ABSTRACT
How should the tourist analogy be handled in dealing with representations of Third World culture in film and television? Should the sense that the moving image caters for the tourist gaze be seen as fatally contaminating for any kind of progressive or political engagement? Or can the presence of a tourist dimension suggest ways in which metropolitan audiences are implicated in what appears to be a distant set of problems or a distant way of life? A film or television programme, once associated with tourism, is readily construed as manifesting diametrically opposite values to those of radical politics in the Third World. Yet it will be argued here that there are significant overlaps between Third Cinema as a political cinema of the Third World and relations of virtual travel and the tourist gaze. Initially, the practice of Third Cinema, which developed as a militant cinema in the context of Third World struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism during the 1960s, appeared to be a long way from any kind of tourist gaze indeed. However, Third World cinema has in general moved away from the openly militant anti-imperialism of the 1960s.1 This piece will address ways in which the tourist gaze and the political discourses of Third World film have come to intersect. The intersection will be considered from the point of view of the metropolitan spectator, who might be expected to be the most susceptible to the depoliticising effects of the tourist gaze.
