Documenting Greenland: Popular Geopolitics on Film

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Abstract

This chapter explores the intersection between documentary and fictional films and their geographical representations of Greenland, including geopolitical relationships, agents and objects, ecologies, and indigenous communities. Our range in terms of themes and topics embraces US, Danish, and Greenlandic productions. The sample includes a multitude of genres, such as documentary, docudrama, and fictional, informed by historical experiences of Greenland as a Danish colony. Contemporary thrillers with embedded documentary material, such as Christina Rosendahl’s The Idealist (Idealisten, Denmark, 2015), provide further diversity because of its usage of archival footage of the 1968 US B-52 crash near Thule Air Base and of the subsequent clean-up operation.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationArctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos
EditorsLilya Kaganovsky, Scott MacKenzie, Anna Westerstahl Stenport
Place of PublicationBloomington
PublisherUniversity of Indiana Press
Number of pages29
ISBN (Electronic)978-0-253-04031-2
ISBN (Print)978-0-253-04030-5
Publication statusPublished - 4 Jan 2019

Keywords

  • Greenland
  • Geopolitics
  • Denmark
  • Arctic
  • documentary
  • film
  • indigenous peoples
  • Cold War
  • colonialism

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