School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHollywood Holidays: case studies of global film tourism sites and their ideological impacts( 2011)This thesis presents a study of film tourism through considering the emergence of the film tourist and of film tourist sites in the mid twentieth century in California. The thesis traces the development of the phenomenon globally over the century and into the new millennium. This area is now a vibrant field of research in tourism studies and my own focus for the thesis is on the concept of the film tourist gaze as it is enunciated in the work of John Urry and others. This study explores the rise of film tourism and its impacts, through a cinema-culture conduit: both studio-created tourism and locations-based travel. I investigate the real impacts of film spectatorship upon local ecologies, and national branding campaigns on national cinemas. I argue that film tourism sites, through acts of “real-life” visitation after a screening experience, enhance the ideological messages contained in originating film texts through the tourist’s repetition of the film’s core narrative and themes at film sites. The practice of film tourism materialises the ideological fantasies contained within the cinema form, yielding interesting insights into the motivations of the film tourist. In each chapter, both the narrative of the individual film(s) and the tourist space itself are interrogated for their prevailing ideologies. The capitalist modes of consumption and production and the fetishisation of loss that the locations invoke, are revealed. From an analysis of five case studies – including three location-based case studies and two studio-based – I map out a constellation of cinematic cultural sites that are crucial to understanding the development of the contemporary film tourist gaze. I consider how film tourism has the power to convey negative stereotypes and damaging images about place/race onto locations that are destinations in the second last chapter and in the last chapter, I examine how national cinemas may become susceptible to tourism sector policy shifts as the economic benefits of film tourism become globally recognised. I show how this has the potential to impact upon the types of films and narratives that are selected and utilised by national cinemas for film tourism campaigns.