Diego Bonelli

This thesis analyses the representation of Wellington in tourism films between 1912, the year in which the first New Zealand tourism film depicting Wellington was released, until 2017, the production year of the last case study. It also aims to trace both the dynamics of formal, stylistic and narrative development and the contexts of circulation of New Zealand tourism film. This thesis relies on the textual analysis of case studies conceived for different distribution platforms, selected according to their stylistic, formal, thematic and narrative relevance and to the availability of related archival documents; on the analysis of archival material related to New Zealand film production; on interviews with key informants involved in local tourism film production and tourism marketing; on the analysis of scholarly sources. This research argues that the depiction of Wellington has been regularly underpinned by a set of economic, social and political factors that changed throughout time...

This article analyses the development of Wellington tourism film from 1991 to 2008, release years of Absolutely Positively Wellington and Spoil Yourself in Wellington TV commercials, respectively. While performing the textual analysis of five case studies released for domestic TV circulation, it examines their underlying tourism marketing and place-branding dynamics in the broader context of the political, institutional and cultural transformations that marked New Zealand and its capital city from the late 1980s onward. Such political and social context, characterised by the privatisation and sale of public assets and businesses, the transformation of public institutions into profit-driven corporations and the closure or downsizing of government departments and government-led institutions, coincided with the reorganisation of Wellington's economic, institutional and social assets, with the reshaping of the city's identity and with the redefinition of local tourism marketing strategies. This article argues that Wellington tourism film's institutional background started to be increasingly characterised by a process of growing and deepened interaction and partnership between local tourism bodies, creative agencies and private stakeholders. It also intends to trace the succession of different but interconnected urban narratives that informed local tourism film production, before the contemporary narratives about Wellington as a ‘creative city’ took hold.

Tourism promotion has often been conceived as an element of destina-
tion image formation (Beerli and Martín 2004; Govers et  al. 2007).
Gartner (1994), for example, suggests that tourism depends on ‘image
formation agents’ to construct appealing destination images for prospec-
tive tourists. Similarly, Urry claims that advertising plays a key role in the
tourist decision-making process:
Overtime via advertising and the media, the images generated of different
tourist gazes come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system of illu-
sions which provide the tourist with the basis for selecting and evaluating
potential places to visit. (2002, 7)
However, despite recognising the importance of advertising, the existing
scholarship on tourism promotion lacks a shared theoretical framework
and terminology to account for the multiplicity of its media forms. Scott
McCabe (2010), for example, acknowledges the wide range of tourism
advertising channels, but does not engage in a discussion of their speci-
ficities. Pan et al. (2011), Pan and Hanusch (2011), and Pan (2011) focus
D. Bonelli and A. Leotta
3
on the examination of tourism TVCs, while Shani et  al. (2010) and
Leung et al. (2017) discuss promotional videos conceived for online dis-
tribution which they define as Destination Promotion Videos (DPVs).
Neither Shani et al. (2010) nor Leung et al. (2017), however, attempt to
explore the differences and similarities between tourism TVCs and DPVs.
Similarly, Gong and Tung (2017) define certain types of online promo-
tional videos as ‘mini-movies,’ while Fullerton and Kendrick (2011) refer
to similar videos as simply ‘tourism advertising.’ Finally, in his pioneering
work in this field, Bonelli used the concept of ‘tourism film’ as an umbrella
term that encompasses a number of different media objects including
TVCs, DPVs, and actual films. His theorisation of the tourism film,
however, did not account for technologies such as VR and AR or user-
generated videos. None of the terms mentioned above—TVC, DPV, or
tourism film—manages to cover effectively the variety of tourism audio-
visual promotion media forms which include texts as diverse as tourism
and travel films (both short and feature length), travel TV shows, safety
videos produced by airlines to promote their countries as tourism desti-
nations, user-generated content (such as amateur footage circulated by
tourists on social media), and so on (...).

According to what Stephen Tallents, secretary of the Empire Marketing Board between 1926 and 1933, wrote in 1932, "no civilised country can today afford either to neglect the projection of its national personality or to resign its projection to others." (1932, 11) Tallents's attention to national visibility and to the manufacturing of a specific, wellrecognisable national character, as well as his focus on the production of educational, promotional, and propaganda films, characterised government-led film companies not only in Britain but also in British dominions and colonies. Australia was no exception: from 1921 until the mid-1940s The Commonwealth Cinema and Photographic Branch of the Department of Agriculture produced films to both promote the country overseas and attract migrants. British documentarist and film theorist John Grierson's visit to Australia in 1945 led to the establishment of the Australian National Film Board to produce documentaries and educational programmes. In 1956, the Board was renamed the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit and, in 1973, the Unit became Film Australia. In Australia a significant segment of this government-led film production revolved around tourism promotion. This chapter-after providing a definition of tourism film as a media form per se-aims to analyse tourism films produced in Australia within the above-mentioned institutional and creative contexts. It will trace and outline their stylistic and thematic features and patterns, as well as their dynamics of production and circulation in a time frame that goes from the establishment of The Commonwealth Cinema and Photographic Branch of the Department of Agriculture in the 1920s, until the spread of television as the main platform for tourism promotion, and the consequent transformation of tourism films into TV ads, in the early 1970s.

Since its inception, New Zealand film production has often been characterized by a strong focus on the promotion and marketing of local scenic locations. However, over the last few decades and simultaneously with New Zealand’s rapidly increasing urbanization rates, urban narratives have gained prominence in the cinematic representation of the country, gradually becoming important aspects of national tourism marketing campaigns. This article first provides an overview of New Zealand tourism film’s dynamics of production and recurring themes and narratives from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. It then focuses on Toehold on a Harbour and This Auckland ‐ tourism films produced by the government-led New Zealand National Film Unit and released respectively in 1967 and 1966 ‐ and identifies a turning point in the manufacturing of local urban narratives and in New Zealand urban tourism marketing. My critical and textual analysis of these two case studies notably relies on the examination of archival documents related to their production and on an interview with This Auckland’s director Hugh Macdonald. It ultimately shows how the emergence of ‘cities with a character’ as a tourism marketing tool was in fact a carefully planned, articulated and years-long government-driven strategy.

By relying on the textual analysis and on the examination of existing archival documents related to their production and circulation, this article analyses three documentaries produced in New Zealand in the 1965-1971 time frame while providing an overview of New Zealand film history as well as the examination of pre-existing modes of urban representation in New Zealand cinema. The author argues that these three case studies, Wellington in the 1960s: The Way it Seemed, To Live in the City and Notes on A New Zealand City stand at the intersection of both local and global cinematic, social and cultural phenomena, displaying the emergence of a new stylistic and ideological perspective on the New Zealand cinematic city. Such dystopic take is a reflection of both deep social and cultural transformations in New Zealand society and global cinematic phenomena.

This paper focuses on the representation of Wellington in New Zealand tourism films in the decades preceding the establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941. While critically engaging with current discourses about early New Zealand film production, New Zealand film history, New Zealand human geography and the cinematic city, it performs the textual analysis of eight case studies also examining archival materials related to their production, circulation and reception. This article aims to demonstrate how the cinematic depiction of New Zealand’s capital city in the analysed time frame was a complex and multi-layered process driven and characterised by the coexistence and intertwining of tourism marketing, national publicity and colonial agenda.

The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), founded in Rome in 1935, has come to signify Italian cinema education in acting, directing, photography, set design, costume design, screenwriting, sound production, editing, production and film animation (since 1983). The CSC has historically admitted a significant number of international students (more than 13 per cent) in the past 85 years. This collaborative article introduces the first comprehensive list of international students in three CSC disciplines: directing, photography and set design. It begins with historical and artistic perspectives addressing the ideal of diversity, the internationalization of culture and the sociopolitical context of studying cinema in Rome. This article also includes graphs and statistics that give a clear sense of the broad geographical representation of foreigners who studied at the CSC. A comprehensive list of their names, nationalities, specializations and year of their degrees is organized in two formats: one by geography and one by chronology. The aim of this article is also to set new research goals so as to broaden our understanding of whether and how the CSC’s Italian cinematic education impacted world cinema.

This paper focuses on the representation of Wellington in New Zealand tourism films in the decades preceding the establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941. While critically engaging with current discourses about early New Zealand film production, New Zealand film history, New Zealand human geography and the cinematic city, it performs the textual analysis of eight case studies also examining archival materials related to their production, circulation and reception. This article aims to demonstrate how the cinematic depiction of New Zealand’s capital city in the analysed time frame was a complex and multi-layered process driven and characterised by the coexistence and intertwining of tourism marketing, national publicity and colonial agenda.

The systematic intertwining of filmmaking, national publicity and tourism promotion in New Zealand dates back to 1901, when the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts began hiring filmmakers to shoot some of the country’s most iconic locations. Since then, the role government-led film production companies played in national tourism marketing grew increasingly stronger through both the Government Publicity Office (1923–1941) and the National Film Unit (1941–1989) eras. During the existence of these two government-led film production companies, the carefully planned production and circulation of tourism films celebrating New Zealand tourist attractions and promoting the country both domestically and overseas was, with the exception of the World War II period, a recurring element. Through the examination of archival documents related to New Zealand tourism film production such as production papers, government documents, correspondence between stakeholders, newspaper articles and an interview with NFU’s director Hugh Macdonald, this article aims to retrace New Zealand tourism films’ modes and patterns of circulation and platforms of distribution from the establishment of the Government Publicity Office in 1923 to the closure of the National Film Unit in the late 1980s.

Since the beginning of the Twentieth Century tourism films have constituted a significant part of New Zealand film production. In fact, films made and/or used for tourism promotion have been released for domestic and overseas circulation by both government-led and private film production companies. Over the last 10 years the institutions in charge of Wellington tourism marketing have been increasingly relying on social media platforms such as Youtube and Facebook to globally circulate images of New Zealand’s capital city. Indeed, since 2007, 20 tourism marketing campaigns conceived for social media circulation featured in WellingtonNZ Youtube channel. This article will focus on three of these campaigns: the Vampire’s Guide to Vellington (2014); the It’s Never Just a Weekend When It’s in Wellington series (2014) and the LookSee series (2017). Through the analysis of these case studies, this article argues that contemporary Wellington tourism film production is a complex and multilayered process characterised by the cross-collaboration between local political stakeholders, local creatives and local businesses. Moreover, it highlights how the representation of Wellington as a cinematic and creative city, home of a globalised creative class has been informed by the neoliberal paradigm and by the persistence of a deeply-rooted settler gaze.

Cinema has always been strongly connected to the cultural and social reality of cities. As well as being a powerful and effective medium to describe urban reality, film can itself be considered a direct product of urban society and culture. The presence of cities has been constant and pervasive throughout film history and in cinematic production. In fact, from its very inception the urban theme has crossed and marked forms, genres and film movements.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s early documentary N.U. (1948) focused on the everyday life of Rome’s garbage collectors in the late 1940s. N.U. depicts the capital city of Italy in a way that closely reflected some of the main stylistic and thematic features of contemporary Italian Neorealist cinema. Twenty-three years later in New Zealand the government-led production company, National Film Unit, released Dustie (Mangin, 1971) a documentary that similarly dealt with the work of Wellington’s rubbish collectors. Dustie provided a dystopic depiction of the capital city of New Zealand that visibly contradicted existing local cinematic conventions in terms of urban representation.
By focusing on the textual analysis of these two short films, this paper intends to examine their striking thematic and narrative similarities. Moreover, it aims to highlight the way the visual representation of these two antipodean urban areas matched and at the same time challenged well-rooted contemporary Italian and New Zealand cinematic conventions.

This seminar examines six Wellington tourism films released from the late 1990s until 2017: Send Yourself to Wellington (1999), Have a Love Affair with Wellington (2005), Spoil Yourself in Wellington (2008), It’s Never Just a Weekend When It’s in Wellington (2014), the Vampire Guide to Vellington (2014) and the LookSee (2017) series. It aims to shed light on the contemporary production dynamics of Wellington tourism films as well as on the recent formal, stylistic and narrative tendencies in the representation of New Zealand’s capital city. It argues that Wellington tourism marketing institutions have been telling a single story about the city over the last twenty-five years. Such coherent noeoliberal has been informing a great portion of the overall Wellington tourism film production. In order to ‘get people into the shop’ this one story has been manufactured and used as a promotional tool in an age characterised by the marketing and ‘commodification’ of culture and creativity, by place-branding as core tourism marketing strategies and by the increasing involvement of the private sector in the national tourism industry.

Swiss film producer and director Gerald Morin encountered 8 1/2 (1963) as a teenager. Deeply impressed by this film, after a few years he traveled to Rome to interview Fellini for a Swiss magazine. Even though Morin was unsiccesful in getting an interview, he was lucky enough to be hired as Fellini’s assistant director and private secretary from 1971 to 1977 and to work with him at important films like Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973) and Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976). During the years Morin spent with the italian director, he was able to collect a number of relics and documents that are now exhibited at the Fondazione Fellini per il Cinema, established in 2001 by Morin himself and Stéphane Marti in Sion, Switzerland. Sulle Tracce di Fellini, a 75 minute-long documentary produced by Raphael Blanc that Morin wrote and directed in 2013, is a homage to Federico Fellini’s life, art and unique personality. It is characterised by a dynamic combination of archival footage from Fellini’s sets, Morin’s personal recollections, interviews with Fellini’s friends and collaborators, and original film footage. The varied and rich anectodical evidence emerging from the intertwining of Morin’s voice-over narration, direct testimonies and unpublished footage helps the viewers to better frame and understand Fellini’s cinematic sensibility, multifaceted character and artistic choices.

Gian Piero Brunetta's most recent book, L’Italia sullo Schermo. Come il Cinema Ha Raccontato L’Identità Nazionale, edited by Carocci in 2020, is a full-bodied volume divided into 14 chapters whose goal is to analyse how cinema has been narrating and interpreting Italian history. More specifically, this book aims to trace the succession of narratives on national and cultural identity that has been informing national film production since its inception in the early twentieth century.

Giovanna Gagliardo's documentary Il mare della nostra storia (‘The Sea of Our History’) produced in Italy by Istituto Luce Cinecittà in 2018, narrates the history of Italian colonialism in Libya from the particular perspective of the Italian community in Tripoli, starting from the Italian occupation of Libya’s capital city in October 1911 and continuing up until the death of Gheddafi in October 2011.

Dr  Stefania Carpiceci, lecturer in film  at  Università  per  Stranieri  di  Siena,  published  in  2020  Amara Terra  Mia/Io Vado Via. Cinema  Italiano  e  Canti  della  Grande  Emigrazione  del  Novecento. As the title suggests,  this  monograph  explores and analyses Italian cinematic storytelling and songwriting about the Italian diaspora, covering a  period  stretching  from  the  late  nineteenth  to  the  early twenty-first century. This volume, published by Edizioni ETS, is divided into three sections, each of which deals with different phases of Italian migrations.

Media play a key role in both shaping discourses about travel and tourism and constructing tourist experiences (Lester and Scarles 2013, 255). Dean MacCannell argues that mass media boost the appeal of tourism destinations by influencing the way in which they are represented and perceived (1999). Similarly, John Urry claims that tourism practices are intrinsically associated with visual consumption, particularly with the commodification of images produced by movies and television (2002). Although the relationship between media and tourism has been receiving increasing academic attention over the last two decades (Urry 2002; Crouch et al. 2005; and Beeton et al. 2000), the way in which tourism destinations and activities are promoted in audiovisual media remains severely under-researched. For example, despite the fact that a number of scholars argue that advertising is crucial to the survival of the tourism industry (Morgan and Pritchard 1998; Urry 2002; Govers et al. 2007; McCabe 2010), relatively little attention has been devoted to the analysis of both the aesthetic characteristics of tourism TV commercials (TVCs) and the contexts of their production and circulation (Pan et al. 2011, 2017; Pan and Hanusch 2011; Gong and Tung 2017; White 2018). Even fewer studies have attempted to investigate what media objects as diverse as movies, TV travel series, and Virtual Reality (VR) share with TVCs in terms of their promotional potential. Drawing upon our previous work (Bonelli 2018; Bonelli et al. 2019; Leotta 2020), this volume deploys the concept of ‘audiovisual tourism promotion’ to account for the shared promotional functions performed by a vast array of diverse media texts including tourism films, feature films, promotional videos conceived for online circulation, video games, and TV commercials. From this point of view, this book aims to fill a major gap in the literature by providing the first comprehensive critical overview of audiovisual tourism promotion as a distinct media field.

Media play a key role in both shaping discourses about travel and tourism and constructing tourist experiences (Lester and Scarles 2013, 255). Dean MacCannell argues that mass media boost the appeal of tourism destinations by influencing the way in which they are represented and perceived (1999). Similarly, John Urry claims that tourism practices are intrinsically associated with visual consumption, particularly with the commodification of images produced by movies and television (2002). Although the relationship between media and tourism has been receiving increasing academic attention over the last two decades (Urry 2002; Crouch et al. 2005; Beeton 2016; Beeton et al. 2000), the way in which tourism destinations and activities are promoted in audiovisual media remains severely under-researched. For example, despite the fact that a number of scholars argue that advertising is crucial to the survival of the tourism industry (Morgan and Pritchard 1998; Urry 2002; Govers et al. 2007; McCabe 2010), relatively little attention has been devoted to the analysis of both the aesthetic characteristics of tourism TV commercials (TVCs) and the contexts of their production and circulation (Pan et al. 2011, 2017; Pan and Hanusch 2011; Gong and Tung 2017; White 2018). Even fewer studies have attempted to investigate what media objects as diverse as movies, TV travel series, and Virtual Reality (VR) share with TVCs in terms of their promotional potential.

Drawing upon our previous work (Bonelli 2018; Bonelli et al. 2019; Leotta 2020), this volume deploys the concept of ‘audiovisual tourism promotion’ to account for the shared promotional functions performed by a vast array of diverse media texts including tourism films, feature films, promotional videos conceived for online circulation, video games, and TV commercials. From this point of view, this book aims to fill a major gap in the literature by providing the first comprehensive critical overview of audiovisual tourism promotion as a distinct media field.