Research project Ingmar Bergman and cinematic tourism

The study problematizes the notion of “the tourist gaze” as a point of departure for conceptualizing cinematic tourism, and approaches travel to locations of filmmaking through recent perspectives of mediated tourism, arguing that the tourist experience is formed by a broader mediatization of a location or a place. Various narratives and images that shape the tourist experience of visiting Bergman’s film locations are mapped out and discussed, from the content of the guided tours and promotional material from the Bergman Center, to tourist information about the locations unrelated to Bergman. The variety of stories and images framing the events of visiting a film location situates the films and the memory of them in history and in relation to various cultural contexts – an understanding in contrast to the imaginary universe of Bergman’s films, often seen as hermetically enclosed and relatively free of concrete references to historical events.