Summary: | This chapter examines a large number of actualités - short non-fiction films from the early history of cinema - set in the Scandinavian Arctic. Exemplifying with early documentaries made by primarily Swedish and French film companies, including Pathé Frères, Svenska Biografteatern, Svensk Kinematograf and Svensk Filmindustri, Dahlquist discusses the exoticization and racialization of the Sámi population that were constituent of the these early films. Such tropes, Dahlquist shows, were common also in other forms of visual mass media at the time, exhibits at the Stockholm open-air museum Skansen included. The chapter traces production, distribution, circulation, and reception history of these films. Dahlquist also presents key thematic and visual components of Victor Sjöström’s silent drama film Daughter of the Peaks (1914).
|