New Arctic Cinemas by Anna Westerstahl Stenport;

Author:Anna Westerstahl Stenport;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520390546
Publisher: University of California Press

These are activities linked to indigenous efforts to assert their rights to self-representation, governance, and cultural autonomy after centuries of assimilationist policies by surrounding states, part of a spectrum of practices of self-conscious mediation and cultural mobilization more generally that began to take on particular shape and velocity in the late 20th century. . . . From small-scale video and local radio to digital projects, archival websites, and mobile phone films, to national indigenous television stations and feature films, indigenous media makers have found opportunities for all kinds of cultural creativity, increasingly on their own terms. (2016, 582–83)

Importantly, repatriation and reclamation allows for what V.-P. Lehtola calls “an archaeology of knowledge in reverse” to promote expanded access, new interpretation of existing sources, increased influence of Sámi thought and practices, and the rediscovery of ancestral voices to make these a constituent part of the Sámi present (2005, 84–87). Lehtola confirms: “The right to one’s own history means criticism and re-evaluation of conventional readings, and discovery of one’s own voice and context” (2005, 87). In this way, Sámi historiography becomes newly constituted, less based on the traditional disciplines that underpin “Lappology” (ethnology and linguistics), whose “ ‘facts’ abstracted from their context have often resulted in biased and utterly erroneous conclusions” (2005, 87). The work of Indigenous documentary filmmakers, such as Gauriloff, who address neglected aspects of Sámi history—by reconfiguring material from ethnologists who collected and documented Sámi practices and narratives (e.g., Crottet and Méndez)—are thus part of a repatriation and reclamation process that exemplifies Lehtola’s call for an archaeology of knowledge in reverse. On the one hand, Cocq and Dubois argue, Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest “seems at first to break with broader patterns of Sámi ethnopolitical filmmaking” by avoiding “a pan-Sámi perspective,” yet, on the other hand, “Gauriloff’s film makes a place for the Skolt story within the broader narrative of Sámi colonial history” (2019, 172, 173). The director’s emphasis on repatriation of audiovisual material engages in a Sámi interventionist historiography that goes beyond national and linguistic borders for one specific time.

The status of repatriated, reclaimed, and repurposed audiovisual material in Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest is ambiguous; it is an experimental documentary that gains its aesthetic and thematic force by juxtaposing form and content. The film integrates material that can be understood as ethnographic, including Crottet’s voice recordings that formed the basis for his publications about the Skolt Sámi and Méndez’s 16mm films documenting Sámi life. Yet the Crottet-Méndez audiovisual material was never used to make an ethnographic film, and Méndez’s material often contained images of his partner Crottet, so these images could easily be seen as home movies taken on family voyages. And Gauriloff doesn’t demarcate the material as ethnographic, but celebrates it as a trove of happily retrieved connections to her family’s past—not only lost, but heretofore not known to exist. This also speaks to interventionist historiography, as the film’s reframing of materials that could be construed to be ethnographic—home movies and tourist photography, or even both—gives them a new status as reverse archaeology. Indeed, Gauriloff’s

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