201d is indeed a load-bearing concept, the introduction to the collection, penned by its editors MacKenzie and Westerst\u00e5hl Stenport, performs methodological heavy lifting worthy of Atlas, and the introduction is a veritable gold mine for anyone wishing to either design a course or binge watch film from and about the North, although the rarity of many of the films in question would make finding them on Netflix<\/em> a feat.\u00a0 As such, the introduction serves as an ample starting place for anyone needing to strengthen their broader knowledge of the Arctic and its many discourses, including Critical Arctic Studies and Arctic Art Cinema. Further, the introductions that open each of Film on Ice\u2019s <\/em>four parts are equally indispensable and help frame the plurality of theoretical perspectives included in the collection.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the clearest articulation of the context from which the collection emerges is located in \u201cTransnational, World, Global, Arctic Cinemas?\u201d Here, the editors put forth their goal: \u201cto challenge standard national cinema histories that have generally overlooked film production in, about, and for the Arctic region\u201d (13). By envisioning \u201cArctic Cinema\u201d as a concept by which \u201cgeographically related subsections of various nation-states\u201d are incorporated into one conceptual rubric, Films on Ice <\/em>also challenges normative definitions of World Cinema. This is equally achieved by including in the collection of essays examples of \u201csub-national\u201d film, or those \u201cnot representative of what is understood as a \u2018national\u2019 tradition\u201d (14). \u201cArctic Cinema,\u201d then, expands the purview of both World Cinema and \u201ccinematic tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is because of this aim that the study focuses on what MacKenzie and Westerst\u00e5hl Stenport describe as \u201cthree distinct, yet interrelated groups\u201d (1). It is useful to describe these groups at length since it is through their interrelationships that the concept of \u201cArctic Cinemas\u201d emerges.\u00a0 They are: \u201c(1) films made by Arctic residents, but mostly seen in the South [\u2026]; (2), films made outside the Arctic, typically by outsiders, and viewed mostly in the South and; (3) films made and viewed by Arctic residents through narrowcast broadcast and alternative venues\u201d (1). As this list suggests, the collection is acutely attuned to the ways that perceptions of the Arctic, its regions, and its peoples have been amalgamated, marginalized and propagated in film.<\/p>\n

The collection is equally attentive, however, to the ways in which pushback and reinscription have occurred with more frequency over the last several decades of filmmaking among the Arctic regions. Because of representation\u2019s implicit function in film, the collection equally takes cue from Critical Arctic Studies, which is interested in exploring how cultural representation can serve as a humanistic counterpoint to the definition of the Arctic region by climate, geopolitics, or cartography (2). The collection\u2019s broad scope is further organized into four parts, each highlighting a distinct frame of reference through which to view \u201cArctic Cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part I, \u201cGlobal Indigeneity,\u201d focuses the notion of \u201cunified singularity\u201d on the indigenous peoples who populate the Arctic, representing \u201cthe first instance that the multiple cinematic traditions from various indigenous cultures and regions of the Arctic are placed in dialogue with one another\u201d (31). There are very few venues, indeed, where an examination of S\u00e1mi, native Alaskan and Canadian, \u201cEskimo,\u201d Inuit, and Greenlander film traditions would make sense standing side-by-side; this is one of them. This juxtapositioning succeeds in large part because of the engagement with the relationship between hybridity (cultural, ethnic, cinematic) and play in contemporary Arctic film, which stresses the reality of transnationality for the region\u2019s indigenous peoples, both for the good and bad.<\/p>\n

Part II, \u201cHollywood Hegemony,\u201d constructs a thorough history of how, beginning at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, \u201cthe Arctic\u201d has figured in American cinema and its \u201ccinematic imaginaries\u201d (121). The tradition of \u201clocation substitution\u201d is one of the focuses in this section, as is the line between fiction and \u201cactuality\u201d in representations of the North. Perhaps one of the most startling aspects of this section is, however, the connection drawn between polar expedition, film production, and the way in which proto-fascist aesthetics reemployed the Arctic in its own image within German Bergfilm<\/em>, the arctic landscape inscribed with sublime, masculine whiteness.<\/p>\n

At the core of Part III, \u201cEthnography and the Documentary Dilemma,\u201d are questions concerning time, chronology, the concept of historical progress and the ways in which ethnography and documentary film have grappled with and, in many cases, perpetuated notions of \u201ccultural evolution\u201d akin to those developed in stadial theory and disseminated in conjectural history and its descendants from the eighteenth century forward. It is in this section where the collection\u2019s multiple threads begin to fully unite, and \u201cArctic Cinema\u201d begins to signify in ways indicative of a functional, load-bearing concept: by juxtaposing the Arctic\u2019s many unique regions and film histories with one another, it becomes apparent that, regardless of the differences among them, film made about the regions and peoples of the Arctic have repeatedly participated in forms of history-making predicated on the representation, evaluation and hierarchization of \u201cotherness.\u201d From this premise, one can more fully appreciate the flip-side of \u201cArctic Cinema\u201d set forth in Part I, that of contemporary, indigenous filmmakers subverting, hybridizing, and playing with tropes long held within a film tradition that for too long functioned outside of their control. Although I appreciate the choice to place \u201cGlobal Indigeneity\u201d first in the collection, allowing indigenous voices to speak first and for themselves, I cannot help but wonder if Part III should have come before it, as the incredible contrast between early ethnographic film and contemporary, indigenous responses to it would deepen the significance of the latter, especially for a reader not wholly versed in the cinemas of the Arctic. After finishing the collection, read in order, I felt as though I needed to return to the opening chapters with the insights I collected along the way.<\/p>\n

Part IV, \u201cMyths and Modes of Exploration,\u201d is perhaps the most daring section of the collection due to the broad geographical, cultural and temporal scope of its subjects: topics range from the earliest depictions of the race to the North Pole in silent film, circa 1901, to a comparison of 1930 and 1970s Soviet images of the North where, in the case of the later films, the Arctic space is imagined as \u201cthe place of possibilities where socialist dreams come true\u201d (321); the collection closes with two works that scrutinize contemporary, visual interactions with the Arctic, examining new models of representing the region through \u201ccreolization\u201d and \u201cinfo-aesthetics.\u201d Despite its diverse material, Part IV succeeds in connecting method, mythmaking, and exploration along several lines, including how film has mediated or attempted to mediate varying histories of the Arctic, personal, political, and environmental.<\/p>\n

In its own words, Films on Ice<\/em> demonstrates how the concept of \u201cthe Arctic\u201d \u201celides the political, geographic, national, transnational and linguistic differences that define and populate the region;\u201d foregrounding, even, how \u201cthe Arctic\u201d encompasses an \u201cintertwined\u201d and \u201cunifying singularity\u201d (2). For even the most casual student of the Arctic, this conclusion will be unavoidable because although it signifies in so many interrelated ways, it is particularly prescient regarding climate change, which will not pause at borders and which will impact the Arctic and its peoples hardest, its uniqueness, its interwoven fabric, the first victim rent by modernity\u2019s hubris. As a whole, the essays in Films on Ice <\/em>speak among one another, pick up threads of common focus, and, in numerous cases, offer readings and arguments concerning the same films, scaffolding up, as it were, from the concept of \u201cArctic Cinema\u201d to demonstrate the concept\u2019s ability to provide a foundation for a new, counter history of film.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of the book:\u00a0Scott Mackenzie &\u00a0Anna Westerst\u00e5hl Stenport (eds.),\u00a0Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic<\/em>\u00a0(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1376],"tags":[239,1444,1446,1445,1447],"coauthors":[1108],"class_list":["post-1658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review-volume-12-no-1-2017","tag-arctic","tag-cinema","tag-ethnography","tag-exploration","tag-hollywood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1707,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions\/1707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}