Description
Some contributors take a broad view of travelogues by examining the colonial and imperial perspectives embodied in early travel films, the sensation of movement that those films evoked, and the role of live presentations such as lectures in our understanding of travelogues. Other essays are focused on specific films, figures, and technologies, including early travelogues encouraging Americans to move to the West; the making and reception of the documentary Grass (1925), shot on location in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran; the role of travel imagery in 1930s Hollywood cinema; the late-twentieth-century 16mm illustrated-lecture industry; and the panoramic possibilities presented by IMAX technologies. Together the essays provide a nuanced appreciation of how, through their representations of travel, filmmakers actively produce the worlds they depict.
Contributors. Rick Altman, Paula Amad, Dana Benelli, Peter J. Bloom, Alison Griffiths, Tom Gunning, Hamid Naficy, Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Lauren Rabinovitz, Jeffrey Ruoff, Alexandra Schneider, Amy J. Staples
A collection of essays focused on the pivotal role of travelogues within the history of cinema
About the Author
Jeffrey Ruoff is Assistant Professor of Film and Television Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of An American Family: A Televised Life and a coauthor of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. His films and videos, including The Last Vaudevillian and Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown have been shown at festivals and on television in the United States and abroad.
Reviews
"Virtual Voyages offers us an incisive look at the ways and means by which nonfiction cinema has mobilized itself to span time and space, carrying viewers across magical expanses for what appears to be a nominal price. The hidden costs and complex pleasures of virtual travel receive close scrutiny in a book that is sure to stimulate further explorations."-Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary
"Stretching from early cinema to IMAX, Virtual Voyages offers the best tour yet available of the production and presentation of travel films, one of the most durable and intriguing-and too long overlooked-of film genres. The reprinted and new essays collected by Jeffrey Ruoff historically situate Hale's Tours, Burton Holmes's lectures, home movies, Grass, Jungle Headhunters, Everest, and a host of other examples of the genre, and theorize the particular knowledges and pleasures the travel film offers of an exotic and mundane world in motion."-Gregory Waller, editor of Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition
Book Information
ISBN 9780822337133
Author Jeffrey Ruoff
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 426g