New Arctic Cinemas

Media Sovereignty and the Climate Crisis

Anna Westerstahl Stenport

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520390546
• eBook ISBN: 9780520390560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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.

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1  •  Twenty-First-Century Arctic Cinemas and Global Media Studies, Media Sovereignty, the Anthropocene, and Interventionist Historiography
• 2  •  New Arctic Explorers and Twenty-First-Century Ice Imaginaries: From Metrical Documentary to IMAX Spectacle
• 3  •  Isuma and Indigenous Media Sovereignty
• 4  •  The Arnait Collective, Feminist Practice, and Inuit Self-Determination
• 5  •  Sámi Media Sovereignty and Interventionist Historiography: Environmental, Experimental, and Archival Politics
• 6  •  Sámi Feminist First-Person Documentary and Women’s Activism
• 7  •  Global Greenland and Postcolonial Cinema
• 8  •  Greenlandic Reconciliation Cinema, Self-Determination, and Interventionist Historiography
• 9  •  Russia’s Contemporary Arctic Cinema as Geopolitics
• 10  •  From the Cold War to the Climate Crisis: The Russian North and Utopian Svalbard
• 11  •  Looking Ahead: Global Arctic Cinemas in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• References
• Index