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Film history
should be about all aspects of the medium, not simply those of
the dominant cinema. Promoting only documentary or avant-garde
alternatives, however, further marginalizes other forms, such
as newsreels, educational films, and industrials. My current interest
is the travel lecture film, which I see as
the archetypal form of the travelogue in cinema.1
This is the world of itinerant film lecturers who present silent
travelogues with live narration. At present, I am studying a corpus
of 284 feature films in distribution, produced by forty-eight
filmmakers, of whom I have met perhaps half. I have attended over
thirty live travelogue screenings.2 Travel lectures
take place at hundreds of venues across North America, including
museums (the Portland Art Museum), concert halls (the San Diego
Symphony Hall), universities (the University of Colorado-Boulder),
and community clubs (the Kodak Camera Club of Rochester, New York).
The travel lecture
film formed an important part of early cinema, flourished in later
years, and continues today, notwithstanding predictions of
its demise in the age of television, virtual reality, and the
Internet. Despite continuities with early cinema, the travel lecture
film remains a little-studied genre. Because it involves a live
performance, it cannot be analyzed apart from its idiosyncratic
screenings. As Thayer Soule eloquently puts it in his autobiography
On the Road With Travelogues, 1935-1995, a travelogue "lives
only when the producer and his audience are together."3
As such, they leave few historical traces. In addition, from the
late 1930s to the 1970s, lecturers projected their camera original
- Kodachrome positive film - until the prints disintegrated.4
As the colors of the camera original are extraordinarily vivid,
and the cost of prints considerable, some producers still follow
this practice today. Kodachrome positive prints are one-of-a-kind
works, like daguerreotypes, that cannot adequately be replicated.
Nowadays, even those producers who shoot negative film rarely
make more than
3
one or two release
prints. As a result, few such travelogues survive, and fewer still
have been archived. The historical invisibility of the travel
lecture film is most evident in its total exclusion from film
history books. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson make no mention
of the genre in their 800-page Film History (1994).
Most research on
alternative film production and exhibition practices has been
limited to the early decades of cinema. While a recent issue of
Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, edited by
André Gaudreault and Germain Lacasse, focuses on the film
lecturer, all 300 pages are devoted to the early ci-
nema period. In their
introduction, the editors claim that the lecturer has "definitively
disappeared."5 And yet the city of Montreal,
where Gaudreault works, boasts a remarkable travelogue booking
agency which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1997.
Les Grands Explorateurs presents travel lecture films with live
French-language narration in forty-four different venues throughout
Quebec. The 1997-98 season included such titles as Visages
d'Australie and Parfums de Chine.
The live travelogue's
show-and-tell characteristics have remained remarkably consistent
over the past century. The most important is the presence of the
filmmaker who addresses the audience directly from the stage.
A travel lecture offers a "non-fiction drama of people and places,
true but dramatized," as one viewer put it, extending the opportunity
to "visit vicariously someplace you can't afford to visit yourself."
An audience member in Oregon volunteered another
definition, "A travelogue is a story about a far away place -
it doesn't have to be far away, yet that seems appropriate - that
presents a variety of information about a culture, in an interesting,
perhaps unique way."
Many current performers
trace their origins to Burton Holmes, who gave over 8,000 illustrated
travel lectures, using slides and, later, motion pictures, from
the 1890s to the 1950s.6 Different approaches
within the live travelogue include comedy, wildlife, history,
and tourist emphases. John Holod, who uses slapstick routines
and vaudeville humor, exemplifies the comic approach and continues
the tradition of his idols Don Cooper and Stan Midgley. John Wilson
prefers to explore the natural world in such movies as Iceland:
Europe's Wild Gem, while Robin Williams uses historical figures
for works such as Amadeus, A Traveler in Italy. Others,
including Grant Foster and Buddy Hatton, stick to the well-trodden
path and highlight enduring tourist sites. Harder to classify
is the "travel theater" of Howdee Meyers and Lucia Perrigo in
The Magnificent World of the Mountain King: Ludwig II's Bavarian
Castles or the absurd humor of William Stockdale in travelogues
such as Cemeteries Are Fun.
Travelogue
lecturers are cultural brokers, translators, and interpreters
for American audiences. As a measure of their significance, 16mm
live travelogues play to greater numbers of people than many foreign
features and undoubtedly most avant-garde films. More Americans
probably saw Frank Klicar's travel lecture film The Yugoslav
Republics than Emir Kusturica's Underground (1995).
At the moment, there are at least thirty full-time
travelogue filmmakers in North America while, to my knowledge,
no such full-time ethnographic filmmakers exist here at all. There
is an established travel lecture circuit;7 John
Holod has dates booked through the year 2000.
The
16mm travelogue industry, in its current configuration, bears
remarkable similarities with the production, distribution, and
exhibition of motion pictures at the beginning of the 20th century.8
Individual filmmakers are involved in all facets of the business.
Exhibition venues are not uniform and often serve multiple functions.
The principal sound accompaniment comes from a live performer
in the theater and, correspondingly, varies from show to show.
Travel lecturers are not celebrities and the films are not usually
structured around their personalities, as was the case with the
films of Martin and Osa Johnson.9 Not only are
there no stars in live travelogues, there are frequently no characters
at all. Like early cinema, the emphasis is on actuality footage
and scenics. Similarly, it is difficult to date travel lecture
films. When projected in theaters, many do not have printed titles
or credits. Producers have a vested interest in deliberately not
dating their films. When I saw Charlie Hartman present The
Sunny South of France in 1996, I was led to believe the film
was new. However, a 1988
5
advertisement in Travelogue:
The International Travel Film Magazine indicates the film
is at least a decade old.
In
venues across North America, travel lecturers enjoy face-to-face
contact with their audiences. As Sandy Mortimer, the president
of the International Motion Picture and Lecturers Association
(IMPALA) said, "If you make a program for television, no one knows
your name. When you stand in front of an audience, you are the
name above the title." While life on the travelogue circuit may
be rewarding, it is not easy. A successful producer typically
stays in hotels 250 nights a year. One lecturer, recently retired,
flew his own plane to his performances. Most travel by car, driving
hundreds of miles between shows. Thayer Soule, who apprenticed
with Burton Holmes before pursuing his own career, averaged 33,000
miles a year from 1958-1995.10 In the end, they
spend more time touring cities and towns in America than they
do visiting the countries shown in their films.
After a few years
lecturing on the road, tired of motels and roadside restaurants,
producer John Holod bought a mobile home. He now lives and tours
in this $80,000 vehicle - with satellite TV, VCR, global positioning
system, personal computer, films, videos, promotional materials,
projectors, and tuxedos - giving over 100 presentations a year.
(I accompanied him for two weeks in March 1998 as he presented
Cuba at the Crossroads on tour from New York to Florida.)
His motor home is a movie theater and motion picture studio on
wheels. When the 1997-98 lecture season ended, Holod headed north
to Alaska to shoot the footage for his next feature The Last
Great Road Trip.
Mode of Production:
The Total Filmmaker
Travelogue producers
are independent entrepreneurs who produce, shoot, record sound,
edit, distribute, exhibit, and narrate 16mm movies. Most are Americans
of European origin, with university degrees from schools such
as the University of Southern California, Stanford University,
and Harvard University. Many have had experience in the print,
radio, television, and film industries. Like their audience members,
many lecturers are over sixty years old. Of the
forty-eight filmmakers currently active, only two women independently
produce and present films. While there are few women travel lecturers,
many wives assist in the production process and manage the careers
of their filmmaker husbands, handling bookings, publicity, and
occasionally mixing sound on the lecture tours.11
Producers do not regard learning other languages as a prerequisite
to making travelogues. A Canadian filmmaker admitted in his essay
"Why the Ukraine?" that the only word he knew of the local language
was "Kanada."12 Another described filming
in China in the early 1980s "with sign language and a good phrase
book."13 Even with exceptional ability and the
best of intentions, who could learn the languages of the thirty
or more countries in which Thayer Soule made travel movies?14
Travelogues
are shot by small crews, often only a few people or a husband-and-wife
team, occasionally a lone filmmaker. Location shooting typically
takes place during June, July, and August. (There are no screenings
during the summer, when it is presumed that travelogue audiences
themselves are on the road.) Most travelogues are shot with lightweight
16mm spring-wound or battery-powered cameras; few producers record
sound in the field. The average shooting ratio for an eighty-minute
feature is five to one. Most travel lecturers scorn video; one
longtime producer referred to the VCR as "an abomination."15
Despite their disdain, however, many lecturers now sell videotape
copies of their works, mostly at the screenings, but also by mail
order. (These tapes
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include recorded voice-over
narration, music, and effects that approximate the sound of the
live presentations.) For many producers, video sales make the
difference between profit and loss.
The initial run
of a travel lecture film is about three to four years, though
it may remain in distribution considerably longer. When marketing
their works to potential exhibitors, travel filmmakers are anxious
to point out the newness of their footage. As the director of
China: The Middle Kingdom asserted at the 1997 IMPALA film
festival, "There are no whiskers on this film; it was shot only
six months ago." Given the initial investment, however, producers
are inevitably drawn back to film in the same regions, a process
that encourages updating films. For example, a director with Hong
Kong in his catalogue may shoot additional footage during
the transition to mainland Chinese rule and then market a new
film under a similar title. As a result, the sounds and
the images of individual films evolve over time.
Exhibition and Audiences:
Variety is the Rule
Travel lecture
films are exhibited in the widest possible array of venues, including
libraries, museums, service clubs, universities, high schools,
institutes, and concert halls. John Holod said that he might play
a 900-seat auditorium with a full house, spotlight, projectionist,
and changing room one evening, then lecture to fifty people in
the basement of a school the following night, where he has to
put on his tuxedo in a bathroom stall, and contend with projector
noise throughout the presentation. Fees and ticket prices, too,
vary. The Vassar Brothers Institute pays lecturers $1050 per presentation;
a more common figure is $500. A season ticket for five screenings
at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, sells for
$25, while seven shows cost $52.50 in Portland, Oregon.
At
a time when most Hollywood films are explicitly directed at young
teenagers, travel lecture films reach viewers whose average age
is approximately sixty. Travelogue screenings, attended by well-to-do
audiences, many in formal dress, have more in common with ballet
performances than with multiplex cinema experiences. As a mark
of this difference, lecturers often sport tuxedos for their presentations.
The audience for educational travelogues, as in the past,16
is conspicuously middle-class. A description of a 1950s audience
in Santa Barbara - "elderly, wealthy, well dressed, attentive,
and appreciative"17 - still holds true. An informal
survey concludes that "most are professional people, i.e., doctors,
lawyers, teachers, etc."18 In addition, the
travelogue audience is loyal. A series at the Denver Museum of
Natural History has awarded plaques to women, dubbed "Golden Girls"19,
who have frequented lectures for fifty consecutive years.
As during the early
cinema period, the film itself is only a portion of the evening's
entertainment. A woman from the Rose Villa Retirement Home in
Portland pointed out, "It's an opportunity for us to get off the
grounds here. It offers camaraderie and a chance to be together."
Door prizes may be awarded and presentations are frequently coupled
with musical performances. Screenings at the El Camino College
series
7
in Torrance20,
California have been routinely preceded by live music. At East
Carolina University, film lectures are followed by dinner parties
with the cuisine of the featured country.21
In the end, after the door prizes have been handed out, it may
matter little whether the subject of the movie was Cuba or Canada.
Individual films
are always shown as part of a series of travel lectures. The Geographic
Society of Chicago provides season ticket holders with a "trip
around the world" that touches upon all seven continents.22
An article on "How to Start Travel Film Series" in Travelogue
magazine offers suggestions for exhibitors, "Vary your presentations
geographically. Austria and Switzerland look similar on film.
So do Denmark and Sweden. Avoid such conflicts in the same season.
Consider the ethnic makeup of your community."23
Responding to a magazine survey, a promoter in Sarasota states,
"We also like to give a bit of education for our season ticket
holders. We think they should see a Malaysia or a Tunisia along
with Germany and Switzerland."24
The
first travelogue screening I attended took place at an old picture
palace in Portland built by the Chicago firm of Rapp and Rapp
in 1928. Now renovated, this center for the performing arts seats
2800. Entering this vintage theater for a live travelogue lecture
was like traveling back in time to another era of movie exhibition.
Attendance the evening of March 28, 1996 was probably 1000. Unlike
screenings at regular movie theaters, tickets were sold for numbered
seats; an individual ticket cost $9.75. Though the enormous theater
had many empty chairs, spectators nonetheless dutifully filed
towards their assigned seats. They were season ticket holders,
partial to their regular places.
At the World Cavalcade
series in Portland,25 audience members arrive
in couples or small groups of five or six. Senior citizens from
retirement communities pull up in buses, well before the 7:30pm
screening. Gentlemen dress in suits and ties while some women
wear hats they may keep on during the screening. Considerable
banter animates the auditorium as ticket holders return to familiar
seats. Most travelogue presentations include intermissions when
audience members stretch, chat, smoke, use the restrooms, purchase
videotapes
8
and other souvenirs.
At the same time, the break gives the lecturer an opportunity
to rest and the projectionist time to change the 16mm reels (which,
under normal circumstances, cannot run longer than forty-five
minutes).
Since
the filmmaker narrates the movie live, each showing resembles
a Hollywood preview screening at which the producer directly gauges
the audience response. As a result, there is a particularly good
match between travel lectures and their public; audiences are
rarely disappointed. Travelogue viewers are not in the thrall
of the images and sounds, an implication often made of spectators
of commercial fiction film. The presence of the narrator, as Miriam
Hansen has suggested of early cinema exhibition,26
breaks off this engagement. Further, live travelogues do not encourage
the kind of identification and emotional involvement found in
much Hollywood film.27 It is not uncommon for
exhibitors to leave the lights on in the auditorium for spectators
to be able to read their programs (which are frequently itineraries
of the sites visited). Viewers of travel lecture films prefer
information over identification, discourse instead of spectacle.
The World of the
Travel Lecture Film
What kind of world
is constructed night after night on the travelogue circuit? Of
the 284 features in my sample, the continental distribution of
works is: Europe (39%), North America (26%), Asia (15%), Central
and South America (9%), Australasia (5%), and Africa (4%). There
are no films about Antarctica.28
Among individual
countries, the United States (21%) receives the greatest coverage.
The United Kingdom is a distant second (6%), Canada (5%) third,
Italy (3%) fourth. If counted individually, Alaska (3%) and Hawaii
(3%) tie with the Russian Federation (3%), and appear more than
most countries, including France (2%), Greece (2%), and Spain
(2%). The most popular subjects on the Asian continent are China,
Indonesia, and Israel. In South America, Peru and Brazil lead
the way. In Central America, only Mexico and Costa Rica are represented
more than once. In Australasia, Australia and New Zealand appear
most frequently. Egypt and South Africa dominate the few films
about Africa. Absent were such countries as Rumania, Bulgaria,
Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia,
Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and Somalia.
It is surprising
that, unlike most ethnographic films, travel lecture films do
not principally deal with so-called exotic cultures at all. Over
two-thirds of those in distribution explore Europe and North America.
The films about the United States favor the wilderness and the
west, particularly the mythology of the frontier. Except for two
movies, the entire eastern seaboard is ignored. The midwest, with
no single state films, appears merely as a place to leave at the
outset of Along the Santa Fe Trail, The Oregon Trail,
and The Trail: Lewis & Clark Expedition 1803-1806.
The
topic of a country suggests no automatic approach. Among the most
favored, and now clichéd, is the "land of contrasts" -
modern vs. traditional, rural vs. urban - which allows considerable
flexibility. Most travelogues offer a smorgasbord of local culture.
A viewer in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, praised Cuba for
its breadth, "The variety was good, a little bit of history, climate,
geography, nature, the economy." Most travel lecture films endlessly
catalogue facts about the locale and quantify the world in every
possible way.29 Exemplifying this tendency,
Across the Bering Sea takes inventory in a tiny Alaska
town, "two trees, one hotel, no traffic lights, and thirteen radio
stations." One may learn many curious things from viewing travelogues,
including that there are fifty-four kinds of snakes in Belize,
that most of the great Gothic churches are in the north of France,
and that Guatemala is about the same size as Oregon.
Despite the apparent
narrative frame of the journey (departure-exploration-return),
most travelogues do not represent temporally coherent voyages.
Chronology exists more often as a construct of post-production;
Hong Kong in Transition includes footage from four
different trips to the city taken between 1989 and 1996. The lecture
film tends to be an essay on geography or history, not a journey
per se, resembling a guidebook such as Fodor's Exploring Vietnam
(1998) rather than a travel adventure by Paul Theroux.
The travelogue
lies at the intersection of the industries of travel and entertainment.
"The entertainment industry delivers an experience to its customers,"
an analyst for The Economist writes, "whereas the travel
industry delivers its customers to an experience."30
Like organized tours, travelogues promise
safe and comfortable trips, the opportunity to see the world without
the difficulties of travel. Lecture films often include publicity
for specific modes of transport, accommodations, and restaurants.
At a screening in Portland, filmmaker Buddy Hatton thanked President
Alberto Fujimori for making Peru safe for tourism. Hatton admitted
that in the past it was dangerous to visit, but now, "Don't hesitate
to go." Some producers also lead tours, a profession which parallels
their film lecturing, while sponsors often promote series through
offers of free trips.31 In 1996-97, a Portland
agency coordinated its tours with films offered by the World Cavalcade
travelogue series. World Travelcade offered group tours of Mexico,
Alaska, Peru, France, Scotland, Costa Rica, and Vietnam/Burma,
the very countries shown in the travelogues of the previous season.
A publicity brochure noted that, "The mysterious land of the Inca
is well explored by Buddy Hatton in Peru: The Mysterious Journey,
and by you if you sign up for the tour following in Mr. Hatton's
steps." So, the director's comment to his audience - "You might
be tired after the long boat trip and prefer to take a short nap
upon arrival" - was not simply rhetorical.
Some travelogues
are shot on tours. Reviewing the climate of Indonesia, its population
and linguistic diversity, Grant Foster concluded, "The ideal way
to see both Java and Bali is to take an overland tour by air-conditioned
coach."32 This tour was the basis for his film
Java to Bali: Overland. Any reputable travelogue will feature
as many modes of transportation as possible, not only in the image,
but also, of course, as ways of representing movement. Adventure
Along the U.S./Canadian Border includes POV shots taken from
a train, hot air balloon, river boat, dog sled, wagon train, canoe,
9
freighter, plane, and
automobile. During a seminar at the School of American Research,
anthropological filmmaker David MacDougall
jokingly suggested a definition of ethnographic film as "a film
in which a goat is killed." Similarly, one could say that a travel
lecture film is not quite itself without an antique train ride.
Some, such as Antique Trains of Europe, The Great Canadian
Train Ride, and The Eastern and Oriental Express, feature
little else.
Travelogue Structure:
The Detour
Recent work on
early cinema has stressed the importance of the train in the development
of film narrative.33 Indeed, it has been argued
that the structure of classical narrative resembles the linear
movement of train travel. In an article in Film History,
I suggested that amateur movies and the automobile offer an alternative
to this linearity.34 Most travelogues advance,
halt, double back, digress, and generally meander across the landscape.
If the train is the figurative engine of classical Hollywood,
then the automobile is the figure of the travel lecture film.
The travelogue is episodic, the detour its most characteristic
narrative device. Consider the breakdown, provided by the filmmaker,
of sequences in the first twenty minutes of Belize and Guatemala:
Legacy of the Maya, 1) "Belize City, founded by pirates in
the seventeenth century," 2) "St. John's Anglican Cathedral, oldest
in Central America," 3) "The largest unbroken reef in the Western
Hemisphere," 4) "Ambergris Key, largest of the dozens of small
islands along the reef," 5) "the ancient Maya city of Altun Ha,"
6) "Belize Zoo, home of a family of jaguars," 7) "Danagriga and
the largest settlement of Garifuna people," and 8) "Cocoa and
chocolate processing." Jorge Luis Borges could not have dreamed
up a richer, more imaginative, list.
The actual focus
of a travel film may not be obvious from the title. Ukraine,
for example, opens with scenes of the newly independent country,
as might be expected. But it quickly detours to tell the story
of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada and Ukrainian festivals there.
In addition, while in the vicinity of one such festival, the director
then takes audience members to see the world's largest Easter
egg, just "fifty miles away." There is a radical empiricism in
the travelogue; links between scenes are fortuitous, and seem
to be governed by happenstance, rather than by narrative continuity.
Along the Santa
Fe Trail, despite historical associations, contains many unanticipated
sequences. The viewer, perhaps accustomed to a Ken Burns-like
animation of the past through readings of letters, sumptuous landscapes,
and black-and-white photographs, is instead treated to a series
of visits to interpretive centers and museums in Missouri, Kansas,
and further west. The film opens in Independence, Missouri, with
references to immigration in the 1800s, but then shifts abruptly
to the story of Harry Truman's 1948 election and subsequent administration.
(Independence is the birthplace
10
of Truman.) Further
along the trail, in Abilene, Kansas, the birthplace of Dwight
Eisenhower, there is a similar, digressive, recapitulation of
his political career. Although this hints at a new structural
pattern, the narrative is subsequently hijacked by a sequence
on tornadoes. All this in the first twelve minutes.
The producer of
Hong Kong in Transition deliberately splits his travel
documentary into two distinct parts, structured around the intermission.
In the first half, the film describes the local culture, with
modest restaurants, herbal medicine shops, and the like. This
anthropological emphasis ends when director Frank Klicar comments,
"That's it for the Chinese culture of Hong Kong. What will YOU
be doing when YOU get to Hong Kong? We'll discuss that when we
come back after a 10-minute intermission." The second half of
the film then focuses on tourism in the city, luxury hotels, a
"Middle Kingdom theme park," and the Happy Valley Race Track,
among other standard destinations.
The narrative arrangement
of the travel lecture film has more in common with what John Fell
calls the "motivated link" in early cinema35
than with the question-and-answer story structure of classical
narrative. Relations of space and time are not subordinated to
narrative causality, as Bordwell has argued is the case with classical
Hollywood film.36 Although travel lecture films
usually last about eighty minutes, they could be any length. As
with a music hall performance, the order of scenes could be swapped
with similar results. Individual sequences do not advance a story,
but, instead, add layers to the original conception. Live travelogues
jump from one place to another in almost random fashion. The transitions
between sequences in Belize and Guatemala - often as little
set up as "just over this mountain range" or "only 10 miles down
the coast" - sooner recall the intertitles of Luis Buñuel's
Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) than
the cause-and-effect of Hollywood narrative.
Return to Sweden,
as the title suggests, promises an exploration of the filmmaker's
roots in Scandinavia. It opens with family gravestone markers
in Texas. This personal angle, however, quickly disappears as
the film takes on all the traits of a customary travelogue. It
is only shortly before intermission - after touring Volvo and
Hasselblad factories, typical villages, national parks, and an
iron mine - that director Dale Johnson picks up this personal
thread and remarks that he wanders the seaside still not knowing
the origins of his ancestors. (Small wonder, given his peregrinations.)
After a visit to an immigration museum in the second reel, the
filmmaker takes a classic travelogue detour, "It would be a couple
of weeks before I could visit my ancestral home, so I went to
film some glass blowing." Although he eventually finds distant
relatives and his great-grandfather's old farmhouse, the feature-length
movie includes, at most, ten minutes directly related to this
family quest.
When I started
this study, I assumed that, similar to many ethnographic films
made by North Americans, travel lecture films would magnify cultural
differences by depicting bizarre and possibly inexplicable customs,
a perspective that has been called "orientalism" in other contexts.
To my surprise, while this element exists, it is hardly a dominant
trend. It is much more likely that audience members will hear
a lecture about Martin Luther and the rise of Protestantism than
they will musings about "primitives" or "the inscrutable east."
Further, the travel lecture film is, as often as not, an affirmation
of ethnicity, as the case of Return to Sweden implies.
As noted above, Ukraine spends considerable time at ethnic
Ukrainian festivals in Canada. Further, it turns out that the
Ukrainian footage was shot on a group tour of "Canadian Ukrainians
looking for their roots."37 John Holod's fall
1997 brochure, which includes a description of his film Czech/Slovakia:
Land of Beauty and Change, advertises guided "Heritage Tours
to Czech and Slovakia" with a company that promises "personalized
visits to your ancestral home" and boasts of an eighty percent
success rate at finding living relatives of tour members.
Live Performances:
The Lecturer as Go-Between
Travel lecture
spectators evidently still enjoy the combination of human presence
and moving imagery. A Florida exhibitor compared live screenings
favorably with travel programs in other media, "People go up to
the travel lecturers and ask 'Where should I stay?,' 'When is
the best time of the year to go?,' 'How is the food?,' and that
kind of thing. You don't get that on a movie screen, you don't
get that on television." In-person presentation mirrors the live
travelogue's emphasis on pre-industrial forms and suggests a nostalgia
for the cinema before the coming of sound.
Travel lecturers
always give introductions before their films. As a projectionist
in Hickory, North Carolina, stated, "The spectrum of their personalities
varies dramatically. Some are really low-key. They approach it
as if they are showing home movies: 'This is where we went in
Cozumel, or, here's an interesting beach in Portugal.' But with
others, it's just show business. They come on with a ruffled shirt
and a tuxedo, they tell a couple of jokes, and it's like a nightclub
act." John Holod's opening monologue at the Vassar Brothers Institute
screening of Cuba on March 4, 1998 included jokes about
Fidel Castro, exploding cigars, Pope John Paul II, and Monica
Lewinsky.
Most lecturers
try to include a few references to the region
where the film is being presented, a technique, common to live
performers, used to foster a sense of community. Paradoxically,
the filmmakers mediate the motion picture medium, rather than
the other way around. They speak directly to their audiences as
fellow travelers, "Those of you who have been to Hong Kong will
agree with me that it has the best food in the world." At a screening
in Portland, a lecturer jokingly chastised two patrons for arriving
ten minutes late. One producer introduced his presentation with
the remark, "The more I travel, the more grateful I am to be an
American." And, after a pause, he added, "God bless America."
Applause followed. In the past, it was not unusual for screenings
to begin with the Pledge of Allegiance or the National Anthem.38
The travel lecturer personalizes the anonymous, but common, "voice
of God" narration that often
11
accompanies documentaries
on television.39 In travelogue presentations,
the volume varies as the speaker glances at the screen, checks
his or her notes, moves towards and away from the microphone.
Lecturers occasionally laugh with the audience at their own jokes.
Several husband-and-wife pairs offer a novel style of tag-team
narration, alternating sections of the film. Although generally
using a low-tech process, lecturers have elaborate techniques
for managing a live mix of sound effects and music along with
the voice. Most use music and effects tracks on cassette and manipulate
a portable tape recorder from the podium. Others have optical,
sound-on-film, prints and use a wireless transmitter which allows
them to control the volume setting on the projector from the stage.
It is a convention
of the travelogue that the lecturer filmed the country represented.
By and large, it is so, and the rhetoric of film presentation
relies on personal anecdotes, first-hand information, and eye-witness
accounts (as does ethnographic writing, I might add). However,
films are occasionally narrated by lecturers who did not shoot
the images. John Holod learned the technique of film presentation
by accompanying veteran Dick Massey on the
lecture circuit in 1989 with New Zealand/Red Sea: Above and
Below and Along the Mexican Border: California to Texas.
Each evening, the young apprentice learned a passage of the narration,
which he read live from behind the screen, until, bit by bit,
he had memorized both shows. Eventually, when Massey retired in
mid-season, Holod took over the presentations, paying fees for
the rights to the films. Needless to say, the young lecturer then
presented the films as if he had taken them, later splicing
in footage of himself to further personalize the movies. For the
rest of the season, Holod lectured about places he had never been.
Though remarkable today, such a pose would not have been unusual
in 19th century lantern slide shows, "Sets of views accompanied
by readings could be acquired from any major lantern firm and
could be used by even the most untravelled to present lantern
exhibitions."40
Lecturers rarely
flaunt foreign language competency, typically presenting themselves
on a trip that any audience member might easily take. Similarly,
native speakers are rarely heard as such speech is almost always
filtered through the voice of the filmmaker. Although the delivery
is typically quite polished, lecturers still occasionally make
off-the-cuff remarks, unwittingly stumble over passages, excuse
or repeat themselves, features that recall home movie screenings
rather than TV programs. Many recite from memory, others consult
notes. It is difficult to capture in print the charms and idiosyncrasies
of live narration. Speaking of social structure in Central America,
the producer of Belize and Guatemala stated in Portland
that "the Mayan are on the lowest class of the rung." In the middle
of a screening of New Zealand: An Outdoor Adventure, the
speaker interrupted his narration to politely ask of the projectionist,
"Could we have the focus check, please?"
Clearly, the apparatus
of cinema is displayed and acknowledged in the typical travelogue
presentation. In some venues, such as those used by Kiwanis and
Rotary clubs, the projector is visible and audible in the back
of the hall. Recognizing that their audience includes many amateur
photographers and would-be cinematographers, producers may explain
how they obtained particularly remarkable footage. In addition,
there has been a proliferation of films about travel filmmaking
recently, as elderly lecturers have produced works such as Adventure
Filming the World, The Great American Travelogue: The Story
of Travel Adventure Filmmakers, and The First Fifty Years.
This reflexive turn has perhaps been fueled by a growing sense
of the live travelogue as a dying form. At the same time, such
retrospective works also offer an opportunity for producers to
recycle old footage, obtaining greater return on the initial investment.
There is a subversive,
quasi avant-garde current working in the travel film lecture field,
usually under the guise of humor and parody. So, for example,
"the holiest of holy pilgrimages" in Bill Stockdale's Pilgrimage
Across Europe turns out to be the golf course at St. Andrew's
in Scotland. This anarchic spirit also appears in his macabre
Cemeteries Are Fun. (Portland exhibitor Alan Jones decided
not to book this film, explaining, "A lot of our audience is elderly
people. I don't know about having them look at gravestones for
eighty minutes.") The same producer even made a film worthy of
Andy Warhol, called The Ride, a U.S. cross-country tour
shot entirely through the windshield of his car.
The travel lecture
film comprises a full-fledged industry, with filmmakers, booking
agencies, exhibitors, and audiences in the millions. This industry
presents intriguing parallels with early cinema, vaudeville, and
home movies, all deserving of additional analysis. As virtually
nothing has been written about post-war travelogues, this article
provides an overview of film style and mode of production as a
way of opening up discussion in the field. Numerous questions
about travel lecture films - their ideological effects, their
role in constructing cultural identities, their nostalgia for
pre-industrial forms, their future survival - await further study.
Jeffrey Ruoff is
a film historian and non-fiction filmmaker at Reed College in
Portland, Oregon. His latest documentary, The Last Vaudevillian:
On the Road with Travelogue Filmmaker John Holod, was released
in September 1998. Please address comments and queries by electronic
mail to Jeffrey.ruoff@reed.edu.
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1.
Although the travelogue is a staple of motion pictures, its importance
is not reflected in the literature of film studies. In my manuscript-in-progress
on the travel film experience, Being There: Notes on the Travelogue,
I analyze travel lecture films (Cuba at the Crossroads,
Return to Sweden), documentaries (Land Without Bread,
Sherman's March), ethnographic films (By Aeroplane to
Pygmyland, Cannibal Tours), experimental movies (Reminiscences
of a Journey to Lithuania, From the Pole to the Equator),
IMAX productions (Tropical Rainforest, Everest),
and feature films (2001: A Space Odyssey, Lisbon Story).
(back)
2. "Around
the World in Eighty Minutes" is an interim report, part of an
ongoing investigation of live travelogues. It is based on public
screenings, professional literature, fieldwork, and interviews.
(All quotes not otherwise attributed come from screenings I attended
and interviews I conducted in Oregon, Washington, Nevada, New
York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Florida.) I would like to thank the many filmmakers, exhibitors,
and audience members who shared their passion for travelogues
with me. Special thanks are due producer John Holod, who invited
me into his (motor) home for two weeks during his 1997-1998 lecture
tour, and Portland promoter Alan Jones who introduced me to local
audience members and lent me photographs, flyers, and posters.
Mari Ray of Kamen Film Productions generously provided production
stills. I am grateful to Susan Morrison, Tom Doherty, Dirk Eitzen,
and Karel Dibbets for comments on this essay. (back)
3. Thayer
Soule, On the Road With Travelogues, 1935-1995: A 60-Year Romp
(Seattle, WA: Peanut Butter Publishing 1997), 136-7. (back)
4. Gene
Wiancko, "40 Years in Travelogues," Travelogue: The International
Film Magazine 19.2 (1996), 21. (back)
5. André
Gaudreault and Germain Lacasse, eds. The Moving Picture Lecturer.
IRIS: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound N. 22 Fall (1996),
15. (back)
6. Irving
Wallace, "Everybody's Rover Boy" in Genoa Caldwell, ed. Burton
Holmes: The Man Who Photographed the World (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, Inc. [1947] 1978), 11. During the 1993-1994 lecture
season, there were numerous centennial celebrations of Holmes'
presentation of what these producers consider the "first travelogue."
Cf., "100 Years of Travelogues," Travelogue: The International
Film Magazine 17.2 (1994), 8. (back)
7. Annual
meetings of the International Travel and Adventure Film Guild
bring together exhibitors, filmmakers, and booking agencies. INTRAFILM
is the umbrella organization of the industry, comprised of the
Professional Travelogue Sponsors (PTS) and the International Motion
Picture and Lecturers Association (IMPALA). The IMPALA film festival
allows directors to preview new work for exhibitors. My research
on live travelogues began at the INTRAFILM convention, December
6-8, 1997, in Las Vegas. (back)
8. Tom
Gunning, "Early American Film" in John Hill and Pamela Church
Gibson, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 258-262. (back)
9. Tom
Doherty, "The Age of Exploration: The Hollywood Travelogue Film,"
Cineaste January (1994), 38. (back)
10. Soule,
op. cit. 178. (back)
11. "Meet
Joan Lark," Travelogue: The International Film Magazine
15.2 (1992), 49. (back)
12. Bob
Willis, "Why the Ukraine?: Filmmaker Accompanies Immigrant Group
to Homeland," Travelogue: The International Film Magazine
20.1 (1997), 16. (back)
13. Raphael
Green, "Adventures of an Old China Hand," Travelogue: The International
Film Magazine 19.1 (1996), 23. (back)
14. Soule,
op.cit. 246. (back)
15. Don
Cooper, "Dear Coop," Travelogue: The International Film Magazine
19.2 (1996), 36. (back)
16. Charles
Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman
H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 189. (back)
17. Soule,
op.cit. 119. (back)
18. Maureen
Ferrante, "Looking Ahead to a New Season," The Performer: The
International Magazine of Stage and Screen 2.2 (1979), 40.
(back)
19. Lucia
Perrigo, "Lines by Lucia," Travelogue: The International Film
Magazine 17.2 (1994), 12. (back)
20. Perrigo,
Lucia, "Lines by Lucia," Travelogue: The International Film
Magazine 18.2 (1995), 21. (back)
21. Perrigo,
Lucia, "Lines by Lucia," Travelogue: The International Film
Magazine 19.2 (1996), 44. (back)
22. William
S. Fisher, "Enthusiasm Always Shows Through," Travelogue: The
International Film Magazine 14.1 (1991), 28. (back)
23. Hal
McClure, "How to Start Travel Film Series," Travelogue: The
International Film Magazine 11.2 (1988), 34. (back)
24. "Sponsors,
Artists Advise How," The Performer: The International Magazine
for Stage and Screen 4.1 (1981), 6. (back)
25. Interestingly,
only in-person appearances by directors Michael Moore and Oliver
Stone at the Portland Art Museum this year brought in audiences
comparable with those at the monthly World Cavalcade travelogue
series.(back)
26. Miriam
Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent
Film. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 142.
(back)
27. In
contrast to travel lecture films, IMAX widescreen and 3-D travelogues
(like many Hollywood movies) thrive on visceral sensations of
movement and sound combined with extraordinary vistas. (back)
28. For
the sake of this country by country designation, I have excluded
from my sample twenty-eight thematically-organized or transcontinental
films, such as Great Quotations from Great Locations and
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery of the New World. (back)
29. Buñuel's
Las Hurdes (1932) parodies many aspects of live travelogues. For
a detailed comparison, see my forthcoming essay, "An Ethnographic
Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread," in
Visual Anthropology Review 14.1 (Spring/Summer 1998). (back)
30. Mark
Roberts, "Dream Factories: A Survey of Travel and Tourism," The
Economist, January 10 (1998), unpaginated supplement. (back)
31. Lucia
Perrigo, "Lines by Lucia," Travelogue: The International Film
Magazine 18.2 (1995), 33. (back)
32. Grant
Foster, "Adventure in the East Indies, Beyond the Java Sea," Travelogue:
The International Film Magazine 14.1 (1991), 12. (back)
33. Lynne
Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). (back)
34. Jeffrey
Ruoff, "Forty Days Across America: Kiyooka Eiichi's 1927 Travelogues,"
Film History 4.3 (Spring 1991), 243-49. (back)
35. John
Fell, "Motive, Mischief, and Melodrama: The State of Film Narrative
in 1907" in John Fell, ed. Film Before Griffith. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 277-8. (back)
36. David
Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 47. (back)
37. Willis,
op.cit. 9. (back)
38. Soule,
op.cit. 188. (back)
39. Jeffrey
Ruoff, "Conventions of Sound in Documentary" in Rick Altman, ed.
Sound Theory/Sound Practice.
(New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1992), 222-226. (back)
40. X.
Theodore Barber, "The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard,
E. Burton Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel
Lecture," Film History: An International Journal 5.1 (1993),
69. (back)
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