Theoretical Approaches to Film-Motivated Tourism

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the relationship between tourism and the moving image, providing an overview of the way this relationship has been conceptualised in both tourism studies and media studies. The range of motivations within the film tourist experience is discussed, focusing in particular on the ways in which a tourist attraction's relationship with the complex notion of “authenticity” can have both a positive and a negative effect on the site, its management, and its stakeholders.

Introduction

In the post-industrial western world, film and tourism are linked, both conceptually and historically. It is no coincidence that one of the first, and certainly the most-referenced, of the Lumière brothers’ films depicted a moving train: these were two potent symbols of modernity, of unprecedented developments in technology and economics, both offering the possibility of witnessing never-before-seen sites and sights to mass publics of the late nineteenth century. According to Boorstin (1987), the origins of mass tourism are closely linked to, if not enabled by, the beginnings of industrial mass production of long-distance transportation (1987, p. 86); similarly, film began to emerge and be mass-produced at precisely the same time as the first automobiles. Indeed, both tourism and cinema are predicated on movement: the moving/travelling spectator in the case of the former, and the moving image in the latter. As Gibson (2006), Kirby (1997), and Strain (2003), among others, argue, the cinema-going experience still retains some of the qualities which initially aligned it with tourism. The concept of the “tourist gaze” identified by Urry (2002) can thus be applied not only to physical tourism but also to the act of viewing representations of other lands or even periods, so that “The traditional room with a view becomes a seat with a view” (Gibson, 2006, p. 158, emphasis in original). The viewer and the tourist share another commonality in that the duration of their excursion is usually limited (Mazierska and Walton, 2006) and predicated on an inevitable return to the point of origin.

Film Spectatorship As Tourism

As Bruno (1997) points out, early cinema consciously took on what MacCannell (1999) would term an explicitly touristic function, focusing on representing foreign locations through their most picturesque and recognisable sights (what MacCannell termed “markers”). Bruno uses the example of the now-forgotten dal vero genre, a film genre “devoted to viewing the city…shot from real life on location. The first film-makers…widely practiced dal vero, making short films entirely composed of street views or vistas of the city and its scenic surroundings. Dal vero was an international phenomenon…Like the urban spectacle of flânerie, the mobile gaze of the cinema transformed the city into cityscape, recreating the motion of a journey for the spectator” (Bruno, 1997, pp. 48–49). Dal vero films found two distinct audiences, for whom they served different purposes: those we might term “ordinary” spectators, who viewed the foreign sights depicted in the films as entertainment, and immigrant viewers, who specifically sought out cinematic representations of their native lands for nostalgic reasons.

Baudrillard (1988) continues this theme (and provocatively inverts the common-sense understanding of the relationship between sight and cinematic representation) when he describes America as a “cinematic” country: “The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city” (1988, p. 56). America is of course the global centre of film production, and thus lends itself particularly well to being considered in traditionally cinematic terms. Baudrillard's conflation of sight and representation is echoed by Zukin's (1991) description of American metropolises: “Without a traditional centre or downtown, cities like Los Angeles and Miami can only be seen in fragments” (1991, p. 217) and by Donnelly's (2005) reflection on the way cities can be perceived as “metonymised” by both tourists and film viewers: “cities…are reduced to key sites: a city's ‘essential’ or ‘key’ elements” (2005, p. 96). The experience of perceiving—and interacting with—real-world sites is thus described in terms of a cinematic montage (the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated sights and scenes). This conceptual conflation between the cinematic and the real is not restricted to consideration of the USA, as the world's most prominent site of film production. For example, Abbas (1997) applies strikingly similar terms to a discussion of the cinematic representations of Hong Kong, and Diken (2005) offers a similar analysis of the slippage between the cinematic and the real-life urban experiences of Rio de Janeiro. Neither is this overlap between the empirical and cinematic experiences of the city a strictly contemporary phenomenon. Sorkin (1992) invokes the work of one of the pioneers of cinema, Dziga Vertov, whose early experiments with montage reconstituted not only cinematic form, but the viewers’ perceptions of once-familiar urban topography, to argue that cinematic montage is analogous to the experience of navigating, and indeed building, a city: “the practice of montage—and the practice of urbanism, its three-dimensional equivalent—requires a theory of juxtaposition. For the cinema, the theory is either about narrative or its interruption, about a sequence of images bound to time. Montage begs the question of the logic of this arrangement. The city is also joined in sequence. Both its construction and its politics devolve on principles of aggregation” (1992, p. 227). Finally, Clarke (1997) argues that the histories of film and the city are interrelated to such an extent that “it is unthinkable that the cinema could have developed without the city, and…the city has been unmistakeably shaped by the cinematic form” (1997, p. 1).

In the discussion of the dal vero films, Bruno positions them as a particularly cinematic form of “sightseeing”, and thus “An extension of nineteenth-century dioramas and panorama painting” (1997, p. 48). Academic discussions of the moving image's relationship with tourism offer a variety of starting points and analogies, particularly when it comes to the distinction between the moving image's conceptual similarities to touristic experiences (as outlined above), and the moving image as a direct motivation for physical travel (which forms the focus for the rest of this article). Beeton (2005) asserts that “Most of the world's great pilgrimage and tourist sites were established through the written media, well before the coming of film, and this limits the effect that film had on actually establishing the iconic status of such sites” (2005, p. 4), allowing only the relatively “new” tourist sites, such as Australia and New Zealand, the possibility of having been impacted by the moving image. Beeton underlines her concept of film-motivated tourism as a direct successor to literary tourism by drawing a parallel with “mainstream” tourism: “Film is to literary tourism what the Boeing 747 was to mainstream tourism—a major booster for mass tourism. We have moved from small, niche-based personal pilgrimage literary tours to the mass (and at times over-full) visitation of film sites” (2005, p. 53). Film, in this conception, is a new technology, which may increase the convenience and popularity of tourism, but does not re-shape the fundamentals of the tourist experience. Craik (1997) also conflates literary and film-motivated tourism, contrasting both with the earlier phenomenon of “nature tourism”—tourism motivated by the desire to see unfamiliar landscapes, rather than by the desire to see sights represented in either literature or film. Craik dubs such tourism, motivated by (usually fictional) representations, “cultural tourism” (1997, p. 116). Similarly, Iwashita (2006) brings together “movie-induced tourism”, “media-related tourism” and “literary tourism” under a collective banner of “popular media-induced tourism” (2006, p. 60).

Meanwhile, Urry (2002), Rojek (1997) and Jenks (1995), among others, have argued that the significance of visuality in contemporary culture far outweighs that of other types of perception, giving the pictorial representation (and in particular, the moving image) a primary role in shaping the modern tourist's expectations and perceptions of sights, and thus potentially producing in tours motivated by the moving image, a distinctly different experience than that of, for example, the literary tour. As Sydney-Smith (2006) argues, “in an increasingly media-saturated world, our first impressions of place are as likely to come from audio-visual representations as those of ‘real life’” (2006, p. 79). Sorkin (1992) expresses the same idea more bluntly, in a discussion of the particular appeal of Disneyworld: “Decades of films have furnished a common iconography on generations. Now there's a television channel too” (1992, p. 205). Sights and the act of seeing are also central to MacCannell's (1999) conception of the touristic experience, in which tourists encounter a succession of sights mediated through “markers”, which contain information about the sight; the touristic experience is thus bound up with representation and reproduction of the “original” sight through primarily visual means. The ultimately collective nature of the film/television viewing experience may contribute to giving film-related sites what Hayden (1995) termed the “power of place”: “the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory” (1995, p. 9), creating sites of public, and therefore touristic, significance through shared representation.

Film as a Motivation for Tourism

Alongside a conceptual cinematic tourism, whose origins lie in the birth of cinema, is the more contemporary phenomenon of physical tourism to sites associated specifically with film and television. To some extent, the ontological and methodological difficulties in this area, discussed below, can be attributed to the fact that the precise origins of film-motivated tourism have been difficult to pinpoint. One of the earliest instances of marketing film-related tourist sites appears in Boorstin's (1987) reference to a 1961 El Al-organised tour of the locations used for the filming of Exodus (dir. Otto Preminger, 1960). A slightly earlier example is the launch of Disneyland in 1955. Disneyland was not just the first, and still one of the most successful, of the purpose-built official sites of film-motivated tourism. As Hannigan (1995) points out, Disneyland was also the very first instance of multi-platform marketing of tourism, as a tourist site conceived simultaneously with a television series: “In the 1950s, Disney successfully completed a triple bill by featuring the American backwoods hero Davey Crockett on his Sunday evening television show together with motion picture spinoffs, in Frontierland at Disneyland and in the sale of licensed products…This kind of commercial synergy is now widely practised, with animated television shows based entirely on hot-selling toys (or vice versa) and movie studios as operators of theme parks (Universal Studios, Disney-MGM Studios); however, it was a novel concept 40 years ago when first introduced as part of Disneyland” (1995, pp. 186–187). Beeton (2005) draws a distinction between “on-location” and “off-location” film-motivated tourism, with the former referring to tourism to sites directly associated with filming (as with the Exodus tour), and the latter referring to “industrial-style tourism activities such as tours of the working studios and hands-on experiences with the technology” (2005, p. 28), such as studio tours and the Disney experiences. Beeton adds that off-location film-motivated tourism can include sites which are “even…further removed from the film itself, such as the homes of the stars and tourist constructs such as Hollywood Boulevard…These phenomena have not been studied at all in terms of film-induced tourism, hence the literature is even less forthcoming than in other areas of this field of study” (2005, p. 28). Fitting firmly into this latter category of “far-removed”, off-location tourism is an even earlier key moment in the history of the moving image. The 1926 funeral of one of the silent cinema's most famous and beloved stars, Rudolph Valentino, which was reportedly attended by close to 100,000 fans (Ellenberger and Ballerini, 2005), may be conceptually much closer to a quasi-sacred pilgrimage than to a leisurely tourist activity, but nevertheless stands as one of the earliest recorded examples of the significance of film as an entirely distinct and purposeful motivation for travel.

Film and Tourism Studies

Academic considerations of film-motivated tourism as a distinct field of inquiry are much more recent, with much of the work originating in the mid 1990s. The field of research is both new and multidisciplinary, though I would characterise this multidisciplinarity as “unconscious”, since the disciplines involved are not only not communicating with each other, but are actually using different terms to describe the same (or very closely related) phenomena. As Crouch, Jackson and Thompson (2005) observe, “There are many connections, overlaps and disjunctures between tourism and the media and equally between the disciplines of tourist and media studies…This new area of investigation throws up pluralism of debate from the very start. It is worth immediately emphasizing the fact that we are dealing with two disciplines as well as two different objects of study…there is no one theoretical perspective, no single angle of approach and indeed no obvious starting point” (2005, p. 1).

Thus, researchers in leisure and tourism studies can refer to “film-induced tourism” (Beeton, 2004, 2005; Macionis, 2004; Singh and Best, 2004), “movie-induced tourism” (Busby and Klug, 2001; Riley, Baker and Van Doren, 1998), “teletourism” (Aitchison, Macleod and Shaw, 2000), and “film tourism” (Hudson and Ritchie, 2006a, 2006b; Law, Bunnell and Ong, 2007). Meanwhile, researchers in media studies, cultural studies, and the emergent field of fan studies have described the same phenomena in terms of “symbolic pilgrimage” (Aden, 1999), “media tourism” (Couldry, 2000), “cinematic tourism” (Tzanelli, 2004), and “cult geography” (Hills, 2002). This disciplinary schism appears to be not only discursive, but to some extent methodological, with work in leisure and tourism studies frequently having a strong quantitative basis and focusing on how featuring in film/television productions affects a location's tourist numbers and host communities (Tooke and Baker, 1996; Riley, Baker and Van Doren, 1998; Busby and Klug, 2001; Beeton, 2004; Singh and Best, 2004; Hudson and Ritchie, 2006a, 2006b), while work in media/cultural/fan studies has tended to be qualitative, focusing on how such tourism sites are represented in terms of “authenticity” and the significance of “authenticity” to the tourist experience (Combs, 1989; Urry, 1995; Hills, 2002; Tzanelli, 2004). Even when such work has had a quantitative dimension (Couldry, 2000, 2005), its emphasis was still placed on how meaning was constructed for and by the visitors.

Quantitative studies can provide highly illustrative data about the impact of film and/or television on tourism, yet the early quantitative work on film-motivated tourism was clearly subject to the same criticisms as those levelled by Cohen (1995), Picard (1996), Lippard (1999), and Franklin and Crang (2001) at the entire field of tourism studies. Their charges of thematic and methodological myopia within the discipline, caused by a quantitative emphasis on industrial and economic perspectives, were reiterated by Rojek and Urry (1997), who extended the parameters of the criticism to questioning the validity of tourism as a distinct object of study, as practised within the field at the time: “A response to the problematic character of tourism is deliberately to abstract most of the important issues of social and cultural practice and only consider tourism as a set of economic activities. Questions of taste, fashion and identity would thus be viewed as exogenous to the system. Tourism on this account is treated as a set of economic factors, and individuals are viewed as bundles of given preferences. This is the standard treatment of tourism in the main textbooks…the economic analysis of tourism provides crucial information for understanding the phenomenon. But it is limited. The number of houses built in Berlin since the destruction of the Wall, or the average tourist expenditure by British tourists in Greece, tell us very little about the diverse qualities of tourist experience. In addition, they carry the danger of reifying tourist experience so that thinking about tourism and developing tourist policy simply become a matter of reading and seeking to manipulate economic indicators” (1997, p. 2).

Perhaps in response to such critiques, more recent work in tourism studies has incorporated a significantly wider range of perspectives and methodologies. Specifically in the area of film-motivated tourism, the work of Edenson (2005), Mordue (2001), and Torchin (2002) has successfully combined quantitative and qualitative approaches, providing both an anthropological “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of the tourist experience of the site and a much wider contextual framework of how the site is managed on both micro and macro levels in terms of tourism policy.

The Film Tourist Experience

Purely qualitative studies can contribute to understanding by outlining the complexity of the possible range of tourist experience. Fan studies in particular focus on the meaning of a sense of physical presence at a location which is somehow significant to the object of fandom. Both sports fans and music fans place a premium on attending “live” events, which they recognise as a more “authentic” experience (because they are present at the site simultaneously with the object of fandom), despite the fact that recorded or transmitted versions of sporting events and music concerts usually offer both a better vantage point and a more comfortable viewing experience than actual attendance of the event. These fandoms place a premium on physical presence rather than mediated spectatorship, a premium which for Sandvoss (2005) is motivated by “a search for unmediated experience, of putting oneself, literally, in the place of the fan text and thus creating a relationship between the object of fandom and the self that goes beyond mere consumption and fantasy” (2005, p. 61). However, the fan impulse is by no means restricted to music and sport. Film and television fans share the same motivations, despite the fact that the objects of their fandom are always mediated through the screen and never available “live”. As Mordue (2001) states in a study of sites associated with the television series Heartbeat, “the tourist expects an experience when visiting Heartbeat country similar, but more immediate, to that offered by watching Heartbeat on television…the promise of bridging or de-differentiating the divide between the real and the imagined fuels the demand for Heartbeat country consumption” (2001, p. 247). This search for the most “unmediated”/“immediate” experience possibly links back to the importance of “authenticity” in the more general tourist experience. As MacCannell (1999) points out, “The rhetoric of tourism is full of the manifestations of the importance of the authenticity between the tourists and what they see: this is a typical native house; this is the very place where the leader fell; this is the actual pen used to sign the law; this is the original manuscript” (1999, p. 14, emphasis in original).

However, “authenticity” is a complex term, and, particularly in the context of mediated representations and externally managed tourist experiences, it can encompass a variety of definitions. As Taylor (2001) points out, the centrality of “authenticity” as an issue in tourist studies “has set the agenda for lively and diverse debate and analyses. As a result of these, there are at least as many definitions of authenticity as there are those who write about it” (2001, p. 8). Taylor identifies a range of dialectics (“between object and subject, there and here, then and now” (2001, p. 8)) within which the authenticity of a particular site or experience may be determined. Similarly, in his discussion of the touristic appeal of authenticity, MacCannell immediately draws a distinction between “minimal” “sub-minimal” “pseudo” and/or “tacky” tourist attractions (such as a giant fibreglass statue of Jesus in a Biblical amusement park) and “true sites” (such as the Statue of Liberty or the Liberty Bell), whose supposed authenticity is only enhanced by the existence of the “pseudo” sites: “Modern society institutionalizes these authentic attractions and modern life takes on qualities of reality thereby” (1999, p. 14). The concept of authenticity in tourism, then, is built upon a dialectic in which certain types of sites and experiences, in certain circumstances, are recognised as intrinsically more authentic than others. Such recognition may depend on existing socio-cultural hierarchies (as suggested by MacCannell), or on a set of beliefs and understandings common to a particular social group, which may be distinct from other social groups’ understandings of the same phenomena (Belhassen, Caton, and Stewart, 2008), or may in some cases even be determined by individual subjectivity of each tourist. For instance, Belhassen, Caton and Stewart (2008), in a discussion of the differences in the performance of religious pilgrimage among different Christian denominations at the same sites, argue that the authenticity of a touristic experience is not pre-determined, but emerges during the process of the tour, partly as a result of external influences (p. 683).

Many if not most sites of film-motivated tourism are in one way or another closer to MacCannell's “pseudo” sites than to his concept of “true” or “authentic” attractions. Firstly, many cinematic locations “stand in” for sites physically located elsewhere. Donnelly (2005) offers the example of Belfast, a popular setting for film and television, which used to be considered unsafe to actually be used as a film location: “Films set in Belfast, until very recently, were almost never shot there, as the cinematic version of Belfast was a bricolage of other cities in Britain and the Republic of Ireland…The problems of filming in Belfast have led to fabrications of the city, lacking a footing in ‘re-presentation’ of the actual location” (2005, p. 93). Such substitutions are very frequent, though they are more often motivated by budgetary and logistical concerns. Cities like Prague and Vancouver (Spaner, 2003) are far more likely to appear on screen as representations of other sites than as themselves: both cities offer economic incentives and strong infrastructures (in terms of local studio facilities and technical staff) to entice foreign film and television productions. Similarly, for all its quantifiable and long-lasting effect on the Scottish tourism industry (Edenson, 2005), Braveheart (dir. Mel Gibson, 1995) was actually filmed in Ireland (Aitchison, Macleod and Shaw, 2000). According to Beeton (2005), such substitutions “can create a situation where people are basing their knowledge on false information as well as developing false expectations of sites they choose to visit, resulting in dissatisfaction with the experience” (2005, p. 31), though the current literature doesn't yet provide empirical examples of such situations.

Another dimension to considerations of authenticity (or lack of it) of sites of film-motivated tourism is provided by the studio/theme park tour, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the various Disney theme parks. This is potentially both the most visible and least “authentic” example of a film-motivated tourist site. As Warren (1999) points out, Disney's attractions are consistently more popular than the most famous tourist sites in the world: “Each year, more people visit Walt Disney World than the monuments of the United States capital; more visit Disneyland Paris than the Eiffel Tower” (1999, p. 109). At the same time, the Disney attractions offer their visitors some of the most rigid, regimented and commercialised tourist experiences in the world, in which no detail is accidental, or (according to critics) innocent: “Control strategies are embedded in both environmental features and structural relations. Visitors’ spatial movements are directed by constant ‘interventions’ from recorded voices, robots in human form and Disney employees. Physical environmental features (pools, fountains, flower gardens, Disney vehicles) serve a dual function, creating beauty and providing transport at the same time as acting as barriers which direct guests away from or towards particular locations” (Hannigan, 1995, p. 188). The cynicism which underlies the Disney experiences is part of what renders them so clearly inauthentic. Another aspect of Disney parks’ inauthenticity is their over-reliance on image, representation, and, in particular, simulation: the Disney parks are surrounded by impenetrable perimeter walls, have their own security forces, and their own currency, actively producing a simulation of a nation state, and leading Zukin (1991) to the elegant conclusion that Disneyworld matters “not because it is a symbol of capitalism, but because it is the capital of symbolism” (p. 232).

At the same time, outside the context of the official theme park, the disjuncture between the site and its representations (which may be termed the flipside of authenticity), may itself be a potential attraction for some film tourists, who might seek out not the similarities but the differences between site and representation. Aitchison, Macleod and Shaw (2000) suggest that the film-motivated tourist “derives pleasure from comparing image with reality” (p. 49). Boorstin (1987) advances this hypothesis, linking it back to the dominance of visual representations in our everyday experience of the world, as outlined by MacCannell (1999) and Urry (2002): “Much of our interest comes from our curiosity about whether our impression resembles the images found in newspapers, in movies, and on television. Is the Trevi fountain in Rome really like its portrayal in the movie Three Coins in the Fountain? Is Hong Kong really like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing?…We go not to test the image by the reality, but to test reality by the image” (1987, p. 116). An example of precisely this kind of film-motivated tourist experience comes in Rojek's (1997) discussion of the Schindler's List tour which has operated in the Kazimierz district of Krakow since 1994, and in which the landscape and history of the city are framed in terms of their relevance to the film: “Cinematic events are dragged onto the physical landscape and the physical landscape is then reinterpreted in terms of the cinematic events…Here one should note that the area only became a significant tourist spot after the film was made. The film, so to speak, made Kazimierz an extraordinary place, a place worth visiting” (1997, p. 54, emphasis in original). For Rojek, sites such as the Schindler's List tour “challenge one of the main assumptions in the literature on tourism, namely, that tourism is primarily motivated by a quest for authenticity” (1997, p. 55), a conclusion which is echoed by Beeton's (2005) assertion that “tourists are often more interested in experiencing what has been promoted through the powerful visual media than in gazing at so-called ‘dead’ history” (p. 22). However, sites such as Kazimierz are not necessarily intrinsically “inauthentic”, at least not in the same way as Disneyland is. A closer analogy is an attraction such as the William Wallace monument in Stirling, Scotland: an existing historical attraction which received a significant increase in prominence and tourist numbers following the release of the film Braveheart. Edenson (2005) charts the ways in which the site and marketing of the Wallace monument went on to incorporate direct and prominent references to the film, while maintaining its primary focus on genuine historical events; in other words, the Wallace monument now combines touristic markers from two distinct, but thematically related, realms (actual local history and its cinematic representation, which was actually filmed elsewhere). The two coexisting realms certainly complicate, but do not altogether negate, the site's claims to authenticity; and the cinematic realm does not overwhelm the realm of actual history. As Torchin (2002) notes in relation to the Manhattan TV Tour, “The virtual memory of a television show renders the actual space noteworthy, and auratic, yet it does not overtake this space, which harbours many more ghosts, both of television and New York” (2002, p. 257).

In a similar vein, Sargent (1998) analyses the effect of BBC television's 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice on UK heritage sites featured in the series, noting among other factors the active and purposeful blurring of the distinctions between film-motivated tourism and heritage tourism, fiction and history, artifice and authenticity, culminating in the exhibition of the BBC production's costumes alongside original historical artefacts in National Trust properties around England. Sargent quotes the series’ director, Simon Langton, commenting that the series prompted an immediate increase in visitor numbers, not just to the filmed locations “but several other National Trust properties as well” (in Sargent, 1998, p. 182). Sargent echoes Wollen (1991), in drawing attention to the similarities between viewing cinematic representations of the past and the act of travel: “If the past is another country then we should expect historical tourism to evince some of the features of travel…Historical films grant sight of places we go to imaginatively or physically and enable a relation of sameness and difference which is typical of travel abroad” (1998, p. 181). However, what is more striking in the examples she cites is the seeming shift in emphasis in the tourists’ quest for authenticity. In the case of the Pride and Prejudice adaptation, some of the tourists would seem to have been motivated to visit sites associated with the historical period represented on screen, rather than the sites immediately associated with the production of the series. Similarly, Tooke and Baker (1996) cite ITV's 1994 screening of Cadfael, set in medieval Shrewsbury, as the cause of a sudden increase in tourism to Shrewsbury, despite the fact that the series was actually filmed in Hungary. Tooke and Baker conclude that, “It seems that if the film location is the true setting, the visitor visits the location; if the film location represents a fictional setting, the visitors go to the location; but if the film location represents a different actual setting, the visitors go to the place represented. It is not clear whether they also visit the location” (p. 93). Tooke and Baker inserted a qualifier into their conclusion, and indeed the topic remains under-researched to this day. However, these examples indicate that cinematic representations of history may introduce an additional complexity into their location tourists’ relationship with authenticity, one in which the markers of the authenticity of the historical period can, for some visitors, take precedence over the attraction of being present at the actual site of filming. As Sydney-Smith (2006) suggests in relation to the annual “re-enactment” tours by the Get Carter Appreciation Society, in dealing with representations of the past, “‘authenticity’ is crucially connected to nostalgia… Re-enactments by the society show a desire to recreate the virtual experience through a touristic one; yet here, it is of course the imaginary one that is ‘authentic’” (p. 90).

Authenticity is not the only aspect of film-motivated tourism in which certain distinctions between types of tourist experience can be observed. Another significant dialectic which has already attracted academic interest in this area is that of tourist's individual motivations for visiting film-related sites. Macionis (2004) posits a continuum of “increasing interest” in film-induced tourism, from the “serendipitous” tourist who just happens to be in a destination which appeared on film, through the “general” tourist, who is not specifically drawn to a location but participates in film tourism while at a destination, to the “specific” tourist who actively seeks out places seen on film (2004, p. 87). This complexity of the range of possible film tourist experiences is mirrored by a complex relationship between the tourist and the site of tourism, which once again can be expressed as a continuum. Couldry (2000) defines the span of this continuum in terms of commercial status, from “highly commercialised, organised sites with museum-like displays and theme park entertainment” to “not fully commercial leisure sites (entry is free) [which] are visited simply because they have been sites of media production” (p. 65). Meanwhile Combs (1989) suggests a distinction between “official”, “semi-official”, and “unofficial” and even “counter-official” sites of popular celebration, which allows us to re-imagine the same continuum of relationship between the tourist and site in terms of the degree of autonomy afforded to the visitors (Karpovich, 2008). Thus, the official studio tour, such as those offered by a variety of Hollywood studios, by the Disney properties, or the Granada Studios tour (Couldry, 2000), offers a highly structured, infinitely repeatable experience, in which the fans may at times seemingly be positioned as participants, all the while remaining as spectators. The next type of experience is the fan-organised tour, such as The Third Man tour of Vienna, the The Avengers walking tour (Miller, 1997), the Manhattan TV Tour (Torchin, 2002), or Manchester's “Hollywood of the North” tour (Schofield, 1996), which shares a degree of structure with the studio tours, but posits different hierarchical relationships between the tourists and the tour guide. The presumption that devotion to the object of fandom is “shared” by the tour guide and the tourists allows for a greater degree of interaction on the part of the tourists; in contrast to the official studio tours, fan-organised tours allow the fan tourist the possibility of immediate intervention, interjection, challenge, or addition to the narrative presented by the fan tour guide. Finally, the unofficial tour, such as the Get Carter tour of Newcastle (Sydney-Smith, 2006) or The X-Files tour of Vancouver (Hills, 2002), can dispense with both a defined structure and a tour guide. Such a tour is both an “underground activity” (p. 147) and, more importantly, an individualised, often unique, “quest narrative” (p. 148).

Managing Sites of Film Tourism

The tourist sites themselves can be categorised in terms of institutional structure, as either “official”, “semi-official”, or “unofficial”. Official sites of film/television tourism (such as the Hollywood studio tours or the Granada Studio Tour) are characterised by a direct relationship between the site and the copyright holder of the intellectual property associated with the site; such sites unambiguously invite tourism, but rigidly structure the tourist's experience. Semi-official sites (such as Hobbiton, the New Zealand Lord of the Rings location-turned-themepark, Portmeirion, the quirky Welsh hotel complex instantly recognisable as the backdrop to the cult television series The Prisoner, or those parts of central Vienna which feature on The Third Man tour) invite mass tourism, and particularly encourage film-motivated tourism, but, without an explicit commercial or institutional relationship with the copyright holder, can easily detach themselves from film/television tourism or limit it to a specific context (Portmeirion, for example, limits its association with The Prisoner to one tiny gift shop and one themed weekend a year). Notably, Hobbiton is based on a contemporary cinematic product, which means that, despite the fact that the tourist site is not owned by the film studio, it still has to follow rigid guidelines set by the film's copyright holders: “Tours…were tightly scripted by the cinema company. When the [site] owners were permitted to commence their tours…New Line Cinema provided photo boards along with instructions as to what they could show and say. In addition, no reworking of the hobbit holes or restoration/renovation of the site was permitted—they had to stay as they were. As the holes were built from untreated wood and polystyrene, their collapse was inevitable. Finally…the family was given permission to maintain the site, but not to enhance it. In spite of the state of the set, tours have been highly successful. The operator has turned the copyright and confidentiality issues and restrictions into a benefit by taking them as the main theme of the tour, which may disappoint young visitors looking for a theme-park style recreation” (Beeton, 2005, p. 94). These kinds of restrictions do not apply to “unofficial” sites, such as the ones discussed below, nor to the semi-official sites based on older films and television programmes (such as The Third Man or The Prisoner), but they are shared by other sites associated in particular with contemporary blockbusters (see, for example, Beeton, 2005, pp. 94-95 for a discussion of Warner Brothers’ restrictions on the promotion of sites associated with the Harry Potter films).

Unofficial fan-defined sites, such as The X-Files tour of Vancouver or The Avengers walking tour, have little or no institutional structure and allow for tailor-made individual experiences. The increasing availability of resources dedicated to identifying locations featured on screen (e.g. Film London, 2007; Reeves, 2001, 2003) means that sites which neither announce their association with film and television nor offer any obvious attraction to the visitor beyond the possible private thrill of “being there” are now being conceptualised as sites of tourism. Couldry (2000) speculates that at least part of the pleasure in visiting a location may indeed lie in simple physical presence at a familiar site, and in confirming the site's “realness” (as distinct from its “authenticity”) through that physical presence.

Such range and diversity of tourist experiences potentially available to film and television fans may illustrate the importance of tourism within media fandom. Yet, as well as potential gains, are there potential disappointments lying in store for the fan tourist? Unlike fans of sport and popular music, film and television fans traditionally follow fictionalised worlds, and every instance of physical proximity brings with it a potential demystification and disavowal. Indeed, tour guides often delight in revealing the nuances and the mechanics of the creative process, and in pointing out the subtle inconsistencies in the finished products (Torchin, 2002, p. 254) (although fans themselves are frequently sufficiently knowledgeable about production processes to be able to speculate about the technicalities of filming (Couldry, 2000, p. 98)). Such knowledge adds to the valuable resources of information at the fan's disposal, but at the same time may alter the ways in which fans will watch the film or programme from this point on. In an earlier work (Karpovich, 2008), I documented a range of responses to an exhibition based on a familiar television show, including the sense of mild disappointment which came with seeing the props and costumes up close, and outside their usual context: “The costumes are impressive, but close-up, they lose some of the lustre. If the mannequins are the same size as the actors, then they somehow seem small and fragile, and nothing like the stature I had always associated with the characters” (p. 212). At the same time, Couldry (2000) documents visitors constantly “testing the boundaries of the set's illusion: looking through the houses’ letter boxes or windows, pressing doorbells and knocking on doors, looking round the houses’ backs” (p. 69) to determine the limitations of the filmed location. Clearly, the visitor's interaction with the site is complex and individual, and can itself become part of the visitor's even more complex relationship with the film or television show associated with the site of tourism. Kim and Carl (2007) discuss fan tourism to two film location sites, focusing on tourists’ performative re-enactments of key scenes from the original film/television show, and suggesting that such re-enactment may bridge the experience of cinematic viewing with real lived experience, at least for some viewers/tourists.

Conclusion

Film-motivated tourism presents a complex and intersecting range of social practices and cultural phenomena. A given site can be mediated through a variety of cultural representations, through promotional materials, and through the performative practices of both staff and visitors. Moreover, as Mordue (2001) points out, the interests, expectations and practices of tourists and inhabitants of the same site are not necessarily homogeneous, and can even be oppositional to each other, creating tension, and thus yet another level of complexity, around the site. Mordue's example, the village of Goathland in Yorkshire, already showed signs of tension between local inhabitants and cine-tourists in the mid 1990s, when the village's main attraction was its association with the television series Heartbeat (a programme which consistently received high viewer numbers, yet was not associated with an active fan community, and the appeal of which was limited to the UK). By the turn of the century, Goathland also became associated with the Harry Potter films, with its railway station featuring as Hogwarts station in the films. Once again, the local tourist authorities attempted to capitalise on the cinematic association, though this time they were thwarted by Warner Brothers, when the film studio imposed severe restrictions on the use of its trademarked intellectual property (Beeton, 2005, p. 94-95). Unlike Heartbeat, Harry Potter is a global phenomenon, with a huge and proactive community of fans. It remains to be seen whether the tensions first identified by Mordue in relation to Heartbeat became exacerbated in the wake of Goathland's increased signification and exposure as a site of cinematic tourism.

Film-motivated tourism is of course enabled by advances in the convenience and affordability of travel, but it also becomes more popular and appealing the more the public participate, and the more awareness is created through word-of-mouth and the media. As Urry (1995) points out in relation to conventional tourism, “at least part of the social experience involved in many tourist contexts is to be able to consume particular commodities in the company of others…The satisfaction is derived not from an individual act of consumption but from the fact that all sorts of other people are also consumers of the service” (p. 131). Future research in the area will have to draw upon both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in assessing not just the physical manifestations and impacts of film-motivated tourism, but also the publicly available discourses about such tourist experiences. This article has identified a range of potential visitor experiences in film-motivated tourism; in a previous work (Karpovich, 2008), I compared two thematically and structurally identical film tourist sites, and concluded that the presence or absence of other similarly motivated visitors at the site has an influence on the visitor's experience. Thus, the significance of sites of film-motivated tourism is rarely intrinsic; rather, it is created, accumulated, and maintained by the continuing collective participatory experience of those who actually visit them.