The success in America of Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, corroborated the two awards received by the film in 2008 (the Golden Globe Award and the Lumières Award) as well as the box office ticket sales in France of 1,245,920 and the US box office receipts of 56.82 million US dollars (slightly higher than the 52.5 million US dollars for the film Wild ) 3.
These two films have proved very popular with the younger generation, who are open to mobility, film tourism (Tzanelli, 2007) and new tourism territories (Delaplace and Gravari-Barbas, 2017), such as Alaska. However, what does the way in which it is presented in the cinema teach us about tourism and the traveller figure? How does cinema influence off-the-beaten-track tourism (Argod, 2016)? How do filmmaker diarists mediatise out-of-the-ordinary and extreme travel? The reference points for the two American travel diary films Into the Wild (2007) 2, written and directed by Sean Penn, and Wild (2015), directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the American pioneer front. The Rendez-vous du carnet de voyage de Clermont-Ferrand 1 offers some good examples of this. This tradition has been revived with the popularity of self-transcendence and out-of-the-ordinary travel adventures, whether on foot, bicycle or snow sleigh.
In France, the myth of the contemporary hero and this taste for exceptional travel are in line with the French geographical tradition that emerged with the creation of the Société de Géographie in 1821. Defining this new genre (Argod, 2011) means adopting a new point of view with regard to the increase in audiovisual production since 2012, which seems to have gone beyond a quest for authenticity to mediatise extreme travel. The voyage of discovery myth and the attraction of adventure and travel stories explain the popularity of the audiovisual travel diary genre. The film viewer’s tourist trips contrast with the filmmaker diarist’s out-of-the-ordinary or extreme travels. This is a paradoxical dream, however, in this age of satellite and digital technology and mass tourism. 2 All references relating to the films and videos cited in this study are grouped together in the fil (.)ġ The dream of being a traveller rather than a tourist (Urbain, 1991) is nurtured by the myth of travelling to ‘terrae incognitae’.1 The 17th Rendez-vous du Carnet de Voyage, held from 18 to 20 November 2016, was a Europe-wide event (.).The aesthetics of the image, panoramic landscape and grandeur of nature are thought to be a legacy of the notions of ‘picturesqueness’ and the ‘pioneer front’, while the renewed myths of both the wandering hero (Benoliel, 2011) and the quest for a new world seem to have developed from the literary references of On the Road and the Beat Generation’s ‘Beat ethos’.
References to the american west in back to the future part iii movie#
We thus extend the road movie genre to robinsonades and films on the experience of a natural environment. The return to the wild, as a cultural confrontation, formative journey and self-transcendence, is said to shape the travel diary genre, which takes the form of either a piece of self writing or an autobiographical film (sometimes called a biopic) on the experience of travelling. These films mark a generation of travel diarists in search of the dream and anti-travel. The reference points for two American travel diary films Into the Wild (2007), written and directed by Sean Penn, and Wild (2014, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the American pioneer front. The lived experience of the journey of discovery (adventure, exploration, expedition) defines the travel diary genre, which has become an off-the-beaten-track tourism medium.
The conceptions of ‘wild’, as addressed in fictional travel diary films, question our relationship with space and the form of travel that gives rise to self-transcendence through a confrontation with the environment.