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).