A comprehensive study of films made in and about one of the world's most breathtaking landscapes - the Arctic
The 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.
About the Author: 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).
