Used territory, tourism and film:

A methodological proposal

Abstract

Film reproduces and deplores, simultaneously, the paradoxes of human existence in the planet; it has served to control, but also for leisure and education; it spreads the western ideology of progress, modernization, and consumption, in addition to feeding the individual and collective imagination about social values and unknown territories. Thus, the objective of the article is to propose a methodology for cinematic analysis based on the Latin American geographic experience, especially, the Mexican one. The analytical procedure corresponds to: i) reviewing the relationship between cinema and tourism in Mexico (20th and 21st centuries), from the concept of used territory and an unpublished cartography of these phenomena; and ii) develop the notion and methodology of the interscalar film space economy, for studies on film-tourism. Notion and methodology make it possible to overcome the society/space dichotomy and helps to understand the political-technical content of the territorial order catalyzed by the film industry. The complexity of the cinema-tourism-territory relationship in Mexico has inspired this methodological proposal, that can be applied in other national contexts.