Industry-oriented concerns have dominated research on the links between tourism and cinema, especially in so-called ‘film-induced tourism’ studies. Working from a humanities and social sciences perspective, I have formulated a different set of questions, which regards tourism and cinema as two distinct but often-interconnected social fields. I am interested, for instance, in how cinema and tourism have historically overlapped, especially before the 1980s; how they can be defined as a set of discourses but also as a set of practices that can be sociologically and ethnographically described and understood; and how they have converged or diverged in their relations towards the state and the market. These questions informed an interdisciplinary research project that I coordinated between April 2014 and September 2015, which is the main object of my talk. Called ‘Behind the camera: practices of visuality and mobility in the Portuguese tourist film’ (EXPL/IVC-ANT/1706/2013), this project focused on the non-fictional film collection of the ANIM – the National Archive of the Moving Images of the Portuguese Film Museum, which had received little scholarly attention, to learn more about the filmmaking and touristic practices developed in Portugal between 1910 and 1980. I will discuss the project’s major theoretical and methodological premises, its implementation and final results. How to move from here and continue to use moving images for research purposes is another question I wish to raise.

--

moving images,tourism,cinema,social practices,archive,Portugal 1910-1980