Wonderland of the south Pacific: Romantic and realist tendencies in amateur tourist films

Abstract

With a specific focus on New Zealand archival visual material, this chapter looks at examples of amateur filmmaking and considers how amateur practice both relates to and deviates from other contemporary forms of visual culture such as professional cinema, highlighting how they display a 'referential coherence' in relation to other media and offering a way of understanding amateur films as historical documents in the public domain. It will analyse holiday films recorded at well-known sightseeing destinations that offer a more ambivalent view of the tourist locality's geography and inhabitants. It will stress how films by outsiders familiar with popular representations resemble the imagery of professional media in many respects, without articulating the simplistic narratives of publicity material but sharing some of the wider aspirations of cultural discourses in circulation.