Travel Film

By Mike LaRocco

While the phrase “travel film” is often used to categorize content, travel film exceeds the boundaries of mode and genre, crossing many production contexts: fiction, non-fiction, avant-garde, and home movies. Travel film as a practice extends beyond content into a collection of social, technical, and visual practices that recreate the sensation of travel, mobility, exploration, and discovery. Alison Griffiths characterizes travel film, like ethnographic film, as being about “an encounter.”  The difference is that travel film is about encountering a destination, as opposed to a people.

Cinematically, a lineage of travel film extends from early film experiences in a variety of theatrical and non-theatrical contexts up to the present day, in large-scale IMAX theaters and motion simulation rides. Travel film can be seen emerging from other 19th century technical/visual experiences that simulate motion and mobility, especially the magic lantern illustrated travel lecture and the panorama. The popularization of travel film (and travel itself) coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism, the growth of leisure time and its commercialization, and technical and transportation innovations like the railroad and automobile, as well as an increased interest in ethnography, the colonization of Africa and the Asian subcontinent, and the push into the American west. As an experience, simulated travel was frequently advertised as a way of experiencing a place without the logistical difficulties and cost of actual travel, and coincided with a similar growth in other methods of representing travel, such as travel literature, photographs, postcards, etc. The popularity of travel films also coincided with trends in global exploration, with much of the footage of early travel film being shot on actual expeditions to distant and unseen lands, lending the films a level of exoticism and spectacularization. As narrativization of cinema became more common, travel films often shifted their sites of reception beyond the theater space into other realms, such as schools, churches and community-based organizations.

Travel films fall within a spectrum that spans from simulation to narrative immersion, each with its own particular experiential logic. The former attempt to recreate the experience of travel visually and physically, oftentimes through non-filmic sensory enhancements such as stylized viewing environments (i.e. watching a train journey in a simulated train car) and through physical manipulation of space (the train car rocking on hydraulic jacks, the sound of bells and whistles). As a film tends toward simulation, it increasingly calls to mind the space of the screening environment as well as of the film, creating a unique relationship between image, viewer, and venue. The opposite end of the spectrum presents narrative films that foreground the settings and locations of the diegetic world and frequently are structured around journeys, tourism, and exploration. Even in narrative films, there exists a spectrum between the use of destinations presented for their own sake apart from the primary events of the plot, and destinations that serve the narrative more directly. Aesthetically, the look of the travel film of both types varies wildly along with its production contexts, with some being shot by professional cinematographers and others produced by nonprofessionals, such as ethnographers or amateur filmmakers.

The motion and views presented in travel film are always taken from a certain literal and ideological perspective. The sites and people selected for viewing are dependent on the logic of the films, which is often to thrill and spectacularize. Given the production contexts of most early (and contemporary) travel film, the sense of distance and exoticism in travel film are defined largely by Western and Judeo-Christian frameworks. Despite their real world locations, travel films selectively create idealized versions of places; they are the topos through which imaginary creations of spaces and places occur, and as such, travel films are as much about controlling their subjects as they are representations of the experience of mobility.