Watching narratives of travel-as-transformation in The Beach and The Motorcycle Diaries

WOS:000338007000007 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science)The attention recently accorded to feature films in tourism studies has been mostly driven by the idea that cinema has the ability to provoke in the viewer a sense of anticipation regarding a given or potential tourist destination. Films, however, also play an important role in shaping our notions of what a tourist experience should be. One of the most common tropes in travel or tourism-related films has been the trope of the journey as a transformative or ‘life-changing experience’. This paper explores the connections between this recurrent trope and the classical narrative film. Broadly consisting of a character-centred narrative in which events are organised by causal logic, moving towards the resolution of an initial problem or crisis, the classical narrative film relies heavily upon the idea of change (the turning point which prepares the way for denouement) and is, therefore, particularly prone to depictions of tourism as a life-changing experience. Despite innovations introduced from the 1960s onwards, most mainstream travel films still follow this narrative scheme. This paper analyses two of these films, The Beach (2000, dir. Danny Boyle) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004, dir. Walter Salles), which have been widely discussed in relation to tourism, underlining how they support notions of travelling as a source of transformation, sidestepping more banal kinds of experiences. Drawing on a large sample of online film reviews, I argue that viewers are not unaware of this bias, which they often reproduce, comment upon and challenge

Tourism, gender and consumer culture in late and post-authoritarian Portugal

Tourism was a major player in the introduction of mass consumerism in post-war European societies. In Portugal, during the Estado Novo, it remained limited in scale and kind, being mostly targeted at a foreign and up-market consumer niche. In 1964, the number of international tourists finally reached the million mark, a figure that would rise threefold in the next 6?years. Bodily centred leisure practices were on the rise, taking tourism beyond the confines of state propaganda and tourists beyond sightseeing. Drawing on archival research conducted at the Portuguese Film Museum, this article analyses how the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s saw the appearance of a renewed idea of tourism that owed as much to an expanding consumer culture as to the period’s experimental filmmaking practices. The contours of this renewal can be appreciated in short tourism documentaries around the figure of the foreign woman tourist.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Portuguese Cultural Studies/Cultural Studies in Portugal: Some Thoughts on the Making and Remaking of a Field

This article discusses the overall situation of cultural studies in Portugal. It starts by analysing some of the courses and graduate programmes currently on offer. The results suggest that cultural studies is experiencing a fast academic expansion. While this seems to be entangled with top-down institutional changes, in the wake of the Bologna process and the turn to the cultural/ creative industries and as part of a more general shift to the ‘new economy’, there are reasons to believe that al-ternative understandings of cultural studies have not died out. The name ‘cultural studies’ continues to cause unease in some academic quarters (namely, in literary studies) and there is ambiguity regarding what is meant by it. Cautioning against the tendency to reduce Portuguese cultural studies to a straightforward import from the Anglophone world, I argue for the need to conduct historically informed research on local strands and traditions of cultural theory and critique. I conclude that only a combined synchronic and diachronic approach – one that is sensitive to national and transnational contexts and intersections – will allow us to gain a bet-ter understanding of the deep-running contradictions that characterise the field, helping us to clarify the stakes and reconnect to a socially relevant and critique-orientated intellectual project

Hawking radiation for a Proca field in D-dimensions

We study the wave equation of a massive vector boson in the background of a D-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. The mass term introduces a coupling between two physical degrees of freedom of the field, and we solve the resulting system of ODEs numerically, without decoupling. We show how to define decoupled transmission factors from an S-matrix and compute them for various modes, masses and space-time dimensions. The mass term lifts the degeneracy between transverse modes, in D=4, and excites the longitudinal modes, in particular the s-wave. Moreover, it increases the contribution of waves with larger angular momentum, which can be dominant at intermediate energies. The transmission factors are then used to obtain the Hawking fluxes in this channel. Our results alert for the importance of modelling the longitudinal modes correctly, instead of treating them as decoupled scalars as in current black hole event generators; thus they can be used to improve such generators for phenomenological studies of TeV gravity scenarios.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure