August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Theater, Text, and Image., 2018
Debates about how August Strindberg's A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel, 1901) relates to early film for... more Debates about how August Strindberg's A Dream Play (Ett Drömspel, 1901) relates to early film form have often focused on establishing historical notions of media specificity, prevalent in both cinema and theatre scholarship. By contextualizing a Dream Play in relation to Georges Méliès early "dream film" cinema and situating it in a historical context that bridges Paris with Stockholm, this chapter challenges some of the ideological investments that have kept theories of stage and screen separate.
The philosophical line drawn about medium specificity in theatre and early cinema assumes a firm binary between theatre/performance/stage practice as verbal and early cinema/film/recording/projection as visual. Similarly, such reductionist arguments assume that stage practice, understood to be immediate, embodied and ephemeral, is distinct from the cinema, understood to be technologically mediated and repeatable. By the same token, a wide variety of terms were used to describe early cinematic cameras and projectors, many drawing upon etymologies of sight and writing, along with words signaling magic, light, theatre, kinetics and embodied experiences. These include the laterna magica, kinetoscope, theatrograph, bioscope, vitascope, cinematograph, kinematograph, Ouimetoscope, vitagraph and Mutoscope. These terms signal the belief in a conceptual overlap and amalgamation of a variety of representational forms. This is also true of terms in various languages for cinema as a location for motion-picture projection: for instance, 'Biograf ' in Swedish; 'Kino' in German and Norwegian; 'movie theater' in American English. This chapter historicizes and challenges many of the historical assumptions of stage and screen cultures through comparative case studies of Strindberg's drama and Méliès's fillms.
In August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Theater, Text, and Image. Ed. by Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer, and Jonathan Schroeder. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 95-112.
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According to a contemporaneous account in Annales de Géographie (1925), 25000 meters of film was shipped backed to Copenhagen, amounting to approximately 20 hours of exposed footage. Much of this footage seems to now be lost or languishing uncatalogued in archives. However, various traces of the footage remain. This article examines the Barrow and Nome sequences _With Dogsled Through Alaska_ (Med Hundeslæde gennem Alaska) released in 1927 and restored by the EYE Museum in 1994. We also discuss a Wolf Dance ceremony documented in the short film _Footage from the Fifth Thule Expedition_ (Optagelser fra 5. Thuleekspedition), recently restored by the Danish Film Institute. While we are interested in how these works function as Arctic visual anthropology, we also frame them in the context of archival film history, Indigenous-settler relations, Arctic expedition footage, and Leo Hansen’s extensive writings of filming the Fifth Thule Expedition in his account _I Knuds slædespor. Eventyrets grønne baand_ (1953).
“Tracing the Lost Films of the Fifth Thule Expedition in Alaska.” (2021). Alaska Journal of Anthropology. Vol 19; issue 1&2. 160-175
“The Origins of Ethnographic Filmmaking, the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Indigenous Cinema: An Alternative History of the Arctic.” Visual Anthropology Review 36:1 (2020). 137-161.
The philosophical line drawn about medium specificity in theatre and early cinema assumes a firm binary between theatre/performance/stage practice as verbal and early cinema/film/recording/projection as visual. Similarly, such reductionist arguments assume that stage practice, understood to be immediate, embodied and ephemeral, is distinct from the cinema, understood to be technologically mediated and repeatable. By the same token, a wide variety of terms were used to describe early cinematic cameras and projectors, many drawing upon etymologies of sight and writing, along with words signaling magic, light, theatre, kinetics and embodied experiences. These include the laterna magica, kinetoscope, theatrograph, bioscope, vitascope, cinematograph, kinematograph, Ouimetoscope, vitagraph and Mutoscope. These terms signal the belief in a conceptual overlap and amalgamation of a variety of representational forms. This is also true of terms in various languages for cinema as a location for motion-picture projection: for instance, 'Biograf ' in Swedish; 'Kino' in German and Norwegian; 'movie theater' in American English. This chapter historicizes and challenges many of the historical assumptions of stage and screen cultures through comparative case studies of Strindberg's drama and Méliès's fillms.
In August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Theater, Text, and Image. Ed. by Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer, and Jonathan Schroeder. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 95-112.
Keywords: Arctic cinemas, Documentary, indigenous media, experimental film, Cold war propaganda, transnational cinemas, Arctic art cinemas, climate change, environmentalism, Polar exploration, digital dissemination
many contemporary Canadian film historiographies, the chapter emphasizes the central importance of narrowcast, multimedia, documentary, video arts, and expanded cinema to the nation’s work, which is quite distinct from many aspects of American and European
cinematic traditions and practices. The Arctic cinematic/moving image traditions and practices considered include participatory and documentary filmmaking, Inuit television, Indigenous filmmaking collectives such as Isuma and Arnait, le cinéma vécu, the re-release of archival works as acts of repatriation, multiscreen and expanded cinemas, and IMAX.
Keywords: Arctic, documentary, Inuit media, narrowcast television, repatriation, Isuma, Arnait, IMAX, expanded
cinema, participatory media.
The Polarities and Hybridities of Arctic Cinemas.” In The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinemas. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 125-146
“Tearing Up the Screen: Pia Arke’s Post-Colonial Processes.” In Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age. Eds. Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 390-406.
"Visualizing Climate Change in the Arctic and Beyond: Big Data in the Anthropocene, Multimodal Media Cultures, and the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP).” Scott MacKenzie and Anna W. Stenport. Journal of Environmental Media 1:1 (2019). 79-99.
Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos contextualizes environmental, Indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, making three primary contributions in the process. First, it demonstrates the centrality of the Arctic to documentary cinema by reconceptualizing the history of documentary cinema as one that is indebted to, integrated within, and inseparable from documentary images made in, about, and for the circumpolar North, as well as to the scholarship written about these images. For example, contained within the Arctic documentary tradition are some of the singularly most important documentary films produced during the founding of the field in the 1920s and 1930s: the opposition between a “formalist” Vertov and a “realist” Flaherty, whose “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson: 2014 [1932]) in Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, USA, 1922) became the dominant touchstone for how documentary cinema and theory were conceptualized during the following century. Similarly, some of the most formative and compelling examples of ethnographic, propagandistic, observational, experimental, participatory, activist, Indigenous, and environmental forms of documentary engage in Arctic moving image production, including, in the twenty-first century, films that were agents provocateurs addressing climate change: An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, USA, 2006) and Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, USA, 2012); and the Inuit Indigenous works of the Isuma and Arnait collectives in Nunavut.
Second, Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos frames Arctic documentaries as a singularly important case study because they encompass genres, forms, topics, production contexts, circulation, politics, and public perceptions that have been central to documentary cinema and theory from its inception. The book thereby tells the history of Arctic representation in a comparative and historical context, articulating how the Arctic has been mobilized by different national traditions, transnational relations, and Indigenous knowledge systems. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos also engages in a purposeful heterogeneity among its topics and contributors, since the breadth, wealth, and significance of this tradition could not be told in any other way. In sum, this book argues that Arctic documentary is central to documentary film theory and history, yet up until now, has not been understood as such.
Third, this book examines a key assumption in film history, namely that the documentary form has an ethos -- an undergirding set of beliefs, practices, and ideologies, and that this ethos needs to be examined from the perspective of films made in, about, and for the global circumpolar North. Not all documentary aims to be ethical but, in comparison to other forms of cinematic expression, documentary seeks to portray the world (including its challenges and problems) -- whether in a transparently realist manner, or one that offers a self-reflexive point of view -- as a means to impart new knowledge and information. Scrutinizing such notions of the documentary ethos is central to this book, because many dominant assumptions of documentary, exploration, (self)-representation, identity politics, and visualization coalesce in and around the stories told about the Arctic. We argue through Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos that it is imperative to undertake this inquiry because of the rich history of Arctic documentary and its influence on filmmaking around the world. Examining the documentary ethos with respect to the Arctic region -- continuously imagined as an “ultimate otherworld” (McGhee 2007: 19) or as a blank slate for imagination as well as exploitation -- is all the more urgent in the present day, as questions of resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage.
Throughout the history of Arctic documentary filmmaking, the question of ethos has been paramount, if not often formulated as such. Arctic explorers relied on the ethical dimensions of documentary filmmaking to “prove” the significance of their journeys and expeditions with films such as Who Discovered the North Pole? (Lubin Manufacturing co., USA, 1909), A Dash for the North Pole (Charles Urban co., UK, 1909), and The Truth About the North Pole (Frederick Cook, USA, 1912). Nation states -- from Canada to Norway, USSR to the United States -- made use of documentary to lay claim to land and engage in geopolitical maneuvering, just as ethnographers have relied on the documentary ethos as a voice of European and Western privilege to describe and codify the North and the Arctic and its Indigenous inhabitants. To counteract these practices, women’s and feminist films about Arctic exploration have offered a gender-reflexive ethos that challenges the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative representations of the Arctic. And, with the rise of participatory documentary and video activism, Indigenous inhabitants have in recent years used the documentary form as a means of giving themselves a voice in the global mediascape, and as a tool for bringing attention to the extraordinary and disproportionate effects of climate change in the Far North. Even “straight forward” documentaries on climate change and resource extraction that base their rhetoric on logos, appeal to the ethos of “experts,” such as scientists, politicians, and NGOs. In addition, experimental and formalist documentaries build on the ethos of the filmmaker as offering visions of transcendent beauty, just as activist works mobilize an ethos that challenges representations of resource extraction as normative and safe. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos examines in depth a wide range of these topics, themes, trends, and histories, for the first time bringing together scholarship on documentary practice with the study of the heterogeneous region collectively known as the “Arctic.”
According to a contemporaneous account in Annales de Géographie (1925), 25000 meters of film was shipped backed to Copenhagen, amounting to approximately 20 hours of exposed footage. Much of this footage seems to now be lost or languishing uncatalogued in archives. However, various traces of the footage remain. This article examines the Barrow and Nome sequences _With Dogsled Through Alaska_ (Med Hundeslæde gennem Alaska) released in 1927 and restored by the EYE Museum in 1994. We also discuss a Wolf Dance ceremony documented in the short film _Footage from the Fifth Thule Expedition_ (Optagelser fra 5. Thuleekspedition), recently restored by the Danish Film Institute. While we are interested in how these works function as Arctic visual anthropology, we also frame them in the context of archival film history, Indigenous-settler relations, Arctic expedition footage, and Leo Hansen’s extensive writings of filming the Fifth Thule Expedition in his account _I Knuds slædespor. Eventyrets grønne baand_ (1953).
“Tracing the Lost Films of the Fifth Thule Expedition in Alaska.” (2021). Alaska Journal of Anthropology. Vol 19; issue 1&2. 160-175
“The Origins of Ethnographic Filmmaking, the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Indigenous Cinema: An Alternative History of the Arctic.” Visual Anthropology Review 36:1 (2020). 137-161.
The philosophical line drawn about medium specificity in theatre and early cinema assumes a firm binary between theatre/performance/stage practice as verbal and early cinema/film/recording/projection as visual. Similarly, such reductionist arguments assume that stage practice, understood to be immediate, embodied and ephemeral, is distinct from the cinema, understood to be technologically mediated and repeatable. By the same token, a wide variety of terms were used to describe early cinematic cameras and projectors, many drawing upon etymologies of sight and writing, along with words signaling magic, light, theatre, kinetics and embodied experiences. These include the laterna magica, kinetoscope, theatrograph, bioscope, vitascope, cinematograph, kinematograph, Ouimetoscope, vitagraph and Mutoscope. These terms signal the belief in a conceptual overlap and amalgamation of a variety of representational forms. This is also true of terms in various languages for cinema as a location for motion-picture projection: for instance, 'Biograf ' in Swedish; 'Kino' in German and Norwegian; 'movie theater' in American English. This chapter historicizes and challenges many of the historical assumptions of stage and screen cultures through comparative case studies of Strindberg's drama and Méliès's fillms.
In August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Theater, Text, and Image. Ed. by Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Eszter Szalczer, and Jonathan Schroeder. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 95-112.
Keywords: Arctic cinemas, Documentary, indigenous media, experimental film, Cold war propaganda, transnational cinemas, Arctic art cinemas, climate change, environmentalism, Polar exploration, digital dissemination
many contemporary Canadian film historiographies, the chapter emphasizes the central importance of narrowcast, multimedia, documentary, video arts, and expanded cinema to the nation’s work, which is quite distinct from many aspects of American and European
cinematic traditions and practices. The Arctic cinematic/moving image traditions and practices considered include participatory and documentary filmmaking, Inuit television, Indigenous filmmaking collectives such as Isuma and Arnait, le cinéma vécu, the re-release of archival works as acts of repatriation, multiscreen and expanded cinemas, and IMAX.
Keywords: Arctic, documentary, Inuit media, narrowcast television, repatriation, Isuma, Arnait, IMAX, expanded
cinema, participatory media.
The Polarities and Hybridities of Arctic Cinemas.” In The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinemas. Eds. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 125-146
“Tearing Up the Screen: Pia Arke’s Post-Colonial Processes.” In Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age. Eds. Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 390-406.
"Visualizing Climate Change in the Arctic and Beyond: Big Data in the Anthropocene, Multimodal Media Cultures, and the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP).” Scott MacKenzie and Anna W. Stenport. Journal of Environmental Media 1:1 (2019). 79-99.
Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos contextualizes environmental, Indigenous, political, cultural, sociological, and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic, making three primary contributions in the process. First, it demonstrates the centrality of the Arctic to documentary cinema by reconceptualizing the history of documentary cinema as one that is indebted to, integrated within, and inseparable from documentary images made in, about, and for the circumpolar North, as well as to the scholarship written about these images. For example, contained within the Arctic documentary tradition are some of the singularly most important documentary films produced during the founding of the field in the 1920s and 1930s: the opposition between a “formalist” Vertov and a “realist” Flaherty, whose “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson: 2014 [1932]) in Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, USA, 1922) became the dominant touchstone for how documentary cinema and theory were conceptualized during the following century. Similarly, some of the most formative and compelling examples of ethnographic, propagandistic, observational, experimental, participatory, activist, Indigenous, and environmental forms of documentary engage in Arctic moving image production, including, in the twenty-first century, films that were agents provocateurs addressing climate change: An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, USA, 2006) and Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, USA, 2012); and the Inuit Indigenous works of the Isuma and Arnait collectives in Nunavut.
Second, Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos frames Arctic documentaries as a singularly important case study because they encompass genres, forms, topics, production contexts, circulation, politics, and public perceptions that have been central to documentary cinema and theory from its inception. The book thereby tells the history of Arctic representation in a comparative and historical context, articulating how the Arctic has been mobilized by different national traditions, transnational relations, and Indigenous knowledge systems. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos also engages in a purposeful heterogeneity among its topics and contributors, since the breadth, wealth, and significance of this tradition could not be told in any other way. In sum, this book argues that Arctic documentary is central to documentary film theory and history, yet up until now, has not been understood as such.
Third, this book examines a key assumption in film history, namely that the documentary form has an ethos -- an undergirding set of beliefs, practices, and ideologies, and that this ethos needs to be examined from the perspective of films made in, about, and for the global circumpolar North. Not all documentary aims to be ethical but, in comparison to other forms of cinematic expression, documentary seeks to portray the world (including its challenges and problems) -- whether in a transparently realist manner, or one that offers a self-reflexive point of view -- as a means to impart new knowledge and information. Scrutinizing such notions of the documentary ethos is central to this book, because many dominant assumptions of documentary, exploration, (self)-representation, identity politics, and visualization coalesce in and around the stories told about the Arctic. We argue through Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos that it is imperative to undertake this inquiry because of the rich history of Arctic documentary and its influence on filmmaking around the world. Examining the documentary ethos with respect to the Arctic region -- continuously imagined as an “ultimate otherworld” (McGhee 2007: 19) or as a blank slate for imagination as well as exploitation -- is all the more urgent in the present day, as questions of resource extraction, climate change, and sovereignty take center stage.
Throughout the history of Arctic documentary filmmaking, the question of ethos has been paramount, if not often formulated as such. Arctic explorers relied on the ethical dimensions of documentary filmmaking to “prove” the significance of their journeys and expeditions with films such as Who Discovered the North Pole? (Lubin Manufacturing co., USA, 1909), A Dash for the North Pole (Charles Urban co., UK, 1909), and The Truth About the North Pole (Frederick Cook, USA, 1912). Nation states -- from Canada to Norway, USSR to the United States -- made use of documentary to lay claim to land and engage in geopolitical maneuvering, just as ethnographers have relied on the documentary ethos as a voice of European and Western privilege to describe and codify the North and the Arctic and its Indigenous inhabitants. To counteract these practices, women’s and feminist films about Arctic exploration have offered a gender-reflexive ethos that challenges the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative representations of the Arctic. And, with the rise of participatory documentary and video activism, Indigenous inhabitants have in recent years used the documentary form as a means of giving themselves a voice in the global mediascape, and as a tool for bringing attention to the extraordinary and disproportionate effects of climate change in the Far North. Even “straight forward” documentaries on climate change and resource extraction that base their rhetoric on logos, appeal to the ethos of “experts,” such as scientists, politicians, and NGOs. In addition, experimental and formalist documentaries build on the ethos of the filmmaker as offering visions of transcendent beauty, just as activist works mobilize an ethos that challenges representations of resource extraction as normative and safe. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos examines in depth a wide range of these topics, themes, trends, and histories, for the first time bringing together scholarship on documentary practice with the study of the heterogeneous region collectively known as the “Arctic.”