A story made real
“I have always been fascinated by the tourist industry. It might be because I grew up in a little beach town, or because my father always took me on his business trips to Istanbul, Ireland, Washington or Venice. When he was working I walked the streets of these towns, like a proper flâneuse. But the more cities I saw, the more a certain feeling came over me, a weird feeling of slight discomfort that derived from my position as an outsider.
Odd feelings
I still have that feeling, for example, when walking around in a small Chinese village that is ‘opened up for tourism’. Following a neat path along English signs to the ‘rice field’, ‘restaurant’ or ‘family home’, taking pictures of the colourful women working in the fields who do not look up because they are used to being photographed. I even have this odd feeling when I am in a Dutch beach town in wintertime. In winter these towns seem to be hollow non-places or empty meeting grounds. Those places only come alive when people travel trough them in summer time. Yet it feels more honest when it is closed off, since it seems I can then grasp what the town ‘really is’. But is that so? I guess in all of these cases my ‘odd feeling’ can be specified as a feeling of detachment from a place, not being able to grasp reality or to pinpoint the authentic.
Authenticity
Authentic: ‘real or genuine: not copied or false’; ‘true and accurate’; ‘made to be or look just like the original’. That’s what the dictionary says. I am the kind of tourist that is always seeking for authenticity, but it seems I am never able to fully grasp ‘it’ when visiting tourist towns… Would this be at the base of my uncomfortable feeling?
'Paradise (under construction)' will be a film about discrepancy or tension between the tourist’s quest for authenticity and the host catering for this quest, using their local culture as a commodity. What is authenticity in a tourist town? What is reality in such a place? Is a tourist attraction less real than a local’s home? And does it matter?
I also dived into the other side of the story, the side of the hosts, or locals, the ones ‘selling their culture’. What’s the impact of the presence of the tourist on the lives and identities of people who allow tourists to gaze at them? How does this gaze affect the daily life in a touristic village? How does it affect the narration of their local culture?
The story of Shangri-La
It was because of questions like this that I stumbled upon Shangri-La, a tourist town in South West China. It came on my radar when I found an article written by anthropologist Ben Hillman: 'Paradise under Construction: minorities, myths and modernity in Northwest Yunnan' (2003). Ben Hillman had done research in Zhongdian, a Chinese little town at the border with Tibet. In the 1990’s Zhongdian wanted to develop a tourist industry. In order to attract tourists the village was renamed into ‘Shangri-la’, after the mythical Tibetan paradise in James Hiltons famous book 'Lost Horizon'. It was written in 1933 and brought to the screen very successfully in 1937 by director Frank Capra. It’s a story about four Westerners who crash their airplane into Shangri-La, Tibet. Local inhabitants save them. The place they have crashed into appears to be a paradise in which people have eternal lives. The story became a big hit and the term ‘Shangri-La’ started to have a life of its own, being mentioned in dozens of songs and used for many resorts and hotel chains.
What got me interested in Zhongdian’s renaming was that the town could only be renamed on the basis of scientific proof that it was really Shangri-La. Since James Hilton’s novel was a fiction book, this seemed quite hard to prove. However: they did it. In 1996 the municipality of Zhongdian set up a search party of almost forty scientists, who wrote a rapport in which they presented official prove that Zhongdian was Shangri-La, mainly based on the sources of inspiration James Hilton used when writing his novel. Thus: Zhongdian was renamed and consequently remodelled after the image of the book. After that the tourist industry flourished. Now, almost 20 years later, the renaming has left a significant mark on the local cultural identity. The Lost Horizon story became a part of it, to the extent that some locals even believe it is a historic event, in which an airplane actually crashed into their village.
Authentic Fake or Made Real
The interaction between the tourist seeking ‘authenticity’ and the host creating a stage to serve the needs of the customer, seems to create a reconstruction of culture and the blurring of the boundary between reality and fiction. When I tell this story about Shangri-La people often think of Baudrillard’s notion of ‘hyperreality’ or Umberto Eco’s ‘authentic fake’. I like the latter, but I would rather like to say the story is ‘made real’. A new myth became a true part of the local culture since it was adapted, reinforced and finally truly believed by the locals. Different truths - mythical, scientific and literal - together became a new ‘superimposed reality’.
The tourist and the filmmaker
When working on this topic I more and more started to see similarities between the dynamics between the tourist and the host and my own practice as a documentary filmmaker filming people. Aren’t we, tourists and filmmakers, just the same? Trying to dig up and communicate or replicate ‘the truth’? Just as authenticity in a tourist town is not very clear cut, reality in documentary film isn’t either. The dynamics that are at stake are similar. I decided to start shaping the story from that perspective: me, the tourist and the filmmaker looking for answers about authenticity and reality in Shangri-La.”
Interview by Jan-Ewout Ruiter, January 2015
Mirka Duijn
