Cinematic Tourism
“Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, That marvellous, continuous performance of films and scenarios.”
(Baudrillard, 1988)
Traveling is one thing that people long to be able to do in the time of the pandemic; our long lists of places to visit sit idle either in the bedside drawers or are boxed up in the attic. And since we are homebound, with a lot of time to kill and not many places to go ‑ the social media, OTT platforms, movies and series are our escape from the otherwise lockup world. While watching a couple of movies recently, I pondered upon the relationship between not the protagonist and the geographical setting of the cinema, but that of the screenscape and the cityscape.
The geographical setting of the film is usually a key element, for it does not only add context to the storyline but also provides relevance to the socio-cultural setting of the protagonists. The films introduce us to geographical settings, cultural backgrounds that we were never aware of. Hence the role played by a city is central in a wide variety of films. Maybe that is the reason that in award-winning shows like Fleabag, even though we do not know the names of the protagonists, the writers still chose to divulge its geographical setting of London. The location of the cinematic narrative is a representation of mind-sets which might not always be accurate but the urban environment is still an important stakeholder in the ‘assumed’ representation.
As a visual medium, cinema has the power to teleport the viewers, away from reality to the world of the film; for the cinema does not take place in a vacuum, it is full of contexts, sociological, political, historical, geographical. The viewer lives with the protagonists of the film, traveling around the city wherever the camera takes us, the audience. And most often than not, the city stays back with the audience, even if the cinema might not. That is the reason why many of us know what the New York skyline looks like without having ever visited the place ourselves, how the Thames sits overlooking the London Eye and the Big Ben, we associate canals with Amsterdam and the classic shot of the ‘Queen’s necklace’ always takes us back to Mumbai.
Does that mean that directors and cinematographers can be called a certain kind of tour-guides to the geographical settings of their films, and we are virtual tourists; peeping into someone’s life while on a tour? However, representing an entity as large as a city will always leave a gap between the representation and the reality, like you cannot experience the city by just visiting but have to live there to do so. This gap through representation by architectural images creates a fictitious city that exists in the actual city, but isn’t the real one. It is the gap between realism and illusionism, for a movie can only embody an idea of a city; the real experience is beyond any single film.
Yet we find ourselves noting down locations to visit from the keepsakes of these films. It is for this reason that the city is flooded with a large number of people taking actual tours of the locations from popular movies and series. For example, London has a Sherlock Holmes tours and Mumbai has Slumdog tours. The translation of these virtual tours to realistic tours are evidences of what Baudrillard insists that ‑
“It is there that the cinema does not assume an exceptional form, but simply invests the streets and the entire town with a mythical atmosphere”
Implying that the cinema is an exceptional version of itself, always already leaking out of its specific context to become dispersed across a multitude of sites, most notably in the city.
If many of us have, therefore, experienced that sudden, strange feeling whilst walking in the city that we are walking through the set of a film, this is undeniably a part of the cinema. It is intriguing to think of cities and cinema being interdependent. The act of watching a film is what I’d like to call cinematic tourism, where the places that we see on the screens end up on our ‘to-visit’ places inthe city; while on the other hand, we are often reintroduced to our cities with a new perspective through these films. Hence, cinema can no longer be restricted to the screen upon which films are projected, or to the darkened interior of the movie theatre where we become, directly, the spectators of film, but it extends to the limits of our cities, that stays with the audience far longer than the movie has.
