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In this lecture the focus is on A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s ethnographic work, notably his fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in 1906–8. About the same time, the Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen studied the Polar Eskimos in North-West Greenland. While sharing a general quest for ethnographic description of little-known groups, they styled their fieldwork in different ways, saw colonialism in different terms, adhered to different knowledge traditions, and not least, worked in different natural environments. This resulted in very distinct portraits of ‘the natives’, which were to cast long shadows into the present, within which the history of first encounters is firmly embedded.

This chapter examines one of Denmark’s best-known ethnographic fiction feature films, Knud Rasmussen’s The Wedding of Palo (1934), directed by Friedrich Dalsheim, and shot in Western Greenland. While in many ways a documentary in the salvage ethnography tradition of the first part of the twentieth century, and sharing many similarities with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Volquardsen examines the significance of this film for the contested geopolitical status of Greenland in the early 1930s. Foregrounding the venerable status of Knud Rasmussen as an explorer and ethnographer in Danish history, this chapter shows how the film continues to be both cherished and mocked as a thwarted historical document for the Greenlandic population. The legacy of this film, showcasing seal-hunts, kayaking tricks, and domestic and cultural traditions (including drum-dancing), has remained significant and occupies a complex position in Denmark-Greenland cultural relations.

This chapter analyses the history of one of the most successful indigenous film- and video-making groups, Nunavut’s Isuma. Based in Igloolik, Bredin charts the emergence of the group, as led by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, while addressing the historical limitations on Inuit filmmaking in Canada. Bredin examines the impact of Isuma’s works both on indigenous filmmaking in the Arctic and in Canada, as well as on global art cinema. Bredin provides a detailed history of Isuma from its early days in community activism and Inuit video production, to its move into documentary and feature filmmaking. The chapter focuses on The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) and also considers works such as Cannes award winner Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001). Bredin concludes with an analysis of Isuma’s distribution strategies and its goal to connect with both indigenous and non-indigenous audiences.

This chapter focuses on The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), a film about the contact between shamanism and Christianity voiced through a native Inuit point of view. The film's story is about the near-eradication of traditional spiritual practices and the process of recovery — but this process goes beyond the story of the film, and can also be engendered by the process of making the film itself and its relationship with previous Inuit films, namely Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001). Through representing this religio-cultural encounter the film comments on the concept of story as a vehicle of history that calls for an examination of representation and value (cultural, but also social and economic). This is a film about seeing the spirits, and about the loss of sight that accompanies cultural and spiritual change, but it also provides us with a lesson in how to see.

This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.

This chapter describes the chaos and disruptions that overtook the Chukchi and Yupik peoples during the Russian Civil War, which culminated with the Soviet takeover of the peninsula in 1923 and was followed by the seizure of trading posts and foreign trading vessels and the confiscation of traders’ supplies and money.