ABSTRACT
Ships and boats are the thread connecting the lm Passages1 and its sequel Déjà vu (cf. Karentzos 2011).2 Passages opens on a cruise liner. Viewers embark on a world tour on the visual and sound levels: Vienna, Italy, Zaire, Congo, Nairobi, Venezuela, Casablanca, New York, Cuba, and China. The viewer immediately sees things through the eyes of the tourist, for the material Ponger employs is that of home movies shot in normal and Super-8 lm by tourists traveling the globe from the 1950s through to the 1970s (cf. Büttner 2004, 70). Ponger explains her approach as follows: “I work with found footage lms as a ‘reservoir’ of tourist experience” (Ponger et al. 2004, 110).3 Super-8 technology is characterized by a peculiar graininess and intensive color tones, features which resemble the aesthetics of feature lms, a factor that in turn underlines the status its images possess for the tourist imagination (cf. Saum and Volkmer 2006, 390). The claim to capture the reality inherent in the tourist’s “I was here” becomes entwined with the ction of a brightly colored fantasy world. As a souvenir in the literal sense, Super-8 lm serves as a means of remembering wonderful experiences in faraway places. On the one hand, the souvenir furnishes individual recollection, the visualization of what the tourist experiences personally, but on the other hand, tourist images always imply collective images as well, topoi such as departing the home port with waving wellwishers, or the color and abundance of oriental markets, or elephants and lions in the savannah.
