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Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles By Erkki Huhtamo. Boston, MIT Press, $45.00 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter The paramount mass-media attraction of its era, the 'moving panorama' has, until now, received only piecemeal treatment; cast in the shadow of its larger brother, the fixed, 360-dgree panorama, it has generally been regarded as an historical side-note. There have been studies of moving panoramas of certain subjects -- such as my own Arctic Spectacles -- and some of particular regions, such as Mimi Colligan's Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainment in 19th-Century Autralia and New Zealand , but no comprehensive, international consideration of the role of moving panoramas in the history of visual culture. That is, until now: Erkki Huhtamo's Illusions in Motio n not only takes up the larger histories of this medium, but documents them with an enormous number of hitherto-unseen primary-source materials. For a me

Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition By Heather Davis-Fisch NY: Palgrave Macmillan, $85 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Books on various aspects of the Franklin expedition have been a staple here at the Arctic Book Review since our very first issue nearly fourteen years ago; we've reviewed biographies of Franklin, volumes of Inuit testimony , the lives of Franklin officers , those who searched for him, and of Lady Franklin , along with novels and poems inspired by these events. There's a great body of conventional historical and biographical material on the subject, enough to fill a lifetime's study -- but what has been wanting has been a book which fully examines the cultural impact and lasting significance of the narratives that have clustered around this history, its mythologies (in the full Barthean sense). Aside from Margaret Atwood's (still brilliant) lecture "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew" (publi

The Ambitions of Jane Franklin, Victorian Lady Adventurer By Alison Alexander Allen & Unwin. 294pp.  AU $35 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter For all her enormous stature -- her inspiring of three dozen search expeditions for her missing husband, her persuasive powers over Presidents and Prime Ministers, and her eponymous ballad, Lady Jane Franklin has remained a difficult subject for biographers and historians. It's not that she left no documentation -- between her own letters and journals (extensive, though her handwriting is infamously close and difficult to read) and those of her niece Sophy Cracroft, there's ample material -- it's just that, between the private woman who emerges in these manuscripts, and the public figure so dominant that her apartments opposite the Admirality's headquarters were dubbed "The Battery," there seems at times a strange gap. Not only that, but even with all the material available, there a second, perhaps unbridgeable gap betwe

Nanook of the North and The Wedding of Palo , and other Films of Arctic Life Flicker Alley, $44.95 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Some years ago, I was at a conference on Arctic films at Nipissing University when I heard an intriguing paper by the Greeenlandic scholar Erik Gant . His talk took aim at the curious bifurcation in filmed portrayals of Eskimo peoples, using Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North and Friedrich Dalsheim's 1934 The Wedding of Palo as its bookends.  The title of his talk was " Good and Bad Eskimos " -- and as I listened I realized I'd only seen half, or rather less than half of the important films depicting Inuit life, since I'd never seen, or even heard of Palo . My ignorance was remedied, in part at least, later in the conference, when we watched almost all of a 16mm print of Palo that Dr. Gant had brought with him from Denmark (the conference organizers, unforgivably, shut down the film over time concerns before it had concl

Isuma: The Art and Imagination of Ruben Komangapik  Igloolik: Inhabit Media, $29.95 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter William Butler Yeats once said of the Greek sculptor Callimachus that he "handled marble as though it were bronze." The Inuit sculptor Ruben Komangapik handles no marble, but in his hands, wood, bone, and narhwal horns grow as smooth and fluid as polished metal, or even glass; it is almost as if some spirit hidden within the materials has animated them and brought them to vivid, viscid life. His sculptures play with surfaces, using and altering their texture to create singular effects. Eyes of polished stone gaze out from spongy bone in Taqanaqruluk ;  walrus heads with polished tusks peep out of a bony snowbank in Hard Times ; an osseous Sedna with an onyx face offers a  qulliq with a row of tiny stone flames in Sedna, the Oil Giver ; a hooded hunter is poised on a shelf of horn as an unsuspecting seal swims up toward its aglu from below in The Seal Hunter .  T

Lost! The Franklin Expedition and the Fate of the Crews of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror By Richard Galaburri NY: Black Raven Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Into the icy mists surrounding the final fate of Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition there comes a new figure: Richard Galaburri. An Arctic book dealer, collector, and traveller, his short essays on various aspects of northern history have appeared the The Musk-Ox , Arctic , and other specialist journals, but those seeking a copy of Lost! at their local library or bookstore may be forgiven if they begin to wonder whether the book and its author are themselves phantasms of the frozen zone; even the vast WorldCat archives contain no record of the volume.  Happily, I can report that both the book and Mr. Galaburri do in fact exist; both may be found on eBay , where he's been quietly selling this modest volume for the past year, and I hope that this review will bring them to the attention of a wider audience. And it will be a

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure by Arthur Conan Doyle; Edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower University of Chicago Press, $35 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "came of age in the Arctic," celebrating his 21st birthday at nearly 80 degrees north, is one of those little diamonds of fact in whose facets all kinds of unexpected light is prismed. For, although the editors don't mention it, Doyle was born in May of 1859, the very month that Sir Leopold McClintock came upon the last note left by Sir John Franklin's men on King William Island, and although Doyle describes his shipboard service as a bit of a "lark," the future creator of Sherlock Holmes was surely drawn to the Arctic partly for its air of unsolved mysteries,  implacable ice, and uncharted hazards. It featured in two of his stories -- "The Captain of the Pole Star" (based on the same experiences this diary recounts) and, somewhat less directly, i