“Faces like Landscapes”: Documentary Cinema and Political Change in the Far North | Stefan Hollander

Summary: The northern regions of the Nordic states and Russia are technically part of the “Old World”, but recent history, thorny ethnic relations, politics, and not least its contemporary cinema, can be seen as closely related to those of postcolonial settler situations in the “New World”. Depending on context and ethnic and political allegiance, this relentlessly exoticized, remote, sparsely populated, ethnically and linguistically diverse region is itself imagined according to different, overlapping and conflicting geographies; as the northern peripheries of nation states, or as Sápmi, the transnational land of the Sámi people. This paper examines how contemporary documentary cinema in North Scandinavian Sápmi discovers, recomposes and deconstructs Northern identities in the space between the possibilities and imperatives presented by contemporary politics and, in the words of anthropologist Kjell Olsen, the “complexity of the quotidian, individual selves which often contest the clear-cut categories of collectivity endorsed by institutional discourses”. In doing so, filmmakers make auto-ethnographic use of images that have long been central to a “common sense” of Northern iconography, such as natural landscape, costume, reindeer, wildlife, maps and sacred sites. However, Northern films from different subject positions implicitly rely on divergent or even mutually exclusive historical and political narratives. In documentary biography and autobiography, this intensifies the dramatic significance and the political, ethical and ethnic volatility of the most ambiguous of Northern visual signifiers, the face.