Movie-mapping: Cinematographic Tourism and Place-marketing

Abstract

Liverpool is a great place. The people are so cool… The town is so much fun. (Samuel L. Jackson, quoted in ‘Boomtown! Liverpool Movie and Television Map’, 2002) The Fetishization of Place and Space In Luis Bunuel's film The Phantom of Liberty (1974), a Python-esque series of absurdist sketches, a French bourgeois couple flick through photographs which a creepy-looking man in a park had given to their daughter (with the instruction ‘do not show to grown ups’). We initially only see the parents' reaction to the photographs and not the images themselves, yet from their evident disgust (and arousal) we naturally assume they are looking at pornographic imagery. However, it soon becomes apparent that the images are those we might typically expect to see on tourist postcards: a sunset scene; the Madeleine Church in Paris (‘sickening!’ – ‘What can you expect nowadays?’); L'Arc de Triomphe (‘obscene’); and, most outrageous of them all, the Taj Mahal (‘that's really going too far’). In Bunuel's surrealist take on the fetishization of place and spectacle in commodity capitalism, the tourist image becomes an erotically charged, slightly seedy object of lascivious consumption; the tourist brochure, by extension, a glossy wank mag. In its attempts to seduce the would-be consumer (enticing him or her to consummate their desire by visiting the places represented in the images), the tourist industry is of course heavily dependent on imagery of all shapes and sizes to distil, evoke or construct an essence or imaginary of place.