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106 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel)
Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype?
Moreover, this ‘intensity’ is merely tautologically justified (“the hard life is lived just as it is”).
In this sequence, undifferentiated stereotyping of cultures, colonialistically influenced discourse
patterns and personal confessions of long cherished desires overlap. The fact that Wendt talks
of ‘magical attraction’ and of symbolic ‘steps on African ground’ shows all the more clearly that
the problem of certain terms, for example with regard to German colonial history, is ignored in
favour of the representation of one’s own subjective emotionality.
Conclusion
The multimodal analyses of the two personalised travel documentaries, Weit and Reiss aus,
have revealed that there is an initial special relationship between filmmakers and viewers,
because the ‘consumers’ of the films are also private ‘producing financers’. Arguably, the film-
makers are even more concerned with delivering signals for a ‘documentary reading’ of their
film than filmmakers in other producing contexts. I argue that the digital prosumer-culture
creates a certain dependency and may be one reason why films such as Weit and Reiss aus avoid
reflecting on European travel privileges. Instead, they reinforce cultural stereotypes, such as
the contrast between capitalist driven, ill making societies in the ‘West’, opposed to the ‘hard,
but more valuable life’ in ‘Africa’ or the ‘great aura’ of people wearing turbans and beards.
Both films could have dealt with the travellers’ privileges, like having the right passport and
the necessary financial and social capital to be able to ‘simply travel away’ from burn-out or
boredom of routines. They could have reflected on the multiple misbalances between them-
selves — young, able-bodied white Europeans and members of the global North — and the
inhabitants of the regions they travelled to. They could have located themselves within the
postcolonial discourse, but they chose not to. They brought up neither the different possibilities
of “relating to culture in general” (Hasters 2019: 92) from a postcolonial perspective, nor the
Fig. 12–15: Reiss aus, ‘Africa-motives’, 23:25–24:04
>mcs_lab>
Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020
The Journal
- Title
- >mcs_lab>
- Subtitle
- Mobile Culture Studies
- Volume
- 2/2020
- Editor
- Karl Franzens University Graz
- Location
- Graz
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- German, English
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- Size
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Pages
- 270
- Categories
- Zeitschriften Mobile Culture Studies The Journal