Since the 19th century travelogues have been a popular media format. First as illustrated lectures accompanied with glass-lantern slides and moving images projections, and later as films and television shows, travelogues are media bound to place. Because their location orientation, they could be considered an early form of geo-locative media. The practitioners of the travelogue form used to be travelers who documented their journeys in different media and created non-fiction stories about the places they visited. Burton Homes, for instance, a traveler, photographer, filmmaker and performer, coined the term “travelogue” in 1904 to describe the multimedia lectures in where he narrated stories about his travels around the world. Since that time, the practice of a speaker narrating a visit to a specific place while showing related imagery to an audience became the basic convention for the travelogue format. During the whole 20th century, not only the film and television industries invested in the production of travelogues, but also governmental institutions, academic researchers, and home video amateur enthusiasts, dedicated many efforts to creating them. In this entry, I would like to share a small sample of travelogue films about four Latin American cities (Bogota, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and La Paz) produced between 1940 and 1960s.
Not surprisingly, during the convoluted years that surrounded World War II, USA governmental agencies and international organizations created travelogue films about the major cities in the Americas in order to document not only the modernization of different countries, but also to help building an imaginary community of western allies. Besides displaying visual records of the major public spaces of the cities, their transportation systems, and the most famous places, the travelogues from this period of time had also the feeling of an advertisement for friendly modern tourism and commerce between democratic and capitalist nations. Curiously, the narrators in these films use stereotypical phrases to describe the cities, local people, and culture. For instance, in the film “Bogota, Capital of Colombia” produced in 1946 by the Visual Education Chief from the Pan American Union (now the Organization of American States), the the narrator uses the infamous epithet of “the South American Athens” to describe the city. The epithet circulated among the Bogotanian literary men since the end of the 19th century and was used as a batch of honor that exalted the sophisticated intellectual culture of the denizens of this Andean city located 8.600 feet above the sea level.
In a travelogue about Sao Paulo made by the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in 1943, the voice over of the narrator opens the film saying that the city is the “fastest city in the world.” Although that affirmation was pretty inaccurate, it was an idea believed by the Paulistas, even though at that time Rio de Janheiro was the capital and biggest urban settlement in Brazil.
Another film produced by the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in 1943 was about La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. In this travelogue, the narrator emphasizes the altitude of the city and tells curious anecdotes related to the physical phenomena at 11,975 ft above the sea level. For instance he talks about the time that it takes to boil an egg, the difficulty in climbing stairs, and the headaches related to the lack of oxygen.
Finally, and more than a decade after the end of World War II, the film “Meet Mexico City” produced by American Airlines in 1958 showcase the Mexcian caopital as a unique tourist destination. In this film, the narrator describes the city as a place of “eternal spring,” “mix of cultures” and with the “largest bullfight ring of the world.”
Despite the flamboyant language of the narrator speech, these travelogue films about Latin American cities provide a great audiovisual memory of urban places that sometimes, due to the lack of access to technology, were never visually recorded. These films, as historical geo-locative media records, are great material for creative projects that take advantage of the potential of new media technologies for creating interactive relationships between audiovisual materials and place.
