In this week’s blog post we will
reflect on parts of the literature and the presentation of last Monday’s class.
We will mostly focus on the relationships between spatial experience,
imagination and memories, in the context of media tourism. In his article on
media tourism and places of imagination, Stijn Reijnders brings forward the
following question: “Why do people need physical points of reference for their
imagination?”[1]
One answer, he proposes, has been provided by Pierre Nora (Les Lieux de mémoire, 1984-1992), who claims that this need is the
result of people’s fascination with the past. Reijnders’ counterargument is
that these places of symbolical reference do not, by definition, always refer
to the past. Rather, spatial experience is very much connected to our sensory
input, which is a continuing process in the here and now, and not something
inherent to memories of bygone places and/or situations. An important
understanding of the relationship between places and imagination is, in our
eyes, given by Jeff Malpas’ article Place
and experience (1999), to which Reijnders refers in the following quote:
“Even the wildest
fantasies spring from something recognizable, for the simple reason that there
would be no way to picture them otherwise. And not only do thoughts, fantasies
and concepts spring from physical experiences, but, according to Malpas, they
constantly seek confirmation from those physical experiences, mirroring it.”[2]
This offers some insight in the
processes of memorizing and the symbolical, signifying mechanisms that take
place between the physical experiences and imaginations of people. Not only are
the two, as it seems, interconnected, they are almost inseparable and moreover,
people desire this inseparability. The examples of media tourism, presented
during the group’s presentation from last Monday, illustrated this argument
well, as they showed how enormous the media tourism branch is: Lord of the
Rings (LOTR) tourism in New Zealand, Harry Potter tourism in the U.K., and vice
versa. We not only got to learn how people visit sites of their favorite film
or series, but also how people interact with these places: the writings on the
London hospital, used in BBC’s Sherlock
series, and examples of ‘ostension’, or when people re-enact fictional events
in a real-life setting, such as when LOTR fans dress up to feel like they are in the film’s fictional world.
The debate on media
tourism was related to the ‘tourist gaze’ during class. Whereas in studies on
the tourist gaze there is a focus on how the gaze is formed by expectations of
people, formed most of the time by ‘tourist images’ in brochures and such, we
did not pay any attention to the role of the camera in media tourism. Whenever LOTR
fans dress up and travel to sites used in the movies to re-enact scenes, it is
the films’ camerawork that shapes their expectations of how they will
experience their media-touristic quest. People will want to take in the same
positions as the camera in the film, as if they will become one with the films’
imagery and the storyteller’s point of view – that of the camera. This means
that media tourism is not just a two-sided phenomenon, wherein spatial/physical
experience and imagination come together, but that the camera functions as a medium
through which these two sides of the total experience are brought about.
Seeing that the
camerawork has the ability to shape people’s expectations of a physical
experience, it means that this branch of tourism has the power of changing
physical experience of a place. These sites become symbolically marked by their
appearance on camera.[3]
Moreover, these sites function in the film as signs of authenticity, as they
are sets that are not totally ‘build’. Instead, these places fulfill the role
of creating certain kinds of atmospheres, dependent on what is aimed at by the
film’s director. What is interesting is that these places were pre-existent to
filming and they probably already carried some sort of meaning, outside of a
cinematic-related background. This interruption in a place’s symbolic meaning
would be an interesting subject of research, as it illustrates another example
of the power of the camera, and, in this case, of cinema and television.
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