Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:21:51.796Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Virtual Travels and the Tourist Gaze

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Jeffrey Geiger
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Get access

Summary

The rise of motion pictures was closely tied to changing concepts and modes of travel. After the mid-nineteenth century, tourism saw unprecedented growth, and with it the distant corners of the world seemed to creep closer to established metropolitan centers. Tourism became such a fixture of modern life that, John Urry suggests, a ‘tourist gaze’ emerged as a ‘socially organised and systematised’ mass consumer phenomenon and dominant form of modern perception (1990: 1). For Ellen Strain, the tourist gaze was, and is, ‘mobile, portable, and even culturally promiscuous’: the gaze itself traveled, and was transported into other media that themselves referenced acts of traveling. The mobility and portability of the tourist gaze could therefore extend from actual tourism to perusing issues of National Geographic, or to the armchair tourism of watching a film travelogue (2003: 2).

As the tourist gaze took hold and solidified, people arguably began interacting more intimately with images of the world than with the world itself. Motion picture technology – like tourism, a growing leisure pursuit – kept pace with modern travel developments, mirroring and often exploiting them. The tourist and image-making industries were mutually dependent. Tom Gunning suggests that the production of images was essential to selling demands for travel: ‘One wanted to travel partly because one had already seen images of distant places’, while images of these places were often ‘the end products of the journey, the proof one had been there’ (2006: 28).

Type
Chapter
Information
American Documentary Film
Projecting the Nation
, pp. 40 - 64
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×