"It's so cold in Alaska": Evoking Exploration Between Bazin and The Forbidden Quest

Abstract

In this narrative, only a few short steps separate the travel documents of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley to the nascent genres of documentary and ethnographic film. Exploratory films here form an Ursprung for the British documentary movement and the anthropological film, instantiating a relation to landscape space that would become a key element of non-fiction filmmaking. Bazin goes on to make an immediate geographical and significatory shift. He continues, “Not long afterwards, very likely because of the success of the Arctic films, a type of production appeared which we might categorize as ‘tropical and equatorial.’”2 This spa-