Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century
Author(s)
Strain, Ellen
Abstract
As these turn-of-the-century films illustrate, motion picture cameras of the early silent period were drawn to images of Westerners in motion against exotic backdrops. Cameramen deployed across the globe captured on film the contrast between privileged travelers who left home via luxurious ships or newly-built railroads and non-Western peoples who awaited their guests with empty rowboats and unsaddled donkeys. An equally stark comparison could be drawn between these foreign laborers viewed by their visitors as technologically backwards and the theater-seat tourists who by their attendance became participants in the technological “marvel of the century”–moving pictures. In either case, technology and leisure drew clear dividing lines between the haves and the have-nots, the tourists and the toured. Surveying the history of film from these early travelogues to the widescreen adventures of the fifties to contemporary IMAX magic carpet rides, not only do touristic viewing pleasures seem to be a staple within cinema, but the foreign locale appears to constitute the ideal testing ground for new simulation.
