The study of tourism has been shaped by the dichotomy of work versus leisure, whereby tourism is normally conceived as an expression of the latter. As a result, tourism studies tend to turn a blind eye to work-related aspects, perceived to be the concern of more business-oriented studies. The traditional divide, in film studies, between textual and industry approaches has similarly encouraged a separate treatment of formal and production aspects of film. And yet the research I have been carrying out on Portuguese tourism films has made dichotomy-ridden approaches as these unsustainable. After a few archival viewings, the ‘hybridity’ of tourism films and their ‘contamination’ by industrial films became hard to ignore: long sequences of images showing industrial sites, workers and processes were fairly common amidst the usual picturesque views and overtly promotional displays of tourism infrastructures. The co-habitation of industry and tourism in these films can be convincingly attributed to the subordination of tourism to a state propaganda modernising agenda, which lasted well beyond the late 1960s, when tourism became a more autonomous activity. However, the interviews I conducted with filmmakers suggest that this mixture of genres was often also linked to filmmaking practices, reflecting, for instance, a filmmaker’s tactics to potentiate location shooting or to please different sponsors. This paper wishes to explore the ‘industrial contaminations’ of Portuguese tourism films made in 1940-1970, by drawing attention to the filmmaking production logics and practices in which these films were embedded. I have drawn inspiration from industrial film research (e.g. Hediger and Vonderau, 2009), which has been especially adroit in attending to and making sense of these logics and practices. I will ultimately argue that, even before being linked to a fully-fledged industry (i.e. tourism), tourism films can already be productively thought of as ‘industrial films’.

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Tourism film,work,industrial film,filmmaking,tactics