Into The Ice: Early Polar Cinema

At the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema accompanied the early pioneers of the unmapped polar regions—a new form of explorational documentation was born. Global pioneers such as Sir Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley first brought the Arctic to screen during their early 1900s photographic depictions of their travels. Just a decade later, the Arctic inspired the dominant genre of informational documentary we see today, as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) became known as the first documentary. Though, unable to escape absolute artifice, the prominent French fur company Revillon Frères was later revealed to have sponsored Flaherty’s depiction of the Arctic as an indirect advertisement for the brand. Hudson Bay, a rival fur company soon followed Revillon Frères’ approach, producing a number of their own films based in the polar regions. With the increasing number of screening representations, arctic cinema was born. Evolving from a mere practice of explorational documentation to sponsored documentary to, finally, fictional depictions of the never-ending ice, early Arctic film defined the documentary genre within the medium and cemented its place in cinema history. Frozen in time, attached is a list of early polar documentaries and pre-1940 fictional representations of the Arctic, Antarctic, and tundral expeditions into the unrelenting ice.