Page - 92 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

92 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype? Personalised travel documentary that ‘happens to end up in cinema’ “Hi, I’m Lena. And I’m Ulli. We drove for twenty-two months through West Africa with an old Land Rover and a forty-year-old roof tent. 46,000 kilometres, more than once around the world. And we documented the whole thing a little bit with a film camera. Mainly to reassure our parents.” (Wendt and Stirnat 2017: 0–0:33).1 From the very first sentences of their crowdfunding campaign, Lena Wendt and Ulrich Stirnat introduce themselves as young, open- minded and adventurous travellers who crossed West Africa on their own and documented their trip with a camera, supposedly without any commercial intention. Behind those modest descriptions of themselves and their project, for which they want to receive public funding, lies a highly complex discourse consisting of European travel practice, a long history of representing travel experience, and of mediatisation, which has developed into strategies of “self-branding” over the last decade. “Self-branding” can be understood as a new form of labour that involves “an outer-directed process of highly stylized self-construction, directly tied to the promotional mechanisms of the post-Fordist market” (Hearn 2008: 201). While I am currently researching the interplay of contemporary travel representation, attention-seeking and self-staging within new commodity rules, based on “unsatiable desires” (Böhme 2016) in capitalist affluent socie- ties of the global North, it is sufficient to state for the framework set here that Lena Wendt and Ulrich Stirnat are far from alone in their belief that capitalist fatigue can be escaped by travel- ling away and in the way that they represent their travel as an intended process of self-discovery. In fact, over the last five years in Germany, there has been a boom of what I define as per- sonalised travel documentary for cinema screen. This boom includes films such as Pedal the world (Starck 2015), Expedition Happiness (Starck and Taibi 2017), Projekt Antarktis. Die Reise unseres Lebens (Michael Ginzburg, Tim Müller-Zitzke and Dennis Vogt 2018), Ander- swo (Pahnke 2018), Blown Away (Schulze 2019) and Leaving the frame (Ehrich and Vering 2019), to name just a few. The travel documentary Weit. Geschichte von einem Weg um die Welt (Allgaier and Weisser 2017a) which will be analysed in this article together with Reiss aus, even became the most successful documentary in Germany in 2017. Weit met with a very large audience, viewers continue to post praise on the website (cf. Allgaier and Weisser 2020), and the film is still often screened at cinema festivals. Moreover, Wendt and Stirnat, the creators of Reiss aus (2019), explicitly credit Weit as their source of inspiration, and openly reveal that Allgaier and Weisser advised their film production (Wendt and Stirnat 2019b: 5:39). The world tour of Allgaier and Weisser lasted for almost four years and in the second year of their journey, they had a child and still continued with their itinerary. Initially, Allgaier and Weisser had docu- mented their journey, which was to be carried out with the smallest possible budget and with- out travelling by plane, in twenty-eight five-minute videos for the local newspaper Badische Zeitung (Badische Zeitung 2016). These videos became so popular that, after a successful crowd- funding campaign, Allgaier and Weisser were able to bring their 127-minute travel documentary, Weit, to German and Austrian cinemas in 2017. Just like Wendt and Stirnat for Reiss aus, Allgaier and Weisser claim for their documentary Weit that “what was originally planned as a small, family travel documentary unexpectedly [became] a secret cinema tip in Freiburg” (Allgaier and Weisser 2020). 1 The text quoted here is spoken alternately by Lena Wendt and Ulrich Stirnat. The text is translated from German into English by the author. If not indicated differently, all of the following citations from German sources are translated into English by the author of the article.