|
Visual Anthropology
15, no. 1 (January-March, 2002), 91-114.
Around
the World in Eighty Minutes: The Travel Lecture Film
Abstract:
The travel lecture film is the archetypal form of the travelogue
in cinema. It 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. This essay examines the world
of itinerant film lecturers who present silent travelogues
with live narration throughout North America. In the tradition
of Burton Holmes, these live travel lectures take place
at hundreds of venues across the U.S. and Canada, including
museum, concert halls, universities, and community clubs.
"We are the last
of the vaudevillians. We go from town to town, set up our projectors,
our sound systems, do our shows, and then drive on."
(John Holod, travelogue filmmaker, March 1998)
Jeffrey Ruoff
is a film historian, documentary filmmaker, and assistant professor
of film and television studies at Dartmouth College. His latest
documentary, The Last Vaudevillian (1998), follows one
travel film lecturer on tour from New York to Florida.
An American Family:
A Televised Life,
his study of the 1973 public television series, was published
by the University of Minnesota Press in 2001. Address correspondence
to Jeffrey.k.ruoff@dartmouth.edu.
SHOW
AND TELL: TRAVEL LECTURE FILMS
As this journal issue
suggests, film history should be about all aspects of the medium,
not simply those of the dominant entertainment cinema. Promoting
only documentary or avant-garde alternatives, however, further
marginalizes other forms, such as newsreels, educational films,
industrials, home movies, and, of course, travelogues. In this
essay, I argue that the travel lecture film is 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) [Figure 1].
93
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"
[1997: 136-7]. 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 [Wiancko 1996: 21]. 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 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 ground-breaking
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 cinema
period. In their introduction, the editors claim that the lecturer
has "definitively disappeared" [Gaudreault and Lacasse 1996:
15]. 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 [Figure 2]. 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. 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 [Wallace
1978: 11].3 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;
94
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
95
live travelogues
play to greater numbers of people than many foreign features
and undoubtedly most avant-garde films. More
Americans undoubtedly saw Frank Klicar's travel lecture film
The Yugoslav Republics than Emir Kusturica's masterpiece
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
;4 John Holod has dates booked through the
year 2002 [Figure 3].
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 [Gunning 1998:
258-262]. 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 [Doherty
1994: 38]. 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 [Figure 4]. However,
a 1988 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 [Soule 1997: 178]. 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, producing my own travelogue The Last
Vaudevillian [Figure 5].5 ) Holod's motor
home is a movie theater and motion picture studio on wheels.
When the 1997-98 lecture season ended, he headed north to Alaska
to shoot the footage for his next feature The Last Great
Road Trip: Alaska RV Adventure!.
99
MODE OF PRODUCTION:
THE TOTAL FILMMAKER
Travelogue producers
on the North American circuit 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 [Travelogue 1992: 49]. 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" [Willis 1997: 16]. Another described filming in
China in the early 1980s "with sign language and a good phrase
book" [Green 1996: 23]. 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?
[Soule 1997: 246].
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" [Cooper 1996: 36].6
Despite their disdain, however, many lecturers now sell videotape
copies of their works, mostly at the screenings, but also by
mail order [Figure 6]. (These tapes 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
101
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 [Musser and Nelson
1989: 189], is conspicuously middle-class. A description of
a 1950s audience in Santa Barbara -- "elderly, wealthy, well
dressed, attentive, and appreciative" [Soule 1997: 119] -- still
holds true. An informal survey concludes that "most are professional
people, i.e., doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc" [Ferrante 1979:
40]. In addition, the travelogue audience is loyal. A series
at the Denver Museum of Natural History has awarded plaques
to women, dubbed "Golden Girls" [Perrigo 1994: 12], 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 in Torrance, California have been routinely preceded
by live music [Perrigo 1995: 21]. At East Carolina University,
film lectures are followed by dinner parties with the cuisine
of the featured country [Perrigo 1996: 44]. 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
[Fisher 1991: 28]. 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"
[McClure 1988: 34]. 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" [The Performer
1981: 6].
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
102
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 [Figure 7] ,7
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 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 [1991: 142], breaks off this engagement. Further,
live travelogues do not encourage the kind of identification
and emotional involvement found in much Hollywood film.8
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.9
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.
104
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 cliched, 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.10 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 book 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" [Roberts 1998].
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 [Perrigo 1995: 33]. 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.
105
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" [Foster 1991: 12]. 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, 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 [1997].
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 [Ruoff
1991: 243-9]. 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
106
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 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 cinema [1983: 277-8]
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 [1985: 47]. 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
107
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 [Figure 8]. 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" [Willis 1997: 9]. 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 [Figure 9].
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 [Soule 1997: 188].11 The travel
lecturer personalizes the anonymous, but common, "voice of God"
narration that often accompanies documentaries on television
[Ruoff 1992: 222-6]. In travelogue presentations, the volume
varies as the speaker glances at the screen, checks
108
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
109
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
110
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" [Barber 1993: 69].
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 little
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. Interested
researchers should consult the following entry in this journal
issue, Daisy Njoku's "A Resource Guide to Travel Film Repositories."
111
Notes
1.Although
the travelogue is a staple of motion pictures, its importance
has only just begun to be reflected in the literature of film
studies. An earlier version of this essay, "Around the World
in Eighty Minutes: The Travel Lecture Film," appeared in CineAction
no. 47, 1998, 2-11. I am grateful to Susan Morrison, Tom Doherty,
Dirk Eitzen, and Karel Dibbets for comments on that version
and to CineAction for permission to reprint it here.
My thanks also to David MacDougall, Carl Plantinga, and Richard
Chalfen who subsequently made very interesting comments on my
work on travel lecture films. In her Ph.D. dissertation, World
Pictures: Travelogue Films and the Lure of the Exotic, 1890-1920
(University of Chicago, 1999), Jennifer Peterson argues that
virtually all cinema is travel cinema. I am indebted to Margaret
Werry's manuscript "'A Share of the Wishful Land': Film, Theater
and the Virtual Tourism of the World's Fair" for this reference.
Werry is currently completing her doctorate in Performance Studies
at Northwestern University, with a dissertation entitled "Tourism,
gender, ethnicity and the performance of nationalism, Aotearoa/New
Zealand 1889 -- 1914." (back)
2.
Travel film lectures have a long pedigree around the world;
readers familiar with the history of French and German cinema,
for example, will recognize the persistence of this form. My
study focuses exclusively on North America and, unfortunately,
little literature exists on travel lectures in other countries
for comparison purposes. This chapter 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, Texas,
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. (back)
3.
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)
4.
Annual meetings of the Travel Adventure Cinema Society bring
together exhibitors, filmmakers, and booking agencies. TRACS
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 December 6-8, 1997, at
the annual convention in Las Vegas. (back)
5.
While attending the 1997 INTRAFILM convention in Las Vegas,
I met many travel lecturers, but was most intrigued by one,
John Holod, who was staying outside in the hotel parking lot
in an motor home. Always joking, John seemed like a good subject
for a documentary about the travelogue business. Cinematographer
Philippe Roques and I started shooting a portrait of Holod on
March 4, 1998 in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he was presenting
Cuba at the Crossroads at the Vassar Brothers Institute
and then we continued for a ten day tour south that ended in
Florida. The 30-minute documentary I directed, The Last Vaudevillian:
On the Road with Travelogue Filmmaker John Holod, presents
the routine of life on tour, the hours driving, the time in-between
performances, the equipment setups, and the encounters with
exhibitors, audiences, and friends on the road.
112
VHS copies are available
from Jeffrey Ruoff, Film and Television Studies, HB 6194, Wilson
Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA. (It was reviewed
in Visual Anthropology, 14(2): 225-227.) (back)
6.
The denigration of video gradually started to change in the
late 1990s as several producers began to present what they call
"E-Cinema travelogues," shot with small Mini-DV camcorders and
transferred to 16mm for projection or, increasingly, shown directly
with video projectors. Economies of production clearly favor
digital video in the future. (back)
7.
Interestingly, only in-person appearances by directors Michael
Moore (The Big One) and Oliver Stone (U Turn)
at the Portland Art Museum in 1997 brought in large audiences
comparable with those at the monthly World Cavalcade travelogue
series. (back)
8.
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)
9.
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)
10.
Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes (1932) parodies this
encyclopedic tendency and many other aspects of live travelogues;
see my essay "An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel's
Land Without Bread," Visual Anthropology Review
14, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998), 45-57. (back)
11.
Through the singing of the national anthem or other comparable
gestures, these travel lecture films offer a ritual of communion
through which audiences members reiterate their bonds to one
another before embarking on a potentially threatening imaginary
engagement with another culture. (back)
|
