Preliminary Programme

Wed 30 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 31 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 1 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 2 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 30 March 2016 16.30 - 18.30
P-4 CUL09 Travel as a Commodity in Twenthieth-century Cultural Industries
Aula 13, Nivel 1
Network: Culture Chair: Ingo Zechner
Organizer: Nico de Klerk Discussant: Nico de Klerk
Paulo Cunha : Cinegraphic Missions and Image Hunters
UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001 and European Capital of Culture in 2012, Guimarães is a small town in northern Portugal that has been increasingly promoting itself as a tourist destination, especially of a historical and cultural kind.
The first known images shot in this town and its surroundings were captured ... (Show more)
UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001 and European Capital of Culture in 2012, Guimarães is a small town in northern Portugal that has been increasingly promoting itself as a tourist destination, especially of a historical and cultural kind.
The first known images shot in this town and its surroundings were captured by filmmakers who were passing by as part of foreign and national cinegraphic missions to Portugal and the Portuguese inland: Simbolino do Nascimento directed FESTAS DE SÃO TORCATO EM GUIMARÃES (1912) and GUALTERIANAS (1912); Anatole Thiberville directed GUIMARÃES E ARREDORES (1916) and DE VIZELA A CANIÇOS (1916) for the Gaumont catalogue; R. Moreau directed BRAGA E GUIMARÃES (1918) for the Pathé catalogue; and Silvino Santos directed GUIMARÃES (1929) and VIZELA (1929).
Simbolino do Nascimento is an unknown figure in the Portuguese film panorama, probably an amateur filmmaker or a small film producer; R. Moreau and Anatole Thiberville were cameramen of two of the world’s largest houses of cinema production and distribution; and Silvino Santos was a film director who relocated to the Brazilian Amazon. Despite their diverse backgrounds, they can all be described as image hunters who left their homes behind to travel the world in cinegraphic missions, in search of exotic and peculiar landscapes.
The films they made about Guimarães are thematically very similar, mainly collecting postcard-like landscape features, such as panoramas of the city and its surroundings or social events with a religious content. They were made in a more or less mechanical way with the aim of rapidly increasing the film companies’ catalogues with landscape and travel films.
The purpose of this presentation will be not only to identify these cinegraphic missions and characterize the films of these image hunters, but also to reflect on the influence that these landscape representations had in raising the people’s awareness about the visual identity of these places and communities—or even in building that identity in the first place. (Show less)

Kristin Kopp : The Geopolitics of Travel: the Colonial Representations of Colin Ross
As geographer Bernd Wiese argues in WeltAnsichten: Illustrationen von Forschungsreisen deutscher Geographen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, the turn of the century witnessed the rise of popular forms of the travelogue, which occupied increasing segments of the book market, and steadily displaced the narratives of scientific expeditions that had ... (Show more)
As geographer Bernd Wiese argues in WeltAnsichten: Illustrationen von Forschungsreisen deutscher Geographen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, the turn of the century witnessed the rise of popular forms of the travelogue, which occupied increasing segments of the book market, and steadily displaced the narratives of scientific expeditions that had been popular during the preceding “second age of discovery.” Following this trend, books with a focus on educational and scientific aims that presented the research findings of traveling geographers, biologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers gave way to texts featuring gripping narratives of foreign travel itself.
Current research stresses the role these travelogues played in the construction of a modern worldview in terms of time and space (transportation technology, tourism, the media) and the cultural imaginary (particularly in the juxtaposition of civilization vs. “primitivism,” and of social order vs. adventure). In this paper, I will expand this research to engage the ways in which travel (and its representations) intersected with geopolitical concerns in the interwar period. If prior to World War I, travel literature and territorial expansionism seemingly went hand in hand, postwar-WWI travelogues introduced a new type of global ‘cartography’ to interwar Germany and Austria—one whose concerns seem to have overlapped significantly with those of the (revisionist) geography of the period.
Following World War I, the Austrian travel writer and filmmaker Colin Ross journeyed both through overseas lands in Africa, the Americas, Australia and the Pacific as well as through the continental spaces of Eastern Europe, East and Southeast Asia. In this presentation I will show that Ross employed tropes of colonial conquest and overseas adventure in his depictions of Africa and the Americas in particular. But I will then argue that these same narrative elements are also present in his representations of his experiences in the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this way, he was able to capitalize on the Austrian desire to place themselves at the conceptual center of an objectified colonial periphery. (Show less)

Sofia Sampaio : Miguel Spiguel: Filmmaker, Propaganda-maker and Tourist
Little is known about Miguel Spiguel (1921-1975), one of the most prolific directors and producers of Portuguese tourist films in the 1960s. Born in Turkey of Russian descent, Spiguel arrived in Portugal during the Second World War. He began his film career in the mid-1950s as an assistant director, but ... (Show more)
Little is known about Miguel Spiguel (1921-1975), one of the most prolific directors and producers of Portuguese tourist films in the 1960s. Born in Turkey of Russian descent, Spiguel arrived in Portugal during the Second World War. He began his film career in the mid-1950s as an assistant director, but was soon making his own films, specializing in travelogues about Portugal and the Portuguese colonies. These films were commissioned or bought by the SNI and the AGC/AGU, the state propaganda organs in Portugal and the overseas, and had wide distribution at home and abroad. After the 1974 revolution, Spiguel was dismissed for his association with the regime, whose values and mores resonated in the themes and style of his films. For his supporters, however, he was just an entrepreneurial filmmaker who understood the film industry and tried to make the most of it.
Drawing on oral history interviews and untapped private archival materials, this presentation unearths some of the travel and filmmaking practices of this filmmaker in order to address the vexed question of agency in a dictatorial context. I will argue that Spiguel’s travelogues are imbued with the regime’s understanding of tourism as propaganda, but they also reflect his involvement in the field of rapidly disseminating commercial travel and leisure practices, and, more generally, the changes that were taking place in the 1960s in Portuguese cinema, tourism and politics. (Show less)

Joachim Schaetz : Branding Colin Ross
In 1926 and 1927 Colin Ross and his family traveled the African continent south to north. The two books he wrote about that trip—Der erwachende Sphinx. Durch Afrika von Kap nach Kairo (1927) and Mit Kamera, Kind und Kegel durch Afrika (1928)—were mirrored in terms of audience orientation by the ... (Show more)
In 1926 and 1927 Colin Ross and his family traveled the African continent south to north. The two books he wrote about that trip—Der erwachende Sphinx. Durch Afrika von Kap nach Kairo (1927) and Mit Kamera, Kind und Kegel durch Afrika (1928)—were mirrored in terms of audience orientation by the two films that came out of the same trip: DER ERWACHENDE SPHINX (1927) and ALS DREIJÄHRIGER DURCH AFRIKA (1928). It is the 1928 film that is the specific topic of this presentation. The market of travel accounts in interwar Germany, whether it concerned books or films, constituted a rich palette of products that appealed to a mass audience yet whose topics also addressed various niche audiences (wildlife, adventure, spirituality, colonialism, modern means of transportation, tourism, etc.). Within this palette Colin Ross—supported by the image-making efforts of Brockhaus, the leading travel book publisher at the time—created a niche for himself, firstly, with his geopolitical reflections and, later, nazi sympathies; secondly, and no doubt adding to his enormous popularity, by traveling with his family and consistently featuring them in his writing, photography, and filmmaking. The film ALS DREIJÄHRIGER DURCH AFRIKA (THROUGH AFRICA AT AGE THREE) is the most explicit of this strategy of branding Ross, as it specifically adresses family audiences by using Ross's three-year old son Ralph as protagonist.
In this presentation, the film will be examined as a mode of organizing the different attractions of a travel film. It will examine its poetics, its different, hybrid forms and modes of address in the mid-1920s to early 1930s, as well as its marketing and exhibition (e.g. how is a travel film catering to an audience of children and families presented differently? Is the travel film as family film a more pervavise phenomenon?). (Show less)



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