Tourism, gaze, and moving images: from the archive as repository to the archive as field

Abstract

The article reports the author’s experience in the National Archive of the Moving Images of the Portuguese Film Museum, where she has been carrying out research on the Portuguese tourism film since March 2012, as a departure point for a reflection on the notion of the archive as an anthropological terrain. It is argued that the way the archive is conceived has important consequences for the way the object is constructed. In this particular case, the theoretical repositioning of the archive as a terrain or field led the author to call into question the centrality of the filmas image-content, together with concepts like “tourist gaze”, which have been defining and delimiting the study of the relationship between tourism and visuality. It has also culminated in a research project, in which these ideas have been tested and developed.