|
 Dennis O'Rourke,
Australia, 1988,
70 min
|
This "natives" on the banks of
the River Sepik discuss the lives of Western tourists.
They sail right through the jungle in Papua-New Guinea on
a luxury cruiser called "The Melanesian
Explorer", and their journey is at the same time a
sample of how visitors and visited may well want to swap places when
so-called primitive and civilized peoples come into
contact with each other. This hilarious-distressing
superficial meeting not only exposes the ethnocentrism
and paternalism of the tourist, but more especially makes
visible his privilege (and that of the anthropologist and
the film-maker) of making the Other into the object of
his craving for
exoticism. The filmed images of tourists taking
photographs illustrate with abundant clarity how this
comfortable Club Med trip to the "heart of
darkness" is in essence a metaphor for a society
seeking in vain for the imagined lost innocence of
primitive existence. |
