Critical Strands: On the Beach with Ulrich Seidl and Martin Parr

Critical Strands: On the Beach with Ulrich Seidl and Martin Parr
by retinalechoes
Notebook



Some films you watch. Others you live. In Ulrich Seidl's films you suffer. You suffer and laugh, and laugh and suffer, until tears pour from your eyes, until out from laughter arises guilt. Guilt for having suffered. Guilt for having laughed. And only then, when you emerge from the guilt, wipe the film from your eyes, do you realize that the naïve 200-pound quinquagenarian Austrian sex-tourist on holiday in Kenya is none other then yourself, if not your sister or perhaps mother. Only then does the comfort of guilt morph into the vexation of shame as you understand that the buffoon you saw on the screen was wearing what turned out to be your face for a mask.

But don’t say you weren’t forewarned. The ballsy and shameless opening scene of Paradise: Love, should have given notice enough. After all, away from the scrutinizing eyes of society it becomes too easy to indulge in the visual pleasure of watching warped grimaces twisting in glee and shock across the faces of the spasmodic, the abnormal, the mongoloid. Hidden behind the comfort of our screen (for it is always our screen, and never just yours or mine) it becomes all too simple to relish images of the rejected visages of the mentally retarded contorting themselves in farcical masks as their bumper cars smash into each other, watching Teresa, our fat Austrian heroine, watch them. Our white-winged socially-implanted moral warden hanging over our right shoulder like a wee angel warns us against laughter, but in the liberty and obscurity of the cinematic chamber, we let loose with a laughter poised on the razor's edge between discomfort and hilarity. Paradise: Love’s opening scene is a warning, a provocation, a contract of the film to come, and it reads: “I will force you to laugh at things not only which you do not want to laugh at, but which you know you should not.” But laugh we do, and in so doing become accomplices to the film. Seidl’s humor is not the innocent cathartic guffaw of slapstick, nor the healing chortle of satire. It is a blow aimed to crack open a chink in the armor of our self-righteousness to make way for the stiletto of shame to slide in more easily.

By naming our tender, pale, gullible heroine Teresa after the famed Mother Superior of Christian fame, Seidl sticks a knife in the back of the charitable West’s self-congratulatory sentiments for the aid it provides the (usually somewhat darker-skinned) third-world. (Do we hear the rational arguments of capitalist economics buzzing in the background? Business for the locals? Improvements to infrastructure? Exchange of goods?) The tourist, a missionary of modernity, never meets the third-world inhabitants on equal terms, never enters their world, but rather travels to other lands with the goal of extracting as many resources as possible, be it gold, souls or sex. The images of Teresa’s travels to this land of alterity in Paradise: Love are no reflections of a “mirror being carried along a high road,” but rather visions which barely pierce the thick and muggy waters of the aquarium in which her head is enclosed: Omnia mea mecum porto - when the European travels she takes her whole world with her wrapped around her head, aquarium, water and fish too. Teresa’s ‘omnia’, the civilized rectangular glassed cage is exemplified by the space of the European room (and the cinematic frame?). As Teresa prepares for her trip, she appears in one chamber after another in her Austrian apartment, preparing food, folding laundry, packing bags and the rectangle in which she moves is the one the camera will bring with her (and us) on holiday to Kenya, with its centralized perspective and weight, and its ordered compositions, signs of the European’s efficiency and rationality.

But no matter, for the tourist’s mission is not to see unseen landscapes but rather to ignore the distinctiveness of the travel destination so as to better wrench maximum ‘fun’ from the exotic (what else would make tourism the largest industry worldwide?). So, even when Teresa and her Austrian compatriots travel thousands of kilometers to reach a new panorama, the only landscape they can perceive is the one they brought with them, with its ordered lines, sparkling clean toilet bowls, and secure walled-off pleasures.

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Der Spiegel: Mao's Disneyland -- 'Red Tourism' Is Golden for Chinese Economy

Mao's Disneyland: 'Red Tourism' Is Golden for Chinese Economy
By Sandra Schulz
Der Spiegel

China's leaders have responded to waning interest in ideology by setting up a vast "red tourism" industry. While celebrating the great members and moments of the Communist Party of China, it also helps the economy.

Wu Yongtang's great advantage is having a mole on his chin almost exactly where Mao Zedong did. The 56-year-old actor pulls at the bandage covering the spot, then carefully peels it off and touches the scab with his fingertip. He saw a doctor to have the size of the mole reduced, and now it is exactly as large Mao's was. Wu is pleased. He looks like Mao, he speaks like Mao and his mole might be his ticket to landing movie roles as Mao. There's demand for Mao look-alikes in China -- and especially now. "People have deep feelings for the chairman," Wu says.

Wu spent a full theater season playing Mao at the open-air theater in Yanan, a city in central China described locally as the "Holy Land of the Chinese Revolution." Yanan is where the Long March ended in 1935, the military retreat that marked Mao's ascent to power, and where the Communist Party of China established its headquarters for the province of Shaanxi. Every morning, visitors can watch a performance here called "The Defense of Yanan," complete with fake tanks and real horses. A model airplane even drops from the sky at the end of the show, a moment captured by all the mobile-phone cameras of audience.

The Chinese government has dubbed this "red tourism," and it is meant as a response to its people's identity crisis, to a certain sense of emptiness and alienation. What exactly should people in China believe in these days? Who is really still interested in ideology? Taking a proactive approach to these questions, the Communist Party decided to put its own history on stage to create reminders of the revolution in various places around the country -- and to make clear to all Chinese citizens who made their country great. The government has also set up a "National Coordination Group for Red Tourism" and convened "Conferences for Red Tourism" that have even been attended by a member of the Politburo.

But one thing sets this approach apart from similar campaigns in the past. This time, the idea is for Chinese people to have fun with their political party, to enjoy themselves in the great amusement park of Communism. They're invited to feast on braised pork, Mao's favorite dish, in the leader's birthplace of Shaoshan. They can drink from the well Mao himself supposedly dug in Ruijin or carry fake rifles aboard a rollercoaster at the "Cultural Park of the Eighth Route Army," where they can re-enact the war against Japan. There have even been "National Red Games," including events such as "storming the log house" and a "grenade toss." Party training centers and companies send members to these destinations as part of educational holidays. China saw over half a billion "red tourists" in 2011 alone.

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Marilyn Adler Papayanis: Sex on the Beach - The Yin Yang of Female Sex Tourism in Two Films

Sex on the Beach: The Yin Yang of Female Sex Tourism in Two Films
by Marilyn Adler Papayanis
Bright Lights Film Journal



With the recent screening of Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the spectacle of female sex tourism has washed up, once again, on the shoals of popular culture. According to reviewers, it is not a pretty sight. Women who travel to the spaces peripheral to "modernity" and, by the way, have sex with the natives are not rare; however, in the continuum of capital expansion that stretches from colonialism to globalization, such practices tend to lose their luster as a kind of radical cultural immersion. For men, of course, such sexual adventurism would hardly qualify as a narrative with anything new to say. The notion, however, that women would travel to remote or less developed parts of the world for the express purpose of having sex with men who are, in many cases, younger and poorer than they are seems to cut against the grain. Yet many studies show this to be the case. Whether characterized as "sex" tourism (commercial sex with the locals) or "romance" tourism (commercial sex with the trappings of a "real" relationship), this practice has inspired a good deal of academic research in the social sciences and in popular literature as well. In her 2006 book Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men, journalist Jeanette Belliveau describes her subjects as "sex pilgrims." According to the Amazon review, her book is "the complete reference for anyone who wants to learn about a hidden phenomenon that affects hundreds of thousands of traveling women and foreign men: Instant vacation love affairs that banish loneliness, provide cultural insights, offer one-on-one, hand-to-hand foreign aid to the world's poor, create international children and sometimes even change the course of history."

Who can beat that? I believe, however, that the representation of female sex tourism in the cultural imagination is also worthy of study, as such depictions reveal a great deal about the anxieties aroused by the "aging" woman's sexuality. The staging of this cultural moment is explored in two radically different films, both, coincidentally, derived from works of fiction: the breezy How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), based on the book by Terry McMillan, and the far more disturbing French film Heading South (2005), based, in large part, on a short story by the Haitian writer Dany Laferrière. Both films indulge the notion that sex in the tropics with a dark-skinned exotic youth is all it takes to cure the malaise of the older woman. In one sense, the autonomy of the woman traveler is a real marker of progress. Sadly, though, the representation of female empowerment in these films is either complicit with racist attitudes still fraught with the lingering spirit of colonialism (Heading South) or in thrall to patriarchal norms (Stella.) In the former, sex tourism is punished; in the latter, it is celebrated.

We learn from the literature that women who sleep with the locals are not a uniform class. They vary in age and in their choice of destination; they vary in terms of their motivations and attitudes toward both their exotic partners and the imaginative geographies in which their partners are embedded. Improbably, for example, the Sinai is a popular venue for cross-cultural couplings. Some "ethnosexual" boundary crossings appear to pass unnoticed, while others are more disturbing, usually because they involve pairings between privileged white tourists of a certain age and marginal youths who navigate the interstices of the official institutions of tourism. Joane Nagel first used the term "ethnosexual" to describe "the intersection and interaction between ethnicity and sexuality and the ways each defines and depends on the other for its meaning and power" (10). In the Americas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica are popular venues for the pursuit of ethnosexual adventurism. These are destinations where the opportunity for women to have sexual or romantic liaisons with exotic Others further complicates the shadowy social relations in the "contact zone" where, for centuries, sexual commerce between male travelers and the natives, male or female, have followed, roughly, the contours of imperial power. The term "contact zone" was coined by Mary Louise Pratt in her groundbreaking study Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation to describe "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination, like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (3).

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