"The first book to address the vast diversity of Northern circumpolar cinemas from a transnational perspective, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic presents the region as one of great and previously overlooked cinematic diversity. With chapters on polar explorer films, silent cinema, documentaries, ethnographic and indigenous film, gender and ecology -- as well as Hollywood and the USSR's uses and abuses of the Arctic -- this book provides a groundbreaking account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present. An international array of European, Russian, Nordic, and North American scholars challenge dominant notions of the region in popular and political culture and demonstrate how moving images (cinema, television, video, and digital media) have been central to the very definition of the Arctic since the end of the 19th century. Films on Ice radically alters stereotypical views of the Arctic region, and therefore of film history itself."--Back cover.