Film Locations as Perilous Realms of Memory: Tourists Negotiating Mental, Virtual and Real Topographies of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Abstract

This paper examines film locations as places of memory (les lieux de mémoire) and their role in individual imagination. Filminduced tourism creates specific sites of memory typical of global popular culture; the places of confrontation, negotiation, and interplay between fiction and reality which affect our mental as well as the real topographies. The aim is to analyse how memorised film images determine visitors’ experience of real places and their imagining of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, and vice versa. The film adaptations of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”, directed by Peter Jackson, were shot in New Zealand, causing it to become touristically promoted and visited as “the home of Middle-earth” and “Middleearth on Earth”. This case is analysed as an illustrative example of the aforementioned processes.