Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Tourism Studies / Travel / All Films

One Man's Journey series

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

One Man's Journey series
Buy Now: $705.00

One Man's Journey is a three-part series featuring naturalist/explorer/filmmaker Robert Perkins paddling his canoe through his personal and geographic journeys. All three films were broadcast on WGBH in the winter of 2005.

“One Man's Journey... is an adventure story, but not the kind with bravado or derring-do. Instead, it's the contemplative, solitary kind... Much of the film consists of radiant nature shots narrated by Mr. Perkins as he reflects on the meaning of life... the movie is also unexpectedly stirring, informed by Mr. Perkins's considerable, if dark, charm, and the beauty of the remote landscapes he is drawn to. (The film's) meditative style becomes hypnotic...”
— New York Times

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Common Roads

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Common Roads
Buy Now: $320.00

While the label of 'pilgrim' is still mostly associated with devout persons leaving home with purely religious motives, young people taking to the road as 'backpackers' are generally perceived as adventure seeking globetrotters. Questioning these stereotypes, anthropologist and filmmaker Tommi Mendel followed two young women, one along the Way of St. James — a centuries old pilgrimage route — through France and Spain, and another backpacking through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. Documenting their experiences and encounters over a period of three years, this film reveals intriguing parallels between what at first glance appear as two different ways of traveling.

Common Roads is Tommi Mendel's PhD-thesis accepted by the University of Zurich and was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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Hello Photo

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Hello Photo
Buy Now: $320.00

In her startling, exquisitely shot Hello Photo, documentarist Nina Davenport turns the conventions of the travelogue inside out. She takes us to India and abandons us there, leaving us to believe what we see through her eyes. Her movie replicates the experience of being a traveller and thus a voyeur, of taking in sights without necessarily understanding their meaning.

Davenport seems less interested in cracking the enigma of India than in savoring it …Her hunger makes her unashamed, like the eager children who find the eye of her camera the next best thing to sweets.

"Hello Photo takes its title from their greetings, and its method from her persistent visibility. It's a film about seeing and being seen. It's about making a spectacle of yourself — as a Western woman armed with a movie camera — and being part of a spectacle; in the theater of the street, under a circus tent, on a movie set.

Davenport uses images of Bombay filmmakers at work and the comments of two film stars who philosophize about the nature of fame, to frame her own enterprise, and to comment on it both directly and ironically. In a country intoxicated with cinema, Davenport is just one more moviemaker. Yet she's undeniably an outsider, subject to the scrutiny that brings her. And what she's after is something quite different from her Indian counterparts; popular Indian cinema is spangled, artificial, and gleefully dramatic, a true manifestation of myth.

In contrast, Davenport's vision is poetic and free form, attuned to the beauty and strangeness of real life. Instead of being staged, her drama is found in the details of a broken stone wall and a sky full of bats that are really kites. More than just found, it is aggressively pursued - seized in the faces of people carried on a wave of madness or religious ecstasy, in the look of a blind boy whose expression is as remote and mysterious as the moon."

(notes by Linda Dubler, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

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Home Waters

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Home Waters
Buy Now: $320.00

Home Waters documents naturalist Robert Perkins' five-week journey down the length of the Connecticut River, from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound. Full of humor, adventure and insight, the one-hour film paints a stunning portrait of New England in autumn, and captures the spirit of the river, and the people who live, work and take pleasure on it.

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Goat Packing

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Goat Packing
Buy Now: $320.00

Most of us think of goats as either petting zoo favorites, cartoon staples or food, but in growing numbers America's outdoor enthusiasts are discovering them as trail companions. People-friendly pack goats have been paving the way for many to enjoy an environmentally low impact experience. We meet some of these remarkable animals as we follow 9 people and 16 goats on a challenging 8 day traverse of the Continental Divide in Western Wyoming. Leading our way is John Mionczynski – the naturalist known as the 'father of goat-packing' and the individual credited with popularizing this unique experience. Come along as John and his goats start the hike on a trout filled lake. Once above the tree line we keep our eyes on signs of mountain sheep and their predators as we scramble across imposing boulder fields and trod through quickly melting snow. Along the way John shares his unique knowledge of the native plants and animals of this habitat. At 13,000 ft. we cross the Continental Glacier. Here we discover a vast boulder field in an area that had been covered by the Glacier just eight years ago. Further evidence of its diminishing size is a glacier lake – once frozen within the glacier, now flowing freely at its top. These Rocky Mountain glaciers, which have existed at least 15,000 years as the source of the rivers and underground water table of the Great Plains, are disappearing in our lifetime.

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Incidents of Travel In Chichen Itza

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

Incidents of Travel In Chichen Itza
Buy Now: $320.00

This original ethnographic video depicts how New Agers, the Mexican state, tourists, and 1920s archaeologists all contend to “clear” the site of the antique Maya city of Chichen Itza in order to produce their own idealized and unobstructed visions of “Maya” while the local Maya themselves struggle to occupy the site as vendors and artisans.

The setting is the spring Equinox, when a shadow said to represent the Maya serpent-god Kukulkan appears on one temple pyramid. As more than 40,000 New Age spiritualists and secular tourists from the United States and Mexico converge to witness this solar phenomenon, the video depicts the surrounding social event as a complicated entanglement of expected dualisms concerning tourism. Going beyond previous films that reduce tourism to neo-colonial and exoticizing social relations, this video portrays a Maya cultural site where US New Agers — rather than local Mayas — appear as exotic ritualists who are on display for other secular tourists and for local Mayas.

While the video does examine representations of Mayas by visiting New Agers as part of globalizing discourses on the exotic and evolution, it also shows how during the ongoing economic crisis, resident Mayas struggle against the Mexican state — rather than against tourists — that regularly “sweeps” them from the tourist zone in order to anchor the nation in an image of pure antiquity.

This video also asks what kind of fieldwork is possible as part of such a spectacle. It questions the status of ethnographic authority as people from the various groups converging on the event, ironically including the anthropologist-videomakers, trade positions and compete to speak about the Maya.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, Award 1997

Margaret Mead Festival, 1997

Royal Anthropological Institute, Material Culture and Archaeology Prize, 1998

Latin American Studies Association Film Festival, Washington DC, 2001

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Leaving Bakul Bagan

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 06:41:00 GMT

Leaving Bakul Bagan
Buy Now: $295.00

Three generations of the extended Roychowdury family have resided for decades at 160 Bakul Bagan Road, Calcutta. Every now and then one of its members has to leave the landscape of their childhood - a large sprawling house built around a courtyard and all the affection that dozens of relatives surround them with, to relocate for a job or to start a family elsewhere.

In Leaving Bakul Bagan, Saborna, a 19 year-old girl, prepares to leave for higher studies in the United States. The film is an intimate portrayal of her interactions with her family during her last few days at home. It is full of casual conversational humor and vignettes from typical familial interactions.

Incidental to the time and woven into the film are the effects of race riots throughout India in the aftermath of the destruction of a Mosque by Hindu fanatics. This incident precipitates an already brewing political debate about the ethics of leaving for America, especially on the eve of such a tragic political disaster. The very last scene, rendered in slow motion to heighten its sensibility, effectively creates a sense of deep loss and the feeling that the need for familial roots are indeed pan-ethnic and trans-cultural. Even though shot in cinema-verite style, Leaving Bakul Bagan has the grace and the flow of a dramatic narrative.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Best of Category, New England Film and Video Festival, 1994

Special Invitation, 40th Flaherty Film Seminar, 1994

RAI, University of Kent Festival of Ethnographic Films, 1994

Whitney Museum Tour, New York, Bombay, New Delhi, 1994

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Looking For John Muir

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 06:41:00 GMT

Looking For John Muir
Buy Now: $320.00

Robert Perkins retraces the steps of 19th century Scottish naturalist John Muir, who walked through one thousand miles of the American South in 1867. Perkins takes to the road to provide a personal assessment of how the Southern landscape has changed since Muir's time and examines some of the environmental damage in the region.

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One Man In A Boat

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

One Man In A Boat
Buy Now: $320.00

With whimsy and insight, Robert Perkins canoes from London to Scotland on the canals and rivers of Great Britain to deliver a letter to the head of his ancestral clan, Lord Nigel Forbes. The film is a moving portrait of a land and its people.

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One Man's Journey, Part I

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

One Man's Journey, Part I
Buy Now: $320.00

Winner of many major awards, his best-known work provides a captivating look at Perkins as a young man willing to take on the challenges of the Canadian Arctic on a long solo canoe trip. Battling rapids and black flies, while dancing with his own demons and his shadow, Perkins explores what it means to survive in the stark beauty of the Canadian tundra. Perkins not only takes on arduous physical challenges, but he lyrically describes in film and language how the journey helps him make peace with a difficult father.

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