Framing the Arctic: Nanook of the North (1922) in the Digital Borderlands

This article traces the troubled legacy of Nanook of the North (1922) into the digital borderlands of the twenty-first century. Rather than revisiting long-standing scholarly debates, it follows the film’s migration into online spaces. On social media, Nanook circulates in fragmented, decontextualized ways that reignite questions about race, representation, authenticity, and colonial storytelling. Social media comment threads become an informal archive of how contemporary audiences confront, resist, or reproduce these themes. By examining this digital reception, the article shows how the film’s unresolved tensions not only persist but intensify online, revealing how colonial images continue to shape public understanding in an algorithm-driven media landscape.