Seite - 107 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype? 107 simple fact of the non-existing freedom of travel in most of the countries they travelled through. Instead, they delivered their promised story of an “authentic travel documentary”, which tells about the positive counter-experience, no matter at what price, simply because this is part of their contract. The social media context of their production seems to prevent the filmmakers from exploiting the full creative potential of the “new documentary” that has been “reborn within cinema” (Trautmann 2013: 259). It seems as though the filmmakers are not interested in an artistic and playful approach to the “found reality” (Trautmann 2013: 259). Instead, they focus only on delivering the ‘other images’ and ‘honest stories’ that they promised from the outset. These personalised travel documentaries thus constantly reproduce filmic codes in their specific multimodal design that are intended to strengthen the documentary reading by the viewers, and this repetition often ends up reproducing visual stereotypes. The visually ste- reotypical attribution of cultural identity in personalised travel documentary, could, in this respect, also be understood as a pact-theoretical difficulty arising from the new prosumer cul- ture because the filmmakers are even more dependent from their audience than others: their followers and viewers are also their producers and the promises they make to them in crowd- funding campaigns seem to restrict them. Filmmakers are so anxious to keep their side of the “contract” that they run the risk of ignoring their ‘self-checking eye’. The films then lack the reflection of their own position as an “observational observation” (Huck 2012: 246–247), which can lead to a simplistic representation of ‘foreign cultures’. The detailed look on how the filmic ‘text’ — sound, VO and film music — corresponded to the ‘images’ revealed that stereotypes, identified by the filmmakers themselves, have often been answered with their own visual ste- reotypes. There was no reflected attitude striving for an inter-indivdual encounter or a contex- tualisation of their own position as an observer. Returning to the key question of multimodal analysis — “What function does [a certain] image fulfil in the context of discourse?” (Bucher 2019) — this comparative analysis of Weit and Reiss aus has proved that the images mainly have the discursive function of authenticating a supposed counter-discourse that seems to be inherent to this new sub-genre of documentary and which is not exclusively, but certainly to a large extent also due to the specific genesis of these films. Bibliography Allgaier, Patrick, and Gwen Weisser. 2017a. Weit: Die Geschichte von einem Weg um die Welt, dir. by Patrick Allgaier and Gwen Weisser (weit GbR) [1 DVD-Video (127 min)] Allgaier, Patrick, and Gwen Weisser. 2017b. Weit: Ein Reisemagazin (Norsingen: weit GbR) Allgaier, Patrick, and Gwen Weisser. 2020. Weit <https://www.weitumdiewelt.de/> [accessed 24 March 2021] Alù, Giorgia, and Sarah P. Hill. 2018. ‘The travelling eye: reading the visual in travel narratives’, Studies in Travel Writing, 22.1: 1–15 Badische Zeitung. 2016. Ohne Flugzeit um  die Welt <https://www.badische-zeitung.de/ohne- flugzeug-um-die-welt> [accessed 24 March 2021] Barmeyer, Christoph, and Petia Genkova. 2011. ‘Wahrnehmung, Stereotype, Vorurteile’, in Interkul- turelle Kommunikation und Kulturwissenschaft. Grundbegriffe, Wissenschaftsdisziplinen, Kultur- räume, ed. by Christoph Barmeyer, Petia Genkova and J. Scheffer (Passau: Karl Stutz), pp. 173–190