The Movie "Tourist" Within The Long Term

Intersemiotic Dialogues Between Cinema and Representations of Travel Iconography

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the film Turistas (2006), in a dialogue with the travel iconography produced by foreigners since the first contacts between America and Europe. The work makes a study´s case focusing on the way in which the film shows Brazil. Such form, returns to the representations of the past made by the travelers and that were reverberated by the film; building images of Brazil crystallized over a long period of time in the way of representing the tropical country. The work then, measures and compares these different representations, showing how the film translated the signs of the exotic advocated by travel iconography. When comparing the figurations of Brazil chosen by the film, with the images of the travellers, it is verified that the foreign, western, mostly American and European social imaginary, when representing Brazil, is anchored in the images constructed by the itinerant gaze, which emphasizes otherness and which, even at the beginning of the 21st century, is capable of echoing value judgments that stigmatize and generalize an idea of Brazil as a place of barbarism and backwardness.