Abstract
This chapter offers a comparative analysis of two environmental films that foreground Arctic snow and ice: the climate change documentary Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, 2011), which follows photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, and Silent Snow (2011) by the Greenlandic filmmaker Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann and her husband Jan van den Berg, which intersperses two journeys, one in Greenland and one around the world, to trace the pollution of the Arctic by pesticides that circulate globally. The chapter argues that Chasing Ice reinvents the Arctic sublime by presenting climate change as a visual spectacle recorded by the figure of the photographer, who becomes a twenty-first-century version of the heroic Arctic explorer. Silent Snow, on the other hand, ties together art and activism in a transnational aesthetics that is grounded in relational experiences and rooted in Inuit understandings of snow and ice, contrasting with the masculinist and individualist connotations of ice in Orlowski’s film. While both films are invested in communicating and visualising environmental issues, both engage with snow and ice materially as well as metaphorically. They do so in radically different ways that also posit very different viewers: a passive consumer in Chasing Ice and an active participant in Silent Snow.
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Notes
- 1.
Truscello makes a similar point when he characterises Chasing Ice and related films as “eco-opportunistic”, arguing that “the word capitalism must not be uttered in the film, and the solution to the ecological crises created by capitalism must also involve capitalism” (2018, 270). In Truscello’s view, however, Chasing Ice “understate[s] the crisis” while it succeeds in eschewing the pitfalls of catastrophism; in contrast, I argue that the film’s catastrophist rhetoric is in fact a key symptom of its complicity in the structural logic of capitalism.
- 2.
I thank Tatu Laukkanen for suggesting this to me after my lecture on Chasing Ice at the master class “Media and the Arctic”, University of Tampere, 27 November 2018.
- 3.
Indeed, Kaganovsky, MacKenzie and Westerstahl Stenport mention Chasing Ice as an example of “‘new explorer’ films that draw on past tropes” (2019, 6).
- 4.
Thus, Klaus Dodds and Rikke Bjerg Jensen write that “the film picks up on [the] trope of the ice being indicative of rapid change” in the hope of convincing audiences of “the severity of ongoing climate change” (2019, 157), and for Michael Renov, the film “becomes a powerful tool for altering the public conversation around climate change” (2019, 211).
- 5.
For Kaganovsky, MacKenzie and Stenport, Silent Snow is an example of “Arctic Indigenous environmental documentaries” (2019, 23); Lill-Ann Körber similarly discusses the film “[a]s an example of ecocinema from and about Greenland” (2017, 156).
- 6.
As Körber argues, “[t]he main point of the film is the juxtaposition of local and global perspectives, of a ‘sense of place’ with a ‘sense of the planetary’” (2017, 156).
- 7.
I thank Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Scott MacKenzie and Klaus Dodds as well as the students of the lecture “Imagining the Arctic” (University of Zurich, spring 2017) for an inspiring discussion of Silent Snow that influenced the writing of the following paragraphs.
- 8.
For a good overview of debates about femininity and fluidity, see Stephens (2014).
- 9.
As Kirsten Thisted points out, “Greenlanders are actively engaged in forming a cosmopolitan and urban modernity that reflects the range of globalisation processes” (2014, 98). Somewhat surprisingly, however, she refers to Silent Snow as an example of a film that presents Greenland as remote and ‘traditional’, a claim that is somewhat hard to reconcile with the film’s presentation of Knudsen-Ostermann as a cosmopolitan travelling the world and fluently speaking four languages (Kalaallisut, Danish, English and Spanish).
- 10.
The use of mobile aerial shots as a cinematic rendition of sila is common in Inuit cinema. Other examples include the drone shots in Marc Fussing Rosbach’s Akornatsinniittut—Tarratta Nunaanni (2017) and Lucy Tulugarjuk’s Tia and Piujuq (2018).
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Riquet, J. (2024). Hard Ice, Soft Snow? Transnationalism, Spectatorship and the Arctic Sublime in Chasing Ice (2011) and Silent Snow (2011). In: Hemkendreis, A., Jürgens, AS. (eds) Communicating Ice through Popular Art and Aesthetics. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39787-5_11
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