This paper presents the main methodological premises and questions that underpin the research project “Behind the Camera: Practices of Visuality and Mobility in the Portuguese Tourist Film” (EXPL/IVC-ANT/1706/2013), which has been carried out in the National Moving Image Archive (ANIM) of the Portuguese Film Museum (Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema), since April 2014. I argue for the theoretical and methodological gains of a practices-driven, anthropology-informed approach to the moving image archive. In the case of the tourist film, this kind of approach has proved very productive, allowing us to move away from all encompassing theories (often influenced by the concept of ‘tourist gaze’) to pay closer attention to travel images, as far as their texts, codes, contexts and ‘doings’ are concerned. More than “a library of visual evidence” (Klerk 2008), the archive emerges as a ruin of invisible presences, a repository of hidden practices that call for further research and “excavation” (Ishizuka & Zimmermann 2008).

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Archive; practices; tourist film; methodology