Hard Ice, Soft Snow? Transnationalism, Spectatorship and the Arctic Sublime in Chasing Ice (2011) and Silent Snow (2011)

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of two environmental films that foreground Arctic snow and ice: the climate change documentary Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, 2011), which follows photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, and Silent Snow (2011) by the Greenlandic filmmaker Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann and her husband Jan van den Berg, which intersperses two journeys, one in Greenland and one around the world, to trace the pollution of the Arctic by pesticides that circulate globally. The chapter argues that Chasing Ice reinvents the Arctic sublime by presenting climate change as a visual spectacle recorded by the figure of the photographer, who becomes a twenty-first-century version of the heroic Arctic explorer. Silent Snow, on the other hand, ties together art and activism in a transnational aesthetics that is grounded in relational experiences and rooted in Inuit understandings of snow and ice, contrasting with the masculinist and individualist connotations of ice in Orlowski’s film. While both films are invested in communicating and visualising environmental issues, both engage with snow and ice materially as well as metaphorically. They do so in radically different ways that also posit very different viewers: a passive consumer in Chasing Ice and an active participant in Silent Snow.