Page - 94 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

94 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype? Adapting multimodal film analysis for personalised travel documentary Even though there has been research on the intertwined relationship between cinema-technol- ogy and the travelogue (Ruoff 2006) and on the huge changes occurring within contemporary documentary (Zimmermann and Hoffmann 2006; Heinze and Schlegelmilch 2019; Heinze and Weber 2017; Klünder and others 2016), studies specifically on contemporary travel docu- mentaries are absent so far. This article aims to tackle this research gap and approaches the new sub-genre of personalised travel documentary for cinema screen from a multimodal film analysis perspective. Taking into account Webers’s insights on the media-milieu specificity of contemporary documentary (2017) and defining the personalised travel documentary as a sub- genre that is aesthetically and discursively connected to social media forms such as the vlog, I argue that the multimodal film analysis’ pragmatical approach, concentrating on the “meaning of film” by analysing its discursive patterns and understanding the “filmic text” within its dis- course (Wildfeuer 2013) is a productive method to deal with personalised documentaries such as Weit and Reiss aus. As Bucher writes, “every form of media communication requires two types of modalities: firstly, modes of representation such as text, image and speech for the transmission of content and, secondly, genre-specific modes of presentation such as design, typography, colour, film and image editing, sound or music for preparation for the audience” (2019: 653). As a conse- quence, “the combination of modes of representation and presentation specific to each media genre” constitutes the “media logic typical of the respective media genre” (Bucher 2019: 653). The media logic of the genre ‘personalised travel documentary’ therefore must be understood as a specific multimodal arrangement with manifold discursive relationships to the multimodal designs of social media. The personalised travel documentary relies on the viewer’s knowl- edge of aesthetics, as a result of their experiences of media-convergence in the digital age. By blogging, vlogging, posting on YouTube and setting up a crowdfunding campaign, Weit and Reiss aus are connected to their audience long before the documentary is released in cinemas. The films should therefore be considered as part of the ‘prosumer-culture’ that has steadily evolved with our online communication and social media activities: “In the age of web-based ‘self-realisation’, the traveller thus also changes from consumer to prosumer, from user to ‘pro- duser’” (Klemm 2016: 35). To adequately analyse personalised travel documentary, one ought to consider the role of ‘produser’ that the audience is playing, the ‘prosumer’ culture the films are related to and the specific “presentation modes” of other related “media formats” (Bucher, Gloning and Lehnen 2010), such as the travel vlog’s typical camera angles, colouring, narrative voice modality and the use of certain gestures, abbreviations and specific image motifs, includ- ing the vlogger’s dress codes. Analysing personalised travel documentary from a multimodal perspective is therefore, above all, a “methodological extension” (Bucher 2019: 673) that rethinks the relationship of ‘moving image and text’ within film analysis. “The iconographic-iconological three-step [...] is replaced by an inferential method of discourse analysis: what is shown alongside the image? What function does the image fulfil in the context of the discourse? Which perspective is shown, what is the perspective of, and how is the viewer addressed through the image design?” (Bucher 2019: 673). Working within this framework, I will concentrate on these questions. In doing so, I base my work on an inferential understanding of images, in which images are