'Cannibal Tours'

Clip 3: ‘Is it all right to take pictures?’

Taken from the documentary 'Cannibal Tours' (1987)

Original title classification PG – this clip chosen to be PG

Curator’s clip description

Tourists take photos of the local people and pay a fee. A young Papua New Guinean is interviewed about his response to tourism.

Curator’s notes

The filmmaker, Dennis O’Rourke, chats with a Papua New Guinean local while the tourists take pictures of him. Giving the audience access to the local man’s perspective via subtitles casts an absurd light on the relationship between the ‘civilised’ tourist and the local ‘primitive’.

Damien Parer, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows Western tourists taking photographs of people in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. The tourists are filmed from behind as they advance toward their ‘subjects’ to get a better shot. This is accompanied by their exclamations of delight and the constant click of their camera shutters. The clip includes a subtitled interview with a young Papua New Guinean about his response to tourism. While the man is talking, an elderly tourist appears behind him and takes a photograph. He pauses but does not turn to look and when the tourists pay him for posing, he barely acknowledges them.

Educational value points

‘Cannibal Tours’ is an example of a documentary that is made largely in the observational style. Sometimes referred to as fly-on-the-wall, the observational documentary usually contains no voice-over commentary, intertitles, historical re-enactments or interviews, but rather suggests an unobtrusive observation of the everyday life of the subjects. The filmmaker leaves it to the viewer to determine the significance of what is said and done; however, it can be argued that the filmmaker manipulates the story by the use of dextrous editing. From the viewer’s angle, it looks like a real and unedited version of the truth, but the film is actually another creative use of the film and sound recording process.

The film follows a number of European and US tourists as they travel from village to village throughout the Sepik River region in Papua New Guinea, driving hard bargains for local handcrafted items and taking photographs of every aspect of ‘primitive’ life. The tourists unwittingly reveal an ethnocentrism (belief in the superiority of their own culture) to O’Rourke’s camera.

According to O’Rourke, ‘Cannibal Tours’ is ‘about the whole notion of “the primitive” and “the other”, the fascination with primitivism in Western culture and the wrong-headed nostalgia for the innocence of Eden’ (www.cameraworklimited.com, 1999). In the film the tourists see the villagers as exotic, with several talking about the supposedly ‘unspoilt’ nature of the villagers they encounter, but, as O’Rourke points out, these villagers normally wear Western clothing and only don traditional dress for the benefit of the paying tourists.

Part of the film’s focus is ‘voyeurism and the act of photography’. O’Rourke moves from filming the tourists photographing the villagers to filming the villagers himself. As he says, he moves ‘to a new frame, where no tourist appears, and where my camera and my act of photography replicates the tourists’ framing’ (www.cameraworklimited.com, 1999). This suggests that both his and the viewers’ gazes are as voyeuristic as those of the tourists.

The extent to which global tourism commodifies cultures such as that of the villagers is clearly revealed. While the tourists treat the villagers as curiosities and objects to be photographed and documented (in the same way as their colonial forebears did), the villagers capitalise on this by charging a fee for photographs.

The clip suggests that it is the tourists, not the villagers, who are the curiosity. At the beginning O’Rourke films from behind and over the shoulders of the tourists, and this, combined with the constant click of the camera shutters and the tourists’ exclamations of delight as they advance closer to their subjects to get a better shot, makes them seem both predatory and bizarre.