Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays focused on the pivotal role of travelogues within the history of cinema
Trade Review“
Virtual Voyages offers us an incisive look at the ways and means by which nonfiction cinema has mobilized itself to span time and space, carrying viewers across magical expanses for what appears to be a nominal price. The hidden costs and complex pleasures of virtual travel receive close scrutiny in a book that is sure to stimulate further explorations.”—Bill Nichols, author of
Introduction to Documentary“Stretching from early cinema to IMAX,
Virtual Voyages offers the best tour yet available of the production and presentation of travel films, one of the most durable and intriguing—and too long overlooked—of film genres. The reprinted and new essays collected by Jeffrey Ruoff historically situate
Hale’s Tours, Burton Holmes’s lectures, home movies,
Grass,
Jungle Headhunters,
Everest, and a host of other examples of the genre, and theorize the particular knowledges and pleasures the travel film offers of an exotic and mundane world in motion.”—Gregory Waller, editor of
Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film ExhibitionTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle / Jeffrey Ruoff 1
I. Traveling Machines: Space, Time, Difference
“The Whole World Within Reach”: Travel Images without Borders / Tom Gunning 25
From
Hale’s Tours to
Star Tours: Virtual Voyages, Travel Ride Films,
and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real / Lauren Rabinovitz 42
From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of Travel Films / Rick Altman 61
II. Travelogues and Silent Cinema
“The Nation’s First Playground”: Travel Films and the American West, 1895–1920 / Jennifer Lynn Peterson 79
Between the “Familiar Text” and the “Book of the World”: Touring the
Ambivalent Contexts of Travel Films / Paula Amad 99
Lured by the East: Ethnographic and Expedition Films about Nomadic
Tribes—The Case of
Grass (1925) / Hamid Naficy 117
Trans-Saharan Automotive Cinema: Citroen-, Renault-, and
Peugeot-Sponsored Documentary Interwar Crossing Films / Peter J. Bloom 139
Homemade Travelogues:
Autosonntag—A Film Safari in the
Swiss Alps / Alexandra Schneider 157
III. Travelogues in the Sound Era
Hollywood and the Attractions of the Travelogue / Dana Benelli 177
“The Last of the Great (Foot-Slogging) Explorers”: Lewis Cotlow and
the Ethnographic Imaginary in Popular Travel Film / Amy J. Staples 195
Show and Tell: The 16mm Travel Lecture Film / Jeffrey Ruoff 217
Time Traveling IMAX Style: Tales from the Giant Screen / Alison Griffiths 238
Works Cited 259
Contributors 283
Index 285
