Unpublished research essay, c2009.
While we often perceive ‘landscape’ as a straightforward assemblage of physical elements – trees, fields, buildings, roads, and the like – cultural geographers delve into its symbolic and cultural depths. They explore how the arrangement and interpretation of these elements generate meaning, revealing ideological frameworks that shape social outlooks and perceived shared realities (Sibley 2005).
This paper analyses the evolving New Zealand landscape, focusing on its representation, reconstitution and, ultimately, enrolment within modern consumptive practices. It traces how landscapes are strategically "made" for tourism, demonstrating their instrumental use. New Zealand provides a compelling case study, as both tourism and cinema have been deployed to enhance the country’s global visibility over the past decade. Extending current scholarship, this paper investigates a site where this reconstituted landscape is explicitly commodified. The implications extend beyond blurring the line between reality and artifice; they threaten a deliberate overwriting of existing cultural narratives and historical contexts.
Making places for tourism
Landscape is a symbolic system shaped according to the beliefs and meanings that have been invested into a space (Crang 1998). Our perception of a landscape or place is much more than a direct interpretation of physical constituents. Rather, it is informed by how we read and interpret the meanings attached to a spatial assemblage. In the early Modern period places were mostly understood through written accounts and descriptions.
People are want to write about places, both familiar and new, describing personal attachments and experiences alike. While common now, such activity evolved throughout the Western Age of Exploration. Early writing, from the 15th to 17th centuries, practically documented new lands and trade routes. Enlightenment writers in the 18th century focused on scientific observation. However, by the end of the century there was a turn towards more subjective accounts highlighting the significance of one’s own personal connection to place, the natural landscape, and ‘homeland.’
The Romantic movement was brought about by a backlash against industrial development in the early 19th century. Romance poetry, through the words of Wordsworth, Blake and Goldsmith, was an attempt to reconnect with nature that was seen to have been separated from people’s lives (Crang 1998: 46). Somewhat ironically, industrialisation itself provided the means for these ideas to be produced and distributed en-mass. The works of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, bestsellers of their day, wrote about places in such a way as to compel large numbers of sightseers to visit locations. Areas of natural beauty, such as the Lakes District in the UK, become inundated with visitors wanting to experience landscapes they had read about. Representation of place through stories and fiction thus became a crucial constituent of how places were understood.
Tourism for the masses thus emerged, with tourism promoters capitalising on carefully constructing representations of place. The key promotional tool was the printed brochure – a format which remains relevant even in the digital age (Scarles 2004). Yet, where literature looked to landscape for inspiration and composed images in the mind, tourism promotions relied on visual representation of place. Early on this was via illustration, but as reproduction techniques improved, photographic imagery has become ubiquitous. Today, tourism marketing enrols sophisticated cultural narratives and skilled professional agents in carefully constructing the place representation: marketing managers, photographers, designers and the like. Resultantly, the images produced do not reflect grounded reality, but rather are ‘enworlded’ landscapes, presented in fantastical ways and which invite the viewer to mentally inhabit the scene. Including people in images is therefore an important technique for audience engagement, providing viewers not only a sense of scale, but showing activities and the accessibility of locations.
Scotland exemplifies this constructed tourism, which is adapted to different audiences. Emphasis of Scottish history and tradition appeals to Americans, while dramatic scenery and romantic notions of mystery and legend is what attracts the French (Scarles 2004: 50). Consequently, Scotland becomes a giant ‘heritage theme park’ leveraging cultural imaginaries of the romantic landscape and the rugged sublime, ultimately fabricating a ‘virtual landscape’ – one that does not exist in reality (Aitkens, Simmons & Roberts 1998). The enrolment of landscape, carefully constructed with imagery, becomes a crucial agent in place promotion; designed specifically to evoke emotional responses associated with the promoted locality (Aitken & Dixon 2006).
Tourism in New Zealand
NZ tourism has a history dating to the beginning of the 20th century. The ‘natural beauty’ of the land has historically been the main attraction, along with health and restorative benefits. Maori culture was promoted as an experience of an exotic ‘primitive’ culture (Ateljevic & Doorne 2002). Early tourism numbers were low given the geographical distance and travel time, but with the development of affordable air travel, along with growth of international tourism in the latter half of the 20th century, tourist numbers grew. NZ agencies recognised the economic potential, resulting in intensified marketing efforts. Modern tourism has developed since the 1960’s, drawing adventure travelers from Australia and Europe, with a more recent focus on eco and natural tourism, as well as promoting Maori culture (Tzanelli 2004).
The history of NZ tourism has been well documented elsewhere (see McClure 2004), and in this paper I am interested in exploring how recent market-driven promotion has shifted from conventional representation strategies to enrol hyperreal and simulated schemas. Landscape plays a pivotal role within this process, not simply for representative purposes but at a reconstitutive level. The outcome, I argue, marks a shift in how the NZ natural landscape is read and interpreted.
In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched the "100% Pure New Zealand" campaign, aiming to double tourism earnings by 2005 (Morgan, Pritchard & Piggott 2002). The campaign was unique in a number of ways. First, it used a single-message approach, targeting all audiences worldwide, which was premised on the country’s authenticity. Maurice Saatchi, founding partner of M&C Saatchi, which developed the campaign, described it in the following terms:
As the world becomes increasingly ‘manufactured’, the world’s nations have become more and more homogeneous. It’s become almost impossible to find meaningful differentiation. But New Zealand is different. It’s an authentic country. New Zealand doesn't come pre-packaged or prepared. New Zealand is real. (cited in Morgan et al 2002)
Second, the campaign was an implementation landmark of a larger coordinated branding effort for NZ, or as it became known: BrandNZ – a campaign engineered to promote a unified contemporary and alluring New Zealand image (Warren & Thompson 2002). Whereas BrandNZ was about an overall strategic imaging of the country, the 100% Pure campaign was specifically about destination marketing, although designed as a component of the larger mission.
Imagery used in 100% Pure prominently features NZ’s natural landscapes: specifically scenic vistas employing views of mountains, rivers and lakes. People are strategically placed within the landscape for scale, shown engaged in adventurous activities that draw the viewer into the scenery, inviting them to explore it for themselves. This visual approach is similar to traditional tourism campaigns, such as with Scotland. 100% Pure reaffirms NZ’s position as a destination of natural beauty, as well as adventure.
Reinventing New Zealand’s landscape
So far, I have focused on impacts of literature and visual place representation, however, cinema offers an additional and potent medium of place reinscription. Geographies of tourism scholarship identifies linkages between popular films and increased visitor numbers to the filming locations. Key examples include Deliverance, Dances with Wolves, Crocodile Dundee, Before Sunrise and Groundhog Day (Karl 2007). For NZ, similar research shows films impact on increased tourism numbers (see Croy 2004). Additionally, and of more interest here, is the capacity for movie tourism to generate new cultural landscapes through the way it catalyses transactions between society’s external and internal economic, cultural and social components (Jewell & McKinnon 2008). Here, I am specifically interested in how filmic vision influences the way in which NZ’s natural landscape is read and seen to be constituted.
New Zealand’s film industry is relatively young, emerging in the 1970’s (Le Heron 2002). Landscape has been an integral part of the filmic experience, employed often as an idealised place signifier. NZ-made films have incorporated a number of key local landscape settings: pasture/countryside, ‘the bush’, rivers/mountains/beaches, cities. However, as Le Heron notes in her analysis of seminal NZ films, scenic mountain landscape is underrepresented – an irony given that natural landscape is decidedly one of the country’s defining features. Recent film production, however, has reversed this trend, enrolling the country’s scenic landscape as an integral part of the narrative. The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) film trilogy has not only made the natural NZ landscape one of the most well-recognised globally, in doing so it has dramatically changed how this landscape is read and interpreted.
The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy novel trilogy written by the English academic and writer J. R. R. Tolkien. It was written over the period 1937 to 1949 and, although it was intended as a single publication, it was published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. The book initially received mixed reviews but found a following in the UK, and later in the US by the counter-cultural movement which found affinity with books underlying critique of modernity and environmental themes. By the end of the 20th century the book became regarded as one of the most popular and influential of the period. Various adaptations have been made, but it is NZ film director, Peter Jackson’s acclaimed cinematic adaptation, filmed locally, that has had major impacts for NZ – economically and culturally.
Jackson secured US$300 million funding from New Line Cinema and, to control costs, controversially decided to shoot the production in NZ. Many fans of the book believed that the movie should be shot in the landscape that Tolkien had imagined it: a ‘green Lancashire’ in the UK. Tolkien’s vision for the saga was an attempt to fill a void in English mythology, which had been obliterated in the era of Viking colonization, and indeed the landscape images within the story can be seen to represent a somewhat romanticised rustic ‘Old England’ (Tzanelli 2004). Jackson, however, sought to create his own interpretation of the story, one that was more realistic than previous fantasy films, and based on a NZ interpretation. He was also struck by the similarities between ‘New Zealand’s unspoiled terrain’ and Tolkien’s depiction of a ‘rugged Middle-earth’ (Tzanelli 2004: 22). Filming took place in locations around the country, in both remote areas as well as more accessible and urban locales.
The Lord of the Rings films have been hugely successful worldwide, and resulted in a surge in increased tourism for NZ. Tzanelli (2004) argues, though, that this increase represents a shift from an interest in wild nature, natural landscapes and Maori culture, to that of a LOTR film-tourism which, rather, is constructed through virtuality and simulation. In light of the films’ success NZ was actively promoted as the ‘Home of Middle-earth’ through tourism marketing, supported by the government’s 100% Pure campaign (see illustration), as well as through promotional tie-ins with the national airline, Air New Zealand.
Importantly, the country’s natural landscape when used in the context of cinematic portrayal is not simply represented, as it might be within a traditional tourism promotional brochure or television commercial. Rather, landscape is subject to processes of visual alteration through filmic techniques of simulation and reinterpretation. First, cinematic shots of scenic landscape are subjected to computer enhancement: grading and colouration, but more significantly involving computer generation or enhancement of scenery – or of characters themselves. Secondly, and crucially, the landscape does not – and is not intended to – represent NZ. Rather, it is employed as a simulacrum; used to simulate a place that does not, in reality, exist: Middle-earth, Tolkien’s fantasy land that was imagined for another time and culture. Such practices transforms the NZ landscape into what Tzanelli argues is a ‘hyperreal space’, creating a blurring between reality and fantasy (see also Jones 2004; Jewell & McKinnon 2008).
Further, this cinematic landscape becomes scrutinized by the tourist gaze. The viewer follows the journey of the films’ heros – Frodo and Sam – through stunning vistas of Middle-earth – the NZ landscape. These two characters become virtual tourists with which the viewer is encouraged to identify (Tzanelli 2004). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that tourists might want to come to NZ to have their own ‘journey’. The intent, though, becomes not to see the landscape of NZ for its own merit, but rather to visit the locations that were used to create Middle-earth, and where the fantasy’s characters traveled. This desire was not lost on tourist operators who quickly developed organised tours to take people to the location sites, as well as the publishing of a LOTR location guidebook (Brodie 2004).
The LOTR trilogy has been successful both critically and financially. It has received dozens of film-industry awards, including a total of 17 Oscars, and generated an estimated US$2.91 billion in global revenue (Wikipedia 2008). For NZ this has translated into a substantial increase in tourism income – NZ$6.4 billion from induced tourism earnings between September 2003-2004 (Tzanelli 2004). But perhaps, more importantly, it has created a shift in how NZ is seen by others outside of the country. The UK’s Guardian newspaper commented that it had caused a turn-around for a country that had been seen as ‘the dullest place on earth with more sheep than people,’ but had attained a new exciting identity as Middle-earth. Indeed, NZ government policy has openly supported creative industries, funding initiatives in the arts, culture and film, with LOTR culture being openly embraced and appropriated as NZ’s new heritage (Arlidge 2002).
The Government has shown continued support for creative industries, evidenced in both its strategic policy and through financial incentives for the film industry – as well as direct funding to the LOTR project (not to mention the appointment of a ‘Minister of the Rings’, Pete Hodgson). The benefit of a successful NZ film industry might appear clear:
A strong screen production sector helps strengthen our sense of national identity, our sense of ourselves as New Zealanders and internationally helps differentiate New Zealand, its people and its products by promoting our very special New Zealand brand. (Ministry of Economic Development, 2003 cited in Tzanelli 2004)
While there may indeed be benefits to be had from NZ film-making and others, quite different, to be gained from film-making in NZ, it would appear that there is both a lack of clarity in potential benefits as opposed to impacts, political, economic, social, cultural (Lawn & Beatty 2006). If there is confusion from above, this may also manifest below:
‘virtual tourism’ does not simply re-narrate ‘place’ and ‘culture’: it is the fictional, cinematic, narrative itself that becomes the destination for the ‘archetypal tourist’ of the LOTR sign industry. The narrative itself is always mediated through simulation, losing its initial attachment to physical places. There is a danger that tourist consumption of simulatory landscape and cultures will overwrite specific histories of actual places and cultures. (Tzanelli 2004: 38)
The economic benefits of this expansion and modernisation of NZ’s culture industry are evident, as are increased tourism earnings. But other effects may not be so obvious, masked as they are by the spectacle of opportunity. More importantly, the stories that are told may indeed not be about the country or its people and, as Tzanelli points out, the risk here is a blurring of what is real and what is not – not just ‘on screen’ but translating across the cultural landscape. New ‘layers of meaning’ are created, not just by through the cinematic process, but through inventive and opportunistic tourism practices (Carl, Kindon & Smith 2007). Indeed, as Jutel points out, NZ’s landscape is inscribed with a colonial discourse that, more recently, has come to contain myriad post-colonial meanings and contradictions (Jutel 2004, cited in Jones 2006). It is suggested that the seeming lack of cultural history makes it easier for the landscape to be re-inscribed – to add further depth. However, in the case of LOTR, this inscription is directed not by New Zealanders – or tangata whenua for that matter – but rather Hollywood producers, and specifically for the purposes of global consumption (Jones 2006).
A ‘fairytale’ landscape
While the LOTR films have undoubtedly had the greatest impact on how the NZ landscape is read, its success prompted additional overseas productions to be filmed in the country, compounding impacts. International productions were offered incentives to film by the NZ government, such as rebates. Alongside this the country offered an English-speaking population, skilled local crews and modern production facilities all at cheap production costs. And, importantly, was is the accessibility to a varied range of scenic locations, mots of which were located within a few hours drive from main centres – Auckland, Wellington, Queenstown (New Zealand Embassy, n.d.).
International productions, however, were less interested in representing the NZ landscape, and rather turning it into something else, whether that be place, time or imagination.With LOTR as example, many overseas productions focused on creating mythical or fantasy worlds, enrolling local locations and scenery. The long-running American episodics, popular in the early 1990s, such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, were both shot on location in the country, being set in a pastiche mythical and fantastical ancient Greece. The shows were syndicated worldwide, developing cult-like followings.
And, it was another NZ director who brought a further well-known fantasy series ‘back home’ for shooting. Andrew Adamson, director of computer animated Shrek and Shrek 2 movies, headed the film adaptations of C S Lewis’s Narnia series. The first two books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Prince Caspian, were both principally shot in NZ. Lewis, a colleague of Tolkien’s, created his own fantasy world through a series of seven novels written for children. Extremely successful, over 100 million copies have been sold worldwide, and numerous adaptations made. The success of the LOTR trilogy proved that a fantasy movie could be financially successful, and production of the first book began in 2003. The NZ landscape becoming reconstituted as a new fantasy world, this time Narnia. Said producer Mark Johnson:
There were a couple of locations that were perfect for this movie that only New Zealand could offer. In many ways, it is a fairytale country with the kind of locations that make your jaw drop. (100% New Zealand 2008, emphasis added)
‘You always hope that the movie is not about the scenery’ said director Adamson, talking about the release of Prince Caspian, ‘the scenery becomes a backdrop, it becomes another character in the film which supports what’s really going on.’ Expectations for the Narnia series echoed LOTR successes: ‘I think, being exposed to beautiful images, you immediately wonder where they are and then you want to go there.’ (interview, 100% New Zealand, 2008) He says the Narnia Chronicles were very important to him as a child and he would be ‘perfectly happy if he could adapt all seven novels into movies.’
‘Watch this space for more magic from Narnia Aotearoa in years to come...’ is the enticement on the 100%Pure New Zealand website (2008, emphasis added). The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Trader, which was slated to be shot partially in NZ, recently announced that lack of studio space had forced the production to locations in Mexico (Variety 2008). However, two prequel movies to LOTR, which includes Tolkien’s original story The Hobbit, has been put into production. Peter Jackson is co-writing and producing the two back-to-back movies that deal with the events before the LOTR saga. Once again, NZ will become the ‘Home of Middle-earth’, with release dates slated for 2010 and 2011 (NZ Herald, 2007).
Consuming a post-New Zealand landscape
The result of this filmic imaging has, ultimately, rewritten NZ landscape with globalised layers of myth and fantasy. And, while there is ample film tourism scholarship discussing the implications (see, for example: Carl et al 2007; Croy 2004), here I want to focus on additional slippage, where fantasised landscape becomes more widely enrolled within the cultural arena. I use an example of consumer marketing by a successful and innovative NZ company (Immigration NZ, 2005; Trade and Enterprise NZ 2008).
Icebreaker, founded in 1995, produces outdoor clothing from Merino wool. It has grown into a global enterprise, supplying clothing to over 1500 stores in 22 countries (iStart, 2008). Stylised brand imagery are a central component of Icebreaker’s promotions and marketing materials. The company’s products are intended for active use, and products are shown on fit-looking models engaged, often, in outdoor ‘adventure’ pursuits. NZ landscape is a key element, and Icebreaker branding heavily emphasises the product’s place attachments: ‘merino is built to survive the scorching summers and freezing winters of New Zealand's rugged Southern Alps range’ (Icebreaker, 2008).
Jermey Moon, Icebreaker founder and CEO explains:
when I was a kid we grew up in the South Island, and everyday we could see the alps… it’s a place that most people don’t get access to… which is why we try and share it back through our photography and imagery, because it’s more than just a picturesque, pretty place – it’s the spiritual homeland of the brand. (Icebreaker, 2008)
Rob Achten, Icebreaker creative director, talking about company’s unique approach to branding states: ‘we use stories to tell about where the fibers come from’ (Icebreaker 2008). This may be true, but as we know, stories can be exaggerated and teased into wild yarns. Promotional imagery depicts stylised South Island scenic vistas, some including heroic shots of brawny Merino sheep. Recent images, however, show influences of the current fantasy trope. Scenic South Island landscapes become inhabited by chimeric hybrid creatures, part human, part sheep. Here the boundaries between what is real and what is myth or fantasy are blurred. Icebreaker’s brand narrative becomes more than just a story of garment production, it purposely restitches itself within a fantastical post-NZ landscape.
If we take NZ natural landscape as an integral component of contemporary global product branding, fuelled by a market-led desire to appeal to consumer place-of-origin associations, this new, fantastically constructed film-tourist landscape comes with embedded value. Natural landscape images are no longer ‘just’ NZ, but entangled within, overwritten by, other narratives generated by tourist and filmic lenses, here intended for global market consumption. The denzins of Icebreaker’s hyperreal landscape are reflections of fantasy creatures viewers now expect to encounter in NZ’s ‘fairytale’ landscape: hobbits, fawns, half-beast, half-human hybrids. The post-NZ landscape exceeds its geographical place boundaries, becoming a hyperreal gloablised stage upon which new stories are performed, not just for entertainment but, significantly, for consumptive purposes.
Conclusion
This paper has explored place representation via cultural landscape, tracing its evolution from literary descriptions to tourism packaging. Focusing on NZ as a case study, it has shown how cinematic depictions of place work to reinscribe cultural landscape. The LOTR film trilogy has positioned NZ on a global stage and provided opportunities to bolster film tourism – opportunities which the NZ government and place-promotion agencies have fully exploited. The result is both a conscious and unconscious overwriting of extant landscape, narratives and histories with those decidedly fantastical and hyperreal, and for the purposes of global consumption.
The NZ landscape is no longer read simply as a representation of itself, but rather a referent to other lands, worlds, times, histories, and inhabited by fictitious peoples and creatures. Place, therefore, shows itself to be more than just a fixed marketable commodity. Rather, it is highly malleable, readily reconstituted within cultural circuits which attach value to new place narratives. Such fluidity is somewhat ironic for a country which has invested significantly in the development place branding premised on authenticity.
Icebreaker serves as an example outside the focus of tourism analysis, but where those influences are taken advantage of. Where the Icebreaker brand draws heavily on place-association, its enrolment of a fantastical NZ landscape inhabited by chimeral beings points to a blatant opportunism, suggesting that NZ place renarration offers knock-on opportunities for global market actors.
Through a cultural-geographic lens, ‘worlds’ are continuously made and remade; read, re-read; written and rewritten. The case of the post-NZ landscape points to the assemblage of forces at play; forces that warrant our attention. In the late stages of capitalism we might read this process as driven by inventive mechanisms for consumptive purposes rather than guided by any ethical ideology.
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