tourism and the moving image; ewa mazierska & john k walton

decades we encounter such terms pertaining to the affinity between the mov-
ing image and tourism as ‘cinematic flânerie’ (see Friedberg, 1993) and ‘cinema
without walls’ (see Corrigan, 1991).

Tourists and film and television viewers alike are often construed as disem-

powered addicts or sheep, following the flock and accused of passivity, of being
consumers of objects and meanings rather than their creators and even of par-
ticipating in a world that is unreal.The addictive, self-perpetuating character of
screen images, results, according to Christian Metz, from the exhibitionist and
secretive nature of cinema. Watching films means being complicit in a world
which in a fundamental sense is absent and fake, as ‘during the screening of the
film, the audience is present, and aware of the actor, but the actor is absent, and
unaware of the audience; and during the shooting, when the actor was present,
it was the audience which was absent’ (Metz, 1985: 547).The gap between pres-
ence and absence renews the viewer’s desire to watch, thus guaranteeing the
proliferation of cinema as an institution. In tourist discourse the perceived pas-
sivity of tourism, and consequently its low status in the hierarchy of human
pleasures, is linked to its assumed mass character, contrasting with the elitist
nature of ‘travel’. It is captured by the phrase ‘beaten track’, which ‘succinctly
designates the space of the “touristic” as a region in which all experience is pre-
dictable and repetitive, all cultures and objects mere “touristy” self-parodies’
(Buzard, 1993: 4).This is an unduly demanding level at which to couch such a
distinction, practically equating travel with exploration and consigning all other
recreational itinerancy to an inflated and stigmatized ‘tourist’ category. Such an
approach is inadequate to both practices, not least because discovery and exper-
iment can be experienced as extensions of the agenda of what are supposed to
be the most tightly controlled of ‘package tour’ experiences, and all tourists are
capable of agency and choice, just as all the members of a cinema audience con-
struct their reactions to the film in their own way (see Wright, 2002). Such phe-
nomena as ‘trouble tourism’, in which tourists engage in dangerous activities, or
reality shows in which ordinary people not only look at people like them, but
also affect the course of action (albeit by making choices from a prescribed list
within the limited parameters of the programme’s scripts), can be regarded as
more daring ways to overcome the ascribed passivity and boundedness of these
two activities.

Equally, tourism and media consumption are perceived as based on a duali-

ty of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In tourism discourse the ‘us’ is always equated with those
in the charge of the gaze, and ‘them’ with the objects of this gaze. The latter
tend to be construed as uncivilized, barbaric or at least primitive and provin-
cial, and the objects of a superior, classificatory, orientalizing gaze, while ‘we’
are worldly, civilized and specially privileged in our claims to understanding
what we see through the lenses provided by the tourist process. As Heather
Norris Nicholson argues in the article published in this collection, ‘prevailing
assumptions and prejudices frame how observers contemplate the people and
places around them. Their touristic voyeurism, however apparently benign, is

tourist studies 6:1

imbricated with notions of superiority shaped by gender, class, education, race,
culture and geography’. Consequently, tourism discourse has been compared to
colonial discourse. On the other hand, as Susan Sontag observes, tourism can be
used as a way to overcome colonialist attitudes by learning that there are differ-
ent ways of being civilized and civil (Sontag, 2002: 283); but this requires deep-
er and more extended immersion in the ‘host culture’ than is available to most
transient tourists.

In a way that seems to contradict assumptions about tourists’ and viewers’ pas-

sivity, recent authors emphasize that for both tourist and media consumer, imag-
ination is crucial (see Crouch et al., 2005). For cinemagoers, the film that
unfolds on screen is only a stimulus to produce their own film internally, to
suture the fragmented story into a coherent whole and to speculate how it
might be continued. Similarly, tourists who encounter only selected, isolated,
framed snapshots of the country they visit may seek to fill the gaps in their
knowledge, imagining what the parts of the country they did not see might
look like.

Tourism and the moving image have converging historical trajectories,

although the elitist origins of the former predate the latter by more than a cen-
tury and have even older roots, while versions of the moving image were reach-
ing popular audiences from a very early stage through the magic lanterns and
subsequent fairground films of the later 19th and early 20th century, the point
at which tourism was also opening out to ‘mass’ participation, especially in the
Anglo-Saxon world (see Toulmin et al., 2004).The 20th century, and especially
the generations after the Second World War, saw growing mobility and fluidity
in pursuit of new experiences, directly (though in mediated ways) through
tourism and virtually through new media. Accordingly, Zygmunt Bauman has
proposed to regard the tourist as the embodiment of postmodernity (see
Bauman, 1996). Similarly, the media became such an important part of human
existence that it prompted Jean Baudrillard to say that we live in hyperreality
rather than reality (see Baudrillard, 1985).

Apart from parallels, there are also connections between tourist and media

activities. Since the invention of the camera and then the movie camera, their
dominant use has been to assist travellers in recording what they are seeing. As
Heather Norris Nicholson observes, cinematography – as enthusiasts called
their new hobby – was part of the new technological apparatus that, together
with trains and later cruise ships, motor cars and aeroplanes, became associat-
ed with 20th-century holidays, in a way that gave agency to the user in terms
of what to record, how to represent it and how to edit it. On the other hand,
tourism and travel from the very beginning was a subject of commercial film
and then television for display to audiences. The first films ever produced by
the Lumière Brothers and Georges Melies, which in due course became para-
digmatic of the two main film genres, that of documentary film and fiction
film, recorded journeys to either real or fictional places. Similarly, television, as
conveyed by the phrase ‘a window on the world’, was to provide its users with

Mazierska and Walton Special issue introduction

information about places they could not visit, or had yet to visit. Moreover, cer-
tain methods of deploying reality in film and television programmes, such as
using an establishing shot, after which the camera moves closer to the objects
represented, reflect the way that tourists approach their destination – first look-
ing at the landscape from a distance, then seeing the details of it, governed by
the guide who draws their attention to a particular building or a monument.
Disruption of such techniques, brought about in European cinema by the
French New Wave and in tourism by the increasing use of air travel and the
packaging of experience in ways that disorientate and isolate places, landscapes
and artefacts from contextual understanding, met sustained cultural criticism in
tourism for disconcerting the viewer and trivializing the experience. With the
passage of time the relation between cinema and media became more complex.
The camera today not only registers tourist activities, but a large proportion of
tourism is stimulated by media representations. For many tourists certain cities
such as New York, London or Madrid are associated more with certain direc-
tors, such as Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almodóvar than with
historical monuments. Moreover, these tourists tend to look at the chosen
objects in the way they remember them from films or television programmes,
as in the contribution of Miami Vice to the remaking of Miami Beach as a tourist
destination (Stofik, 2005: 109–10, 169–70, 240–1). Thus, the tourist gaze
becomes more and more entwined with the media gaze. Due to these afore-
mentioned parallels and congruencies between tourism and the moving image,
we can identify parallel debates in tourist and media studies. For example, the
contentious issue of authenticity in tourism has its counterpart in film studies
in an ongoing debate about realism in film and television.

Whilst these phenomena and their disciplines have much in common, theo-

ries and histories of them are mostly written separately. This can be explained
in part by their relative youth and the need to establish their autonomy by elab-
orating distinctive methodologies. We should not underestimate institutional
factors within academia; whilst film historians tended to be grouped with liter-
ature and linguistics, histories of tourism (a minority pursuit within history
departments) tend to be conducted by geographers, sociologists and anthropol-
ogists, while theoretical approaches to tourism themes occupy similar locations
as well as the more obvious territory of tourism studies and economics depart-
ments (see Walton, 2005). Consequently, debates on tourism have so far
informed media studies only in limited ways, mostly in cases where the media
text represents travel or/and overtly serves touristic purposes. Examples are tel-
evision travel programmes (see Dunn, 2001, 2004) and heritage films (see
Higson, 1993, 1996; Mazierska, 2001). However, even when it happens, the use-
fulness of an interdisciplinary approach is often overlooked. It is worth men-
tioning that road cinema, the only fiction film genre that has travel as its main
topic, is hardly examined from a tourist perspective.

The essays that follow address the inadequate cooperation between tourism

and media studies by exploring the complex web of relations between tourism

tourist studies 6:1

and the moving image, whilst at the same time illuminating the differences and
discontinuities in their discursive practices. Heather Norris Nicholson in her
essay ‘Through the Balkan States: home movies as travel texts and tourism histo-
ries in the Mediterranean’, c.1923–39 discusses how ‘cine photography added a
new dimension to the pleasure of travel in the inter-war years’. Norris
Nicholson considers amateur film as a means to shape, document, share and
prolong tourist experience and, to an extent, as a tool for transforming the per-
ception of the tourist as a follower of the ‘beaten track’ into a creator of new
paths. David Dunn in ‘Singular encounters: mediating the tourist destination in
British television holiday programmes’ looks at the evolution of the British tele-
vision holiday programme from a simple representation of places worth visiting
during a holiday to programmes about lifestyles, aspirations and tastes. In such
programmes the tourist is replacing the tourist destination as the object of the
television camera’s gaze and the guides are celebrity journalists and reporters
whose main or even only credential to be a tourist guide is their very popu-
larity and celebrity. Both Norris Nicholson and Dunn draw attention to the fact
that the media texts make tourists the objects of their own tourist gaze, thus
becoming the vessels of self-discovery. Chieko Iwashita in ‘Media representation
of the UK as a destination for Japanese tourists: popular culture and tourism’
examines the phenomenon of media-induced tourism, using as an example
travels of Japanese tourists to Britain. Iwashita acknowledges the fact that in
contemporary times the association of a particular place or even the whole
country with a powerful media image can be an important incentive to visit this
place and the country, and attempts to establish, using on-line surveys and inter-
views, which British films and television programmes affect most Japanese
tourists’ perception of Britain. Finally, Susan Sydney-Smith in ‘Changing Places:
touring the British crime film’ considers British crime film as a genre both sup-
porting and subverting certain touristic myths about Britain, especially about
the contrast between the north and south of England.

Although these four essays discuss different phenomena and address different

problems, they share one important feature. Implicitly they ask the question:
What makes a media text a touristic text, where does the touristic dimension
of the film or television programme lie? Possible answers to this question can
be situated between two extremes. According to one that can be described as
objectivist the tourist aspect or element is inherent in the text itself, due to such
factors as being produced during tourist activity or documenting a tourist’s
experience.The second hypothesis, which can be labelled as subjectivist or dis-
cursive, claims that the tourist aspect is in the eye of the beholder; there are no
touristic films or television programmes as such, but only ways to see them as a
product of or a stimulus to the tourist gaze. Although these four authors do not
propose a definitive answer to this question, they tend towards the second pos-
sibility by drawing attention to the blurred divisions between what can be
described as explicitly or overtly touristic media texts and non-explicitly tourist
media texts. The synergy comes from both ends, so to speak. Thus, Heather

Mazierska and Walton Special issue introduction

Norris Nicholson and David Dunn identify elements of stylization, narratives
focused on stories of individuals and the use of stars, all features associated with
non-explicitly touristic media text, in films and programmes that ostensibly
serve tourist purposes and are products of tourist activities. Chieko Iwashita and
Susan Sydney-Smith, on the other hand, focus on the immense touristic poten-
tial of non-explicitly touristic films and television programmes, going so far as
to suggest that their power to influence opinions about particular tourist desti-
nations is greater than that of those that are ostensibly geared towards tourists.
Needless to add that this phenomenon endorses the assumption that propagan-
da is most effective when it does not present itself in that guise. By and large,
the closing of the gap between explicit and non-explicit touristic media testi-
fies to the diminishing difference between tourism and non-tourism; to the
human race approaching a time when everybody, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests,
is a tourist, at least in the ‘developed world’ (see Bauman, 1996). One can ask
the question whether humanity reaching this point will make tourist studies
change its status by upgrading it to the position of sociology, or will make this
discipline redundant as the study of everything and nothing. John Urry suggests
the former, writing: ‘An array of developments are taking “tourism” from the
margins of the global order, and indeed of the academy, to almost the centre
of this emergent world of “liquid modernity”’ (2002: 142). However, what is
most important from our perspectives in acknowledging that all media texts
can be treated as touristic texts is that such a conclusion can lead to establish-
ing new branches of media studies and tourist studies: tourist media studies,
paralleling the development of feminist media studies and cultural histories of
tourism. We hope that these four articles can be treated as belonging to these
budding disciplines.

re f e re nc e s

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ewa maz i e r ska is Reader in Contemporary Cinema, Department of Humanities,
University of Central Lancashire. Her publications include numerous articles in Polish
and English and several books, such as Crossing New Europe: The European Road Movie
(Wallflower Press, 2006), Dreams and Diaries: The Cinema of Nanni Moretti (Wallflower
Press, 2004) and From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (IB Tauris,
2003), all co-authored with Laura Rascaroli, Women in Polish Cinema (Berghahn, 2006),
co-authored with Elzbieta Ostrowska. She also co-edited Relocating Britishness
(Manchester University Press, 2004). She is currently working on a book about Polish
postcommunist cinema. Address: Department of Humanities, University of Central
Lancashire, Preston, Harris Building, PR1 2HE. [email: ehmazierska@uclan.ac.uk]

joh n k . walton is Professor of Social History at the University of Central
Lancashire, Preston. He has published extensively on the history of tourism (with a par-
ticular interest in seaside resorts) and regional identity, especially in Britain and Spain.
His most recent books are (with Gary Cross), The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and (ed.) Histories of
Tourism (Clevedon: Channel View, 2005). [email: jkwalton@uclan.ac.uk]

Mazierska and Walton Special issue introduction