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Intellect Books - Alfio Leotta

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172 pages

English

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Following the success of prominent feature films shot on location, including Tolkien’s wildly popular The Lord of the Rings, New Zealand boasts an impressive film tourism industry. This book examines the relationship between New Zealand’s cinematic representation—as both a vast expanse of natural beauty and a magical world of fantasy on screen—and its tourism imagery, including the ways in which savvy local tourism boards have in recent decades used the country’s film representations to sell New Zealand as a premiere travel destination. Focusing on the films that have had a strong impact on marketing strategies by local tourist boards, Touring the Screen will be of interest to all those working and studying in the fields of cinema, postcolonial history, and tourism studies.

Introduction

Early New Zealand Films and Western Voy(ag)eurs

1940–90: New Zealand Film Landscapes for Prospective ‘Cinenauts’

The Legacy of the Piano: Film-Tourist Geographies and the Aesthetic of the Sublime

From Ngati to Whale Rider: The Filmic Journey of the Indigenous Traveller

From Mt. Fuji To Mt. Taranaki: Dépaysement and Celebrity Worship in the Last Samurai

‘Welcome to New Zealand, Home of Middle Earth’: Heterotopian Impulse, Western Anxiety and Spatial Identity in The Lord Of The Rings

Conclusions

Sujets

Arts visuels

Cinéma

Cinema

General officer

Art

General

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505848
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Touring the Screen:
Tourism and New Zealand Film Geographies
Touring the Screen:
Tourism and New Zealand Film Geographies
by Alfio Leotta
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leotta, Alfio.
Touring the screen: tourism and New Zealand film geographies / Alfio Leotta.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-1-84150-475-9 (alk. paper)
1. New Zealand-In motion pictures. 2. Tourism and motion pictures. 3. Travelogues (Motion pictures)-New Zealand-History and criticism. 4. Tourism-Social aspects-New Zealand. 5. Motion picture industry-New Zealand-History-20th century. I. Title.
PN1995.9.N494L46 2011
791.43 65893--dc22 2011011406
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Holly Rose Cover photo: David Scott Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN 9781841504759
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Scope of the study
Film, tourism and postmodernism
Chapter outline
Notes
Early New Zealand Films and Western Voy(ag)eurs
Introduction
New Zealand, or the world in a nutshell
New Zealanders: eternal tourists and proud pioneers
The Maori: between ethnographic and tourist romance
Empty landscapes and (post)colonial enterprises
1940-1990: New Zealand Film Landscapes for Prospective Cinenauts
Introduction
From the National Film Unit to the Film Commission
Mapping New Zealand landscapes
Place versus space
Escape from the narrative space
Transitional space, porous space: the road
The city, or New Zealand dystopia
Natural places and natural spaces: the mountain and the bush
Journey to the centre of the film: the cinenauts
The Legacy of The Piano : Film-Tourist Geographies and the Aesthetic of the Sublime
Introduction
Methodological premises
Ada McGrath: a Victorian adventure tourist in New Zealand
Nature, space and narrative
Locations and national identity
Framing the beach
Return to the beach: Memory and Desire
Conclusions
From Ngati to Whale Rider : The Filmic Journey of the Indigenous Traveller
Introduction
Fourth Cinema
Whale Rider : indigenous locations and global imaginary
Whangara: between reality and hyper-reality
Ethnographic, neo-colonial and tourist gazes
The indigenous traveller
The hybrid traveller
The Western traveller
Conclusions
From Mt. Fuji to Mt. Taranaki: D paysement and Celebrity Worship in The Last Samurai
Introduction
The Last Samurai in Taranaki
The Last Samurai and tourist imagination
From Mt. Taranaki to Mt. Fuji: negotiating the meaning of place
Celebrity worship
The management of film-induced tourism: critical factors
Conclusions
Welcome to New Zealand, Home of Middle Earth : Heterotopian Impulse, Western Anxiety and Spatial Identity in The Lord of the Rings
Introduction
The Lord of the Rings : merchandising and film franchise
Style, narrative and space in The Lord of the Rings
9/11 and Western anxiety
New Zealand
Conclusions
Conclusions
Filmography
Primary films
Secondary films
Bibliography
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This undertaking would have not been possible without the unvaluable support offered by Professor Nick Perry and Associate Professor Laurence Simmons of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland.
I would also like to thank those peers, colleagues and friends who offered to share their knowledge and erudition during various long and insightful conversations about the topic of my book. I am particularly grateful to Professor Tom O Regan, Associate Professor Bernadette Luciano, Dr. Amy West, Dr. Stephen Turner, Dr. Cherie Lacey, David Williams, Line Hazer, Jenny Leitheiser, Antonio Orlino and Marion Nouvel for their suggestions and invaluable encouragement over the last four years. Special thanks also to David Scott for generously providing the photo for the cover of the book and to Melanie Marshall for her crucial support during the editing process.
For the extraordinary contribution they made to this study my gratitude goes to Vincent Ward, Owen Hughes, Sue Radcliff from Samurai Village Tours, Joanna Cheok from Tourism New Zealand, the staff of Lord of the Rings Tours Queenstown and Gary from Minareth Lodge in Wanaka.
Finally, I would like to express my love and recognition to my family for their incommensurable practical and moral support throughout my studies and my whole life.
P REFACE
My first memory of New Zealand is associated with a 1988 Japanese computer game called New Zealand Story 1 (Ny J rando Sut r ). In New Zealand Story the player controls a sneaker-wearing kiwi called Tiki, and the aim of the game is to rescue several of his kiwi friends who have been trapped in various parts of New Zealand by a leopard seal. Over the course of the game the player can use improbable weapons such as arrows, laser guns or bombs to destroy his enemies. The main appeal of the game for me was the interaction it offered with the exotic and magical space of New Zealand. In the game, the country was constituted as a maze of platforms, a playground within which Tiki moved using vehicles as diverse as balloons, flying saucers and ducks.
As the years went by, other encounters with media products, from films to guidebooks as well as articles and TV programmes, slowly combined to form my personal virtual image of New Zealand . Of course, its geographical position as the antipodean equivalent of Italy has always exerted a great fascination on the Italian imaginary, and this certainly influenced my own perception of Aotearoa. While the history of migration has made equally distant places such as America and Australia eerily familiar to Italians, New Zealand has been relatively untouched by the traditional routes of the Italian diaspora, and it has therefore kept an aura of mystery. Because of its unfamiliarity and geographical distance from Europe, New Zealand features in Italian popular culture as a synonym for ends of the earth .
The release of The Lord of the Rings trilogy at the beginning of the millennium offered a great opportunity for a more extensive simulated journey to the country, particularly for devoted Tolkien fans like myself. My graduation in Communication Studies at the University La Sapienza of Rome in 2003 offered a serendipitous opportunity to take a sabbatical year to visit New Zealand. After my working-holiday experience in Aotearoa I returned to Europe where I continued my studies, undertaking a European Master in Tourism Communication at the University of Nice in France. This course stimulated my interest in Tourism Studies and further augmented my passion for academic research. When I subsequently decided to continue my studies at a doctoral level it seemed logical to combine my Film and Communication Studies background with my new interest in tourism. The Lord of the Rings craze that was raging at the time made New Zealand famous all around the world as a potential tourist destination, thus offering a perfect case study for my research into film tourism. The possibility of returning to New Zealand gradually materialised and my previous experience of the country proved to be crucial in helping me defining my research project. A pre-doctoral six-month study period at the EHESS of Marseille, under the supervision of Professor Serge Tcherkezoff, head of the CREDO (Centre de recherche et documentation sur l Oc anie), anticipated my relocation to New Zealand and deepened my knowledge of the country s colonial history. In 2006 I returned to Auckland again, this time to investigate the tourist drive that had originally brought me here.
During the three and a half years that it has taken to assemble this book I have embarked on a triple journey. Firstly, it has been an exciting voyage through New Zealand cinema. Since the beginning of my research my personal collection of local films has flourished and both the Auckland Film Archive and University Audio Visual Library have become very familiar places. The second journey has been the one that took me through my doctoral research. The challenge of working in a different language and dealing with a different academic tradition has energised and motivated me throughout this research. Finally, at a more personal level, the last few years have also represented a thrilling opportunity to discover New Zealand culture and society. I believe my initial status of tourist gradually shifted as I immersed myself in the local cultural milieu. I hope that this research has benefited from my multiple and overlapping identities as Italian, migrant and prospective New Zealander.
Twenty years after my first media encounter with New Zealand, through Tiki the kiwi, I am grateful that I have had the privilege of accessing a more complex picture of the country. I hope that this work, inspired by the filmic journey which has directly influenced my personal New Zealand Story , will be of some use to the reader.
Notes
1 . New Zealand Story is defined in technical terms as an arcade game. The main characteristics of arcade games are very short levels, simple and intuitive control schemes and rapidly increasing difficulty.
I NTRODUCTION
This book examines the relation between cinematic representations of New Zealand and the tourist imagery of the country. The histories of cinema and tourism are deeply interconnected, since both these cultural activities provide di