The publication of Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos could not be better timed, given the persistent centrality of the Arctic region to our world's calamities. With the catastrophic melting of the Arctic ice caps, this territory has become a glaring symptom of global humanity's failure to adequately mitigate the mounting disaster of climate change. Simultaneously, the overall focus on the earth's warming has sidelined the awareness of the Far North as an inhabited place, and of the complexities of its interactions with people and nations south of the Arctic “borders.” Arctic Cinema, by exploring filmmaking in and about the region, not only turns its eye towards northern life but traces the region's significance in shaping international documentary traditions throughout more than 100 years of film history. Conversely, the volume argues that cinema has been crucial to sculpting global and regional views of the Far North, both perpetuating and contesting Arctic myths and misperceptions.

One of the volume's central claims is that the complexities of documentary cinema's ethos—“the undergirding set of beliefs, practices and ideologies” motivating its efforts to truthfully represent the world—can be better understood through a focus on cinemas of and about the Far North, to which is has been particularly central. It has been utilized, for instance, to justify non-Indigenous constructions of the territory's essential otherness. Such constructions, and alternatives to them, are laid bare by Arctic Cinemas’ contributors. Mariah Larsson and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, in one particularly noteworthy historicization, focus on female explorers/filmmakers, including the American Louise Arner Boyd in the 1930s and the Danish Jette Bang in the 1940s. These women's work is important not only because it offers a diverse and “some of the most compelling” imagery of the polar life but because these women's histories as Arctic explorers rewrite the familiar narrative of the canonical, male, Arctic conqueror/filmmaker.

Regarding more contemporary work, Arctic Cinemas documents the stubborn inability of non-Indigenous contemporary filmmakers to recognize the fraudulent power of their camera and editing skills when filming the Arctic life. This comes particularly to light in Faye Ginsburg's discussion of the controversy surrounding the Canadian filmmaker Dominic Gagnon, whose compilation of Innuit “found footage” (circulating on social media) into an integrated film Of the North (2015) infuriated Innuit viewers and filmmakers, who perceived Gagnon's video as “trading on historically entrenched negative stereotypes.” Ginsburg's essay, as well as that by Karine Bertrand, trace the more recent evolution of the region's “visual sovereignty.” Exploring, among others, the cinema of Innuit film collectives and the collaborative work of the Quebecois Marquise Lepage and the Nunavik woman Martha Flaherty, such contributions examine the means by which personal and communal histories of the Far North are told through the eyes of its own inhabitants.

For the readers of this journal, three essays discussing Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet portrayals of the Arctic will be of a particular interest. Lilya Kaganovsky's contribution zeroes in on one film, Dziga Vertov's 1926 A Sixth Part of the World, to offer a methodological reassessment of the director's cinematic methods. If Vertov's camera has been cemented in film history as privileging the optical dimension to the detriment of other senses, Kaganovsky argues that he breaks down the optical (and cognitive) distance in this film to pull his audience into an “out-of body” experience, utilizing this as a means to link viewers to the distant everyday practices of the Arctic peoples the film depicts. Jeremy Hicks, in his essay, examines filmic representations of US and British Arctic convoys delivering essential supplies to the USSR through Soviet arctic ports during World War II. Looking at newsreels and documentaries filmed during and after the war, Hicks concludes that this history of war-time cooperation could not be comfortably accommodated into the three allies’ collective memories of the war, within which each felt compelled to stick to its own, ideologically determined, visual and narrative conventions. And finally, Oksana Sarkisova's contribution documents the persistent dichotomy of “modernity versus tradition” in Russian and Soviet films on the Far North, with more recent Indigenous productions questioning the disruption of local ways of life by modern educational and economic necessities.

In its alternative interpretations of familiar works and in its focus on unfamiliar filmmakers and productions, Arctic Cinemas is an exceptionally multifaceted volume, reaching deeply into disparate corners of film history, theory, and practice. Broad in its implications and engaging in its diversity of analytical frameworks, the book will be of interest to general audiences, students, and scholars across humanities disciplines.