12 December 2008

Maintenance

"My name's Bobby Peru. Like the country."

I know we aren't friends or buddies to share our lifes between each other, but still. Due to a major maintenance in my life (moving from Finland to the Netherlands, changing jobs, plus the usual Christmas visit to another 2 countries) the blog goes offline for a while. 
Be aware, "Bobby Peru don't come up for air!"

See you in 2009! 

06 December 2008

Bisztrókirálynő (2003)

Another Hungarian short, this time picked out from the selection of Hungarian Short Films vol. 2. As with Márton Szirmai's Tripe and Onion the story, especially the funny turn at its end was the reason of talking about it, Márton Csillag's short is more interesting due its cinematic style.

What I really liked in Bisztrókirálynő ("The Queen of the Bar"?) is the way how the film combines the traditional, silent era's film language with the absolute contemporary set. Talking about the film language of the silent era, the film goes back to the first years' picture quality, gestures, acting, camera handling, framing, music (at least how and what we associate to the era), its speed and rhythm, etc. This mixture gives a special feeling for the viewer, especially for those, who have seen several silent movies from the very beginning of the film history. This feeling is nothing else but an encounter with our temporality, more precisely confrontation with the ephemerality of our view: today, in 2008 we see and feel this particular film's problems of the above detailed cinematic qualities, but these feelings are compensated with the knowledge on the early cinema's production standards and styles. We know how the early films looked like, how they were conveying information, how they handled continuity, how their actors had to overact, and so on.

Above the obvious practice reasons (the film was made for a film school) there is one important consequence: This confrontation and recognition is extremely essential for the reflexive nature of our viewing strategies and interpretations.

If you sacrifice 5 minutes for the film you'll see these usually exploited and ruined archaizing cinematic approaches* are working very well and elaborate in this try. One more thing: it's Hungarian, but don't afraid, Bisztrókirálynő is 99% silent (I mean the film:) without any dialogues.



* for example music video- and advertisement clips are exploiting the early style, where usually their focuses are on another values (the band, the image, the product, ...) than the recreation of the history of film style.

8/10

01 December 2008

Film-induced tourism

On the other day I was watching Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) and thinking about its innocent, unintended approaches on film-induced tourism. Film-induced tourism is under the umbrella of cultural tourism – to be clear what does it mean take a look at its definition by Hudson and Brent Ritchie:

Sometimes called movie-induced or film-induced tourism, film tourism is defined here as tourist visits to a destination or attraction as a result of the destination’s being featured on television, video, or the cinema screen.” (HUDSON, Simon & BRENT RITCHIE, J.R.: 2006. Promoting Destinations via Film Tourism: An Empirical Identification of Supporting Marketing Initiatives. Journal of Travel Research, Vol. 44, May, p.387)

So during watching Ingrid Bergman's flâneurish visits on Southern Italian sites – Naples and Pompeii – I was wondering how many tourists (or even disaffected couples...) decided to travel to this side of Europe just because they've seen the film. We exactly know how the directors of the Neorealism were fought against the government's censorial efforts which tried to sweep all the postwar problems under the society's carpet. Already at the end of the '40s Italy stepped on the well paved sidewalk of the prosperity, where the realism didn't mean poverty and social exploitation anymore. Finally, Giulio Andreotti's law in 1949 officially controlled and restricted the possible ways of talking about contemporary Italy (if I'm not mistaken, he is "that" Andreotti..). From the time being the voice of Visconti (Ossessione, 1943), De Sica (Ladri di biciclette/The Bycicle Thief, 1948) or De Santis (Riso amaro/Bitter Rice, 1949) couldn't be as effective (and "real") as it was before (btw, according to the legend, after the screening of Visconti's Ossessione Mussolini himself stood up furiously and shouted: "This is not Italy!"). To take into consideration of this contextual background some might get answers on the baffling mixture of a depraved relationship and the sites' beauty, moreover maybe on the strange, sudden ending of the film as well.

But back to the film-induced tourism: Compare Rossellini's intentions which were narrowed and shaped by an indirect censorship (they subsided only those films which created a positive view on the country) with a production which obviously and deliberately serves interests of certain countries' or cities' touristic aims. Mentioning an extreme example: Phyllida Lloyd's terrible (a simple exploitation of the deserved success of the ABBA songs – as a cinematic production doesn't worth anything) Mamma Mia! (2008) was openly sponsored by the Hellenic Film Commission Office, and as a result the represented island (Skopelos (its made-up name in the movie is Kalokairi)) might face with an extreme growth in tourism. There's nothing wrong with this – the phenomenon is more and more part of the productions' PR logic. 


See the better example of Martin McDonagh's In Bruges (2008). Better, because it's "product placement" is less obvious, at least it is covered with an ironic voice (McDonagh's apologies – following his film's unexpected success – in the Flemish television on the possible American tourist hordes visiting Bruges was really funny). Click here for a movie-map of the city.

What is more interesting is the elevation of the consciousness around the importance of the film-induced tourism (from the "wait-and-see" PR to the anticipatory strategies), the sites appearence as an integrated product, the changing film language which bends in order to catalisate the need for travel in us. But this is another story... (currently I'm working on a pilot project which combines the values of the film-induced tourism with the European Capital of Culture brand's potential).