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96 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype? as important context for the films discussed here, I would like to take the research on visual stereotypes further by looking at moving images and their corresponding filmic text. Therefore, I must analyse when visual stereotypes of cultural identity occur in film. To do so, it is important that I note how attributions of identity function, and why they are problematic or harmful. In a recent statement on non-consensus-based attributions of identity, Ursula Renz clarifies that identity in philosophical understanding means nothing other than a reference identity of two “terms” (Renz 2019: 28) and that this simple understanding of identity is also applicable to “person” (Renz 2019: 30). Consequently, “the concept of identity serves to stabilize our views about what or whom we are dealing with in a given object or person.” (Renz 2019: 37) The difference between things and persons, however, is that we allow people to develop “an idea of their own identity” (Renz 2019: 44). It is this understanding of a person that makes the attribution of identity by others so critical: “If we attribute an identity to other persons against their will — no matter how accurate our characterization may be — then strictly speaking we do not treat them as a person at all. This is why [...] we experience ascriptions of identity that are made without our consent, often as threatening, potentially offensive or as an injustice. In them, we are denied a privilege that we are entitled to as a person” (Renz 2019: 44–46). That means that whenever one does not ask (or cannot ask, perhaps due to language barriers, for example) for the terms with which a person would describe themselves, or whenever one does not give priority to self-description over description by others, then an essentially violent act is present, in which someone’s right to personal self-determination is not respected. By studying the visually stereotypical attribution of identity in two travel documentaries, I thus understand the generalising, group-oriented and reducing classification of persons, which is realised by context-driven symbolism that can be decoded when looking at the film sequences with the instruments of multimodal film analysis. Weit. A travel documentary that aims to do everything right and nevertheless re- evokes cultural stereotypes. This chapter discusses a sequence from the first of four film chapters, which depict Allgaier and Weisser’s four years of travel in chronological order. Allgaier and Weisser decided at this point of their travel, after much deliberation and after successfully applying for a visa, to enter Pakistan from Iran, despite their fears of this venture. The establishing shot for the border crossing is a long shot, taken from a moving car. The landscape is visible against the light and the sunrise, and in addition there is a non-European instrumental string soundtrack — the sunrise and the music both symbolically contextualise the following sequence as ‘entering the Levante’. The camera pans to a close-up of Weisser’s head and shoulders, covered with a pink cloth, as she sits in the car. To the camera, she says: “Now my heart is pounding with excitement, because from now on I can see how it really is. The imagination leaves, and the experience comes” (Allgaier and Weisser 2017a: 43:00–43:27). Shortly after crossing the border, she explains in a Voice-Over (VO) that “Hitchhiking is now out of the question. It is 1,000km through the province of Belu- jistan. Pakistan can be quite dangerous here. Therefore, foreigners are escorted. They call us a taxi and we get an escort” (Allgaier and Weisser 2017a: 43:50–44:05). The two travellers then try to contact their drivers despite the language barrier, followed by further information about Belujistan, presented in Weisser’s VO and still accompanied by the aforementioned string music: