To Identify the Evolution of Tourism Practices in a Sensitive Way Through Documentary

Introduction

In the wake of fifteen years of audiovisual work in cities in the south of France, tourist sites are now being filmed¹ in turn as part of a new documentary series entitled “Getting out of the postcard”² in order to try to better understand, through their cinematographic presentation, everyday life in these so easily caricatured territories (Cyrulnik, 2020). While this series was intended to bear witness to the tourists who were taking over these sites, the pandemic and the changes in use that it brought about reoriented it by (re)presenting³ (Bougnoux, 2006, p.53) the daily life in these places, practiced by both tourists and inhabitants. It deals with ordinary places that become touristy, thus making them extraordinary. Based on the behavior of the inhabitants and tourists, who are more or less intermingled, the director and researcher seeks to capture the atmosphere of a place in order to bear witness to the complexity of the situation (Morin, 1990). It is not a question of 'inhabiting' the space insofar as we are more in the public space than in the home (Paquot, 2021), but rather of giving an account of the atmosphere that emanates from a place through the uses of all those who practice it by a sensitive approach (Sumartojo & Pink, 2019). Documentary allows this.

At a time when the world-place is being manufactured, in the sense of a universal site created by and for tourism, the fact of taking a cinematographic look at a long-established tourist site, a heritage site, contributes to the risk of its being transformed. The uses of an urban space bear witness to the culture in which they are embedded. But they are sometimes modified by an invasion of tourists who change their practices or become part of them. Tourists sometimes move around on sites that they themselves contribute to altering through their behavior. The living space is important to us, with its practices, its uses, even its consumption... Public space is modified. Its perception too. This is what the documentaries in this series propose to question in turn, going so far as to finally engage the viewer in this reflection.

While tourists come to a site for its experiential value, the researcher proposes through this series to make another experience, this time cinematic. ” Getting out of the postcard ” is offered as a case study to initially question the media forms for approaching tourist sites. Inspired by the media power of the postcard, with all that it conveys to tourists, this hybrid work between sociology, travelogue and documentary film, bears witness to the mediation devices that organize this relationship between people and nature. With the creative documentary, we are in an anthropological and artistic approach to tourist sites, with a method in a comprehensive approach that affirms a way of addressing these territories and bearing witness to them. A method is defined that allows us to nuance the representations of this territory, and also to better understand the ways in which it is practiced, by tourists as well as by the inhabitants.

The creative documentary forces the narration of a territory in images and sounds: whether through the attitudes of tourists (Augé, 1997) who pass quickly to take their snapshot, or travelers (Paquot, 2014) who stay a little longer to try to soak up an “atmosphere”⁴ (Cyrulnik, 2021). This construction of a filmic discourse about a tourist site is based on the relationship that people establish with the place and its inhabitants according to the time they spend there. The creative documentary participates in this immersion insofar as the viewer can experience it in turn.

With Covid 19, tourism practices have evolved, and the first two films in the series “Getting out of the postcard”, shot at the beginning and then in the middle of the pandemic, have had to adapt to this event and change the way they film and tell the story of these trips. This is what we will see.

The analysis becomes geocultural and interdisciplinary: from film studies to anthropology, via information and communication sciences associated with the artistic dimension. Various disciplinary approaches are thus solicited in this series through the knowledge it allows us to acquire on the uses of these sites.