BOOK REVIEW

“Tourism and the branded city: Film and identity on the Pacific Rim‐‐‐Stephanie Hemelryk
Donald and John G. Gammack, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 234pp.” Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
and John Gammack's
Tourism and the Branded City: Film and Identity on the Pacific Rim:

I. makes a rich contribution to tourism studies and to understandings of place, cultural

identity and cinematic reception by relating the ‘experience of a particular city to the
experience of watching a specific film and the implications of this for other forms of city
engagement, particularly, but not exclusively, touristic’.

The authors explore three ‘structures of attention’

I. Nostalgia
II. Aspiration
III. Everyday life that they identify as affective elements governing engagement with the cities
central to their study, namely, Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

The book is noteworthy for its interdisciplinary, its innovative methodology and its timely addition to the
study of film, location and identity.

Tourism and the Branded City demonstrates that the tourism industry's destination branding‐ campaigns
communicate one facet of the public profile of a city, showcasing the most attractive landmarks and
eliding the controversial and mundane as they seek to attract wealthy visitors.

By contrast, film locations mobilize an ‘idea of the city’, using it to motivate action, develop the narrative
and enhance aesthetic and affective impact by drawing on associations and aspirations linked to
particular sites, harnessing assumptions about the prospects and lifestyle of inhabitants. Unsurprisingly,
film and tourism studies produce varied discourses of location and pursue separate research questions.

At the time Donald and Gammack undertook their research, Susan Beeton's Beeton, Sue. 2005. Film‐
induced tourism, Clevedon: Channel View. Film‐induced Tourism (2005) was the only book‐length study
investigating the ways in which film can inspire tourism by creating emotive images of destinations.

Moving beyond Beeton's overview of ‘set jetting’, Donald and Gammack characterize the study of film
and tourism communications as ‘translation between intellectual and phenomenological engagement
with place’ (43).

When they suggest that ‘place value’ in film can play off the destination branding characteristic of
tourism publications in a manner that supports an idea of the city shared by inhabitants and visitors,
their argument relies on ‘an understanding of lived experience, which links intellectual understanding,
cultural and sensual memory, sophisticated habits of spectatorship and consumption to the
development and growth of place identity’.
Previous analyses of the cinematic city such as those undertaken by Brunsdon (2007 Brunsdon,
Charlotte. 2007. London in cinema: The cinematic city since 1945, London: BFI.  [Google Scholar]), Clarke
(1997 Clarke, D., ed. 1997.

The cinematic city, London: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]) and Donald (1999 Donald, James. 1999.
Imagining the modern city, London: Athlone typically focus on the European or North American city and
its relation to modernity, leaving the cities of the West Pacific Rim unexplored.

Film scholars often address the city's aesthetic, symbolic or narrative function or its role in film genre
and production without bringing its connections to experience and identity to the forefront, which is
precisely where Tourism and the Branded City makes its welcome intervention.

For instance, in one of the book's best‐developed case studies Donald and Gammack detail how Looking
for Alibrandi (Woods 2000 Woods, Kate, dir. 2000. Looking for Alibrandi. Sydney: Robyn Kewshaw
Productions a multicultural teenpic set in Sydney, uses ‘shots of the Harbour to narratively locate
privilege.

The fictional school in the film is actually Kambala, a very exclusive Catholic girls’ school in Vaucluse,
with a Harbour view “to die for” and buildings which are almost regal in their command of the bay
below’. While the Alibrandi analysis is perceptive, several significant films featuring Shanghai, Hong Kong
and Sydney are omitted or glossed over because the participatory methodology relied heavily on
interviewees to determine the film sample.

Reported perceptions of place may have differed had the study included films such as Two Hands
(Jordan 1999 Jordan, Gregor, dir. 1999. Two Hands. Sydney: Meridian Films   [Google Scholar]), which
features an extensive ‘tour’ of Sydney as a resident introduces a visitor to the local haunts, highlights,
and vices of the city.

City branding as expressed through tourism campaigns is surveyed more systematically, giving rise to
intriguing findings relating place to colour, experience and affect. For instance, Sydney is found to be
associated with blue, while Shanghai and Hong Kong are envisioned in colours at the red end of the
colour palette (135–6). The methodology constitutes the book's most innovative and ambitious facet. In
their use of marketing analysis, surveys, interviews and focus groups, the researchers deploy
phenomenology as a means of describing and interpreting experiences of cities but the wide scope of
the project precludes a full exploration of cinematic representations of cityscapes or audience
experiences of films.

For Donald and Gammack the phenomenological method involves assessing how cinema and tourism
represent the city and conceptualize the significance of urban sites, historical context and everyday life.
It also involves the exploration of affective associations and cognitive mapping. The cognitive mapping
experiments of Kevin Lynch Lynch, Kevin. 1960. Image of the city, Cambridge, MA: Technology Press.

In Image of the City (1960) are emulated in the phenomenological city tour‐maps and concept maps
drawn by participants in Donald and Gammack's study. Participants mapped the relationships between
concepts of the city and drew maps of their experiences of the urban environment. Unlike the
omniscient viewpoint and standardized scale in official maps, certain elements became prominent or
nebulous, and others were suffused with activity and affect.
However, this fascinating cognitive mapping experiment is not replicated for Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Interdisciplinary work can seldom offer the depth that a study grounded in a single theoretical
framework provides; yet cross‐disciplinary research can reveal blind spots and unexplored areas within
and between disciplines.

This volume does much to establish connections between film and tourism's understandings of the
urban landmarks that are so often their shared concern. It would be interesting to extend the study
beyond the built environment to other dimensions of landscape that are central to both cinematic and
touristic representations of place and identity, and to incorporate work on place and spatial stories in
the fields of urban geography and the study of everyday culture.

A core finding of Donald and Gammack's research is that narrative is central to the organization,
imagination and engagement with place in that ‘local historical memory and the cultural narratives that
sustain such remembrance are of interest to tourism strategists’ because the identity of a city is
associated not only with its geography and architecture but also with its screen image, socio‐ historical
context, and lived experience.

That the international Tourism Australia campaign launched at the end of 2008, filmed by director Baz
Luhrmann Luhrmann, Baz, dir. 2008. Australia. Sydney: Bazmark Films and featuring the ‘walkabout’
theme in his movie Australia, has raised the profile of film‐induced tourism not only makes Tourism and
the Branded City an invaluable resource but also signals a need for further research into the
intersections between film, identity, and tourism's destination branding initiatives on the Pacific Rim and
beyond.