Since the 1990s, academic literature has paid increasing attention to film-induced tourism, recognising the impact of cultural and marketing products on tourists’ motivations. Film and television are particularly effective in shaping geographic imaginaries and contribute to rendering places attractive as tourist destinations. The search for the real counterparts of places portrayed on screen can be explained with tourists’ need for physical points of reference to give form to their imagination and memory of given (fictional) events. However, since landscapes are often reinvented to fit a narrative, issues of authenticity emerge.
The paper aims to present an ongoing research and provides a bibliographic overview on the topic, by also referring to the analytical concepts of verisimilitude and the invention of tradition, in relation to historical landscape representation in period fiction. It also discusses the potential, for both tourism and Public Historical Geography, of comparing place representations with primary geo-historical sources, particularly maps.
While cinematographic productions have increasingly been addressed as useful Public History practices, communication and reception of the settings of past events through such media have been largely neglected. Fiction-induced tourists tend to accept hyper-real experiences in which the distinction between model and reality is blurred. However, increasing their awareness of the processes of on-screen landscape reinvention (which possibly lead to the production of new localities), by drawing their attention to the information conveyed by historical cartography, could provide interesting opportunities for the transmission of cultural and historical heritage. The extra-textual positive effects of narratives could thus go beyond the mere construction of film- or television series-based tourist offers, and increase both locals’ and visitors’ knowledge and understanding of traces of the past in the featured destinations.
Mots clés : Film/Television-Induced Tourism |Landscape Reinvention|Verisimilitude|Historical Fiction|Public Historical Geography
A103668CF