Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos

<p>Beginning with Robert Flaherty's <i>Nanook of the North</i> (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 <i>Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos</i> 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.</p>