Page - 91 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Revival of the Cultural Stereotype? Personalised travel documentaries from a multimodal perspective: Weit (2017) and Reiss aus (2019) Anna Karina Sennefelder Abstract Cinematic travel documentaries have been enjoying increasing popularity in Germany over the last five years, and this article identifies and analyses a new tendency within them: to focus almost exclusively on the subjective experience of the travelling self. Crowdfunded and personalised travel documentaries emerged from the prosumer-culture of digital communication and social media, such as the travel vlog, and the influences of the sub- genre’s origins are still personalised in their visual aesthetics and discursive patterns. This article argues that this new sub-genre still exhibits stereotypical attributions of cultural identity which will be discussed by looking at two recent German travel documentaries, Weit (Far, 2017) and Reiss aus (Break Free, 2019) from a multimodal perspective. The analysis will concentrate on how the two documentaries implement cultural stereotypes in terms of discursive patterns and filmic design, and it aims to prove that the accounts given in the documentaries are problematic because they often re-actualise non-complex ideas of cultural identity. Keywords travel documentary, visual stereotype, cultural stereotype, image-text-relation cultural identity, multimodality, multimodal film analysis, social media, vlog, prosumer, Weit, Reiss aus DOI 10.25364/08.6:2020.1.6 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 6 2020, 91–110 Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0