I have something of an ambivalent relationship with travel documentaries.  While I often enjoy them, as someone who partially specialises in media representation and has lived, worked and travelled outside my country of origin for the majority of my adult life, I frequently find myself critiquing the various portrayals. While a full list of things that irritate me in some of these documentaries is beyond the scope of this blog, I would draw your attention to a particularly interesting (if problematic) iteration of this genre: Somewhere Street, produced by Japanese national broadcaster NHK. For those unfamiliar with the series (some English-dubbed episodes are available on the series’ website) each episode features a different location which is explored on foot; for this blog I will use an episode featuring the Kazakh city of Almaty as a representative example. Instead of using a presenter, however, Somewhere Street is shot from a first-person perspective; that is, the camera functions as the audience’s point of view (POV).

The first-person POV is not at all unheard of, obviously. Lebow (2012: 1) argues that ‘The designation ‘first person film’ is foremost about a mode of address: these films ‘speak’ from the articulated point of view of the filmmaker who readily acknowledges her subjective position.’ Eugeni (2012: 19) expands upon the idea, stating that ‘the first person shot…is an experiential figure, as it directly expresses the dynamic grasp of the world, enacted by a hybrid agent (a body – sensor), and consequently its perceptual, practical, emotional, living and ongoing experience’  whilst Hart (2019: 73), writing of video games, notes that ‘…the “shooter” in “first-person shooter” indicates a marriage of action and looking…’.  Thus a first-person POV travel documentary can be read as a pseudo-immersive form, allowing the viewer to ‘experience’ walking through a new (to them) urban environment.  The lack of presenter also allows for the same text to be dubbed into multiple languages for transnational sales.  The conceit of the first-person POV also allows for the camera/viewer to ‘interact’ with locals through use of a voiceover, though, obviously, there are some member(s) of the production out of shot asking passers-by questions which have been previously prepared.  This conceit of camera/voiceover-as-viewer can, however, be read as condescending if the audience is more familiar with the region being shown than is expected; in the episode in which Almaty is being explored, at one point when walking toward a building, the voiceover asks what particular building is.  Because of the conflation between camera/voiceover and viewer, this seems to mimic the idea of a verbalised thought that a tourist would have.  Yet the answer is apparent to anyone who can read Cyrillic as the building is labelled ‘базар’ (bazaar).

It is in this aspect, as well as the non-POV features in each documentary in which a local ‘expert’ of some kind gives snippets of history and culture as pieces to camera, in which the problems common to travel documentaries become evident. Though Bakøy (2008), Henry (2017) and my own work (Beattie, 2023) have all argued that travel documentaries can fulfil ethical obligations to their subjects through nuanced representation of places, peoples and histories, Somewhere Street follows Waade (2008) who argues that travel documentaries offer a reductive ‘touristic’ view designed to essentially advertise the country.  There is no critique or questioning offered and, in some cases, problematic discourses can be utilised.  In the Almaty episode, the camera/viewer enters the bazaar and starts walking through.  Though many market stands are shown– including one which greets the production team in Japanese– there is a brief interview with one merchant selling Korean food.  The voiceover asks if the merchant came to Kazakhstan for work or school.  This illustrates a complete lack of understanding of local history.  Though the majority of people in Kazakhstan are ethnic Kazakhs it is a multicultural country with many citizens of Korean lineage, the Koryo-Saram, who were forcibly displaced to Central Asia in the nineteen-thirties under Stalin.  Lee (2020), studying the development of the post-SovietKoryo-Saram in Kazakhstan, notes that they simultaneously recognise Kazakhstan as ‘their own country’ (Lee, 2020: 140) whilst also negotiating their own identity as a minority ethnic group within a multicultural state.  Thus Somewhere Street— and, by the conceit of its style, the viewer themselves– have just assumed that this merchant cannot be Kazakhstani (i.e., a citizen of Kazakhstan, though Koryo-Saram do not officially consider themselves to be ‘native’, potentially to avoid being perceived as a threat, Oka 2006) because she has Korean ethnicity while also making it clear that the camera/viewer is ignorant of a traumatic event in cultural history.  Because the voiceover is also eternally overly–cheerful in tone, presumably on the assumption that the viewer is enjoying (or would enjoy) the experience they are having, that also can be read as minimising both the cultural trauma and the insult that the camera/viewer has just expressed against this merchant.[i]

Thus while the style of these pseudo-immersive travel documentaries is distinct– in both the lay and Bourdieusian senses– the problematic aspects remain omnipresent.  Portrayals are reductive, with information being given without critique and questions asked illustrating ignorant assumptions.  The first-person conceit acknowledges the subjectivity of the filmmaker but, in this case, the combination of movement and sight, creating this pseudo-immersive experience, renders the viewer forcibly complicit in these problematic portrayals by positioning us as the camera/ignorant traveller. At its best, travel television can give the viewer a taste of somewhere else, with as much nuance and heteroglossia as possible given its runtime.  What Somewhere Street unfortunately does is reinforce travel television’s worst aspects of reduction and exoticisation, marketing style rather than exploring substance, and showing another place and its people as a to-be-looked-at Other.

 

Dr Melissa Beattie is a recovering Classicist who was awarded a PhD in Theatre, Film and TV Studies from Aberystwyth University where she studied Torchwood and national identity through fan/audience research as well as textual analysis. She has published and presented several papers relating to transnational television, audience research and/or national identity. She is currently an assistant professor of liberal arts at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. She is under contract with Lexington for an academic book on fictitious countries and Palgrave for a book on Canadian crime dramas. She has previously worked at universities in the US, Korea, Pakistan, Armenia, Ethiopia and for a brief time in Cambodia. She can be contacted at tritogeneia@aol.com.

 

Footnotes

[i]     As Korea was also under Japanese colonisation for many years, this interaction can be read as reinforcing a lack of consideration for Koreans by Japan.

 

References

Bakøy E (2017) Travel television in a cosmopolitan perspective. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 12(1): 51–62.

Beattie M (2023) ‘That’s good’: An industrial, ethics-focused analysis of the televised works of Anthony Bourdain. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies  18(4): online first, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17496020231168067 .

Eugeni R (2012) First person shot. New forms of subjectivity between cinema and intermedia networks.  Anàlisi Monogràfic 19-31.

Hart A C (2019) The searching camera: First-person shooters, found-footage horror films, and the documentary tradition. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58(4): 73-91.

Henry J (2017) Traveling beyond genre: Reviewing Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown’s Africa. Humanity and Society41(4): 515–521.

Lebow A (2012) Introduction. In Lebow A (ed.), The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary. London: Wallflower, pp. 1-10.

Lee J (2020) Identity formation of the Korean diaspora, Koryo-Saram, in contemporary Kazakhstan: An analysis based upon the articles of Koryo-Ilbo. Korean Diaspora across the World: Homeland in History, Memory, Imagination, Media and Reality. In Han E-J, Han M W and Lee JH (eds).  New York: Lexington, pp. 131-146.

Oka N (2006) The ‘triadic nexus’ in Kazakhstan: A comparative study of Russians, Uighurs, and Koreans. In Osamu I (ed.) Beyond Sovereignty: From Status Law to Transnational Citizenship? Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, pp. 359–80.

Waade AM (2009) Travel series as TV entertainment. Genre characteristics and touristic views on foreign countries. Mediekultur 25(46): 100–116.