Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos Screenings: "Challenging the Expedition Tradition of Arctic Documentaries"

• Event Date: Thursday, August 27, 2015
• Time: 4:15 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Film

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos examines documentary cinema as a key to contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic. This event is the first major international conference to address the Arctic Documentary tradition.

Crocker Land Expedition (Donald B. MacMillan, USA, 1914) 11 min.

Running roughly 11 minutes, this recently rediscovered film, thought to be MacMillan's first, accompanies the Spurlock's exhibit of Crocker Land Expedition photographs. It includes footage of MacMillan at Etah in Northwestern Greenland, a long-term staging ground for polar expeditions and, and of the Inuit families who lived there. The Crocker Land Expedition was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, and the film also includes Minik, the Inuit boy who was removed from Greenland by Robert Peary and moved to the Museum as a mascot where, unbeknownst to him, his father’s bones were put on display. The film, then, highlights the colonialism of early ethnographic film and practices.

Of Seals and Men (Mai Zetterling, Denmark/Sweden, 1979) 30 min.

Not screened in nearly 30 years, Of Seals and Men was shot with a small crew on location in remote Eastern Greenland as contract work for Denmark's Royal Greenland Trade Department, with an explicit mandate to show the merits of traditional Greenlandic seal hunting practices at a time of intense global media scrutiny and as Greenland was approaching Home Rule. Of Seals and Men may be partly Danish colonial propaganda, positing Greenlandic culture as primitivist and primordial, but its aesthetic strategies foreground a visceral and visual pleasure in corporeality that aligns with Zetterling's oeuvre and, arguably, her fascination with embodying the role of a hardy Arctic explorer.

Creation (Stan Brakhage, USA, 1979) 16 min.

Creation was made when experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage was teaching in Alaska in 1979. Creation offers a vision of the Arctic at odds with most cinematic representations of it. Fragmentary and frenetic, almost devoid of life, Creation, as P. Adams Sitney notes, offers: "a proximate inspiration for the sublime vision of a world of massive ice and scarred rock" as inspired "by nineteenth-century American landscape painter, Frederic Edwin Church…". The Arctic, as seen in Brakhage's film is almost devoid of humans, and offers a subjective, visionary aesthetic, providing a rich counterpoint to dominant realist visual tropes of the Arctic as empty, barren, and desolate.

The Idea of the North (Rebecca Baron, USA, 1995) 14 min.

In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers–who sought to reach the North Pole via air balloon but ended up marooned on an ice floe–Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past. The Idea of the North emphasizes the paradoxical interplay of cinematic time, historical time, real time, and the fixed moment of the photograph. The film is based on photographs taken in 1897 by polar explorers Nils Strindberg and Salomon Andrée. The plates were rediscovered among the expedition’s remains on an island north of Spitsbergen in 1930, providing a haunting record of failed expeditions and the ideologies that informed them.