Cannibal Tours Dennis O'Rourke

ON THE MAKING OF “CANNIBAL TOURS”                                                                        

by Dennis O'Rourke                                     

To explain my film making process is a bit like a cat chasing its tail - in 

any case, I confess that how I actually make my films is a complete 

mystery to me. I can sit with you, looking at a film which has my name 

on it and gaze in wonderment at what is transpiring on the screen; but I 

certainly will not think the author is exactly the same person who is me, 

watching that film. 

The act of creating a documentary film is one of synthesis upon 

synthesis. Every stage of the film making process - from imagining 

through filming through all the stages of editing - becomes the 

modifier of previous stages, in both direct and subtle ways. Also, for it to 

work, the filming process must be ‘an ordeal of contact with reality.’ I 

must place myself within the perceived reality of what I am attempting 

to film in order to discover the authenticity of people and places, and to 

fix my emotional perspective within a social and political process - 

which is not academic. 

I believe that documentary films should not exist outside of the reality, 

which they attempt to depict. The magic of the documentary film is that 

one can start to create with no idea of the direction of the narrative and 

concentrate all thinking on the present moment and thing. It is 

important, when you make a film, not to be rational but instead to trust 

your emotions and intuition.  In fact, you have to be irrational, because 

when you try to be rational the true meaning and the beauty of any idea 

will escape you. 

I think the story is much less important than the ideas and the emotions, 

which surround it. I try to give you my idea of a palpable 'truth', but 

which is presented comfortably, imperceptibly, as an illusion. I try to 

concentrate on the small, intimate details; using reduction and 

understatement. I like to think that, in my films, nothing really 

happens but it happens very quickly. 

All this is made possible by those beautiful recording angels - cameras 

and tape recorders - who watch and listen for me while I stumble, 

trance-like, through the field of ideas. Like the ideal tourist, I travel on 

a journey of discovery - on an unmarked road, to see where it leads. And 

I travel not in order to return; I cannot return to the point-of-departure 

because, in the meantime, I have been changed. This is why I say: “I 

don't make the film, the film makes me.” 

I find that most documentary films are painful to watch, because their 

makers are so certain of the factual truth of their productions, and 

seemingly so unaware of the time bomb which the notion of truth 

contains. As well, they are often so ignorant of their real place in the 

process of audiences’ readings of their work. In my film work of recent 

years I have always sought to resist and repudiate the lure of that self- 

gratification which comes from making the statements-to-the-converted, 

which most documentaries tend to be. 

So many documentary films, despite other political and cultural 

pretensions, primarily serve to make the audience feel good - feel part 

of an enlightened elite - as though they have achieved some cachet or 

absolution for themselves by the simple act of watching a film. And it 

follows that the audience identifies with their omniscient hero, the film 

maker. (I can speak with some authority about this phenomenon, 

because I have noticed it in the reactions to some of my earlier films.) 

The public role of the committed documentary film maker thus becomes, 

essentially, one where they become the heroic protagonist of their own 

films, even though these film makers are not necessarily seen or heard. 

But, of course, they are the real heroic protagonists in their films. They 

are alluded to by the sense of their own cleverness and goodness and 

worth - alluded to by their theological position as the deliverers of the 

important and politically-correct message - the ‘good news’ (or, more 

likely, the ‘good’ version of the bad news). 

The corollary is that, if a film maker deliberately sets out to collapse this 

comfortable and secret contract between the audience and himself 

(such as I did in my film THE GOOD WOMAN OF BANGKOK, which takes the 

rhetorical-but-sincere position that the film maker is, in his own way, 

as culpable and as implicated as the sex-tourists depicted in the film), 

then, his formerly adoring audience, when forced to confront this 

dilemma of identification which implicates them, will chose the easy 

way out - and kill the messenger. 

I am convinced that humans are not interested in reality or truth, in 

themselves.  What we seek is truth, which is our fantasy of it (just listen 

to the discourses in "CANNIBAL TOURS”). And yet, if we really want to 

understand the world in which we live, we must oppose simplicity and 

slogans and seek meaning in chaos and complexity. 

Unfortunately, the level of critical debate is so basic that most film 

makers seem not to be conscious of what they're doing: that they are 

performing the role of secular gurus to their constituencies who do not, 

or cannot, differentiate between slogans and ideals. I detest the 

theological pretensions of those film makers, who seem to me like Don 

Quixote tilting at windmills; and I reject the whole notion of the 

documentary film maker as a culture-hero. This role is ably filled by the 

reporters from the current affairs shows – those men-and-women-in- 

suits, with their arrogant notions of authority and their Boy Scout code 

of ethics - those who provide us “official storytelling.” 

Jean Baudrillard has made the point that it is precisely when they seem 

the most faithful, true and accurate that images are the most diabolical. 

It is when images start to contaminate reality - when they conform to 

reality only to distort it, when they telescope reality, when they short- 

circuit reality - that they can transmit true knowledge. But it seems to 

me that the facile images and stories that now proliferate in our 

cinemas and on our television screens are driving the more powerful, 

true and complex ones out of circulation. 

This problem of representation - how to articulate the relationship of 

the author to the subject to the audience - is the fundamental challenge 

which faces every storyteller. It is critical that film makers and filmviewers 

be rid of the fantasy that the documentary film is a pure and 

non-problematic representation of reality, and that its 'truth' can be 

conveniently dispensed and received - like a pill to cure a headache. 

I make documentary films (as opposed to fiction films) not because I 

think they are closer to the truth, but because I am convinced that, 

within a reinvented form of the non-fiction film, there is a possibility 

of creating something of very great value - a kind of cinema-of-ideas, 

which can affect the audience in a way that no Hollywood-style 

theatrical entertainment films can. I make documentary films because I 

believe in a cinema, which serves to reveal, celebrate and enlighten the 

condition of the human spirit and not to trivialise or abase it.  I don't do 

it to provide information to people; I do it to touch people and to provoke 

and astound them, and to make the truth that we already know more real 

to us. 

“CANNIBAL TOURS” is certainly a documentary film but it is also a 

fiction because it is an artefact, that is: someone made it. The making of 

art is, after all, only artifice - playing with the undifferentiated mess of 

life to get a little product. But this can be both the meaning and the 

subject matter. In a profound sense the viewer and the subject can be 

one-and-the-same. We can be embarrassed to be inside and outside the 

frame (and the process of film making), simultaneously. This 

experience of self-recognition and embarrassment is the subject matter. 

In “CANNIBAL TOURS” we can recognise in these Western tourists both 

the hopelessness of their experience and we can recognise ourselves. 

We can also recognise (at least sub-consciously) the tourists’ implicit 

understanding that anyone who will see them in the film shares their 

sense of hopelessness, in the face of such a futile search for utopian 

meaning, which is their tourist experience. 

I can only touch on some of the ideas that influenced me during the 

making of the film and I will confine my remarks to tourism in 

traditional societies, because this is where I have some experience. 

However, I can imagine that what applies in Papua New Guinea does also 

apply in many other places in the Pacific and around the world, 

including even, some which are in the developed world. 

It must be stated that most of the theoretical ideas only registered with 

me when interested people brought them to my attention - long after 

the film was completed. Firstly, I would like to quote from a review of my 

film by Professor Dean MacCannel. Professor MacCannell wrote the 

seminal book The Tourist, which was first published in 1976, I read it                       

only in 1989, when he sent me a copy after he had seen my film.  I have 

often speculated, “What if I had read this wonderful book before I made 

“CANNIBAL TOURS” ? Would the film be better or worse? In keeping 

with my philosophy of film making I am sure - perversely sure - that it 

was better to read the book after the film was made. 

This is part of what Professor MacCannell wrote: 

“It is disheartening that any group of human beings, simply caught in 

the eye of the camera, could appear to be so awkward and in such bad 

faith.  It is to O’Rourke’s great credit that he does not simply leave us 

with these disturbing images.  The film quietly provides answers to the 

questions it raises, and to do this O’Rourke goes to a psychoanalyticallevel.

 Freud does not speak here directly, except perhaps in the final 

scene where the Bette Midler-type American woman climbs in the plane 

brandishing her five realistically carved dildos (“I get to ride back with 

these in my lap!”). It is the camera, which throughout assumes the role 

of the old paternal analyst, steady, listening, silent, pretending to be 

non-judgemental... 

“A lesson of the film is that the New Guineanans experience their myths 

as myths, while the tourists experience their myths as symptoms and 

hysteria. An old man tells the story of the New Guinean reactions to the 

first ships carrying German colonialists: “Our dead ancestors have 

arrived!  Our dead have come back.” and he continued with a smile, “Now 

when we see tourists, we say the dead have returned. That’s what we say. 

We don’t seriously believe they are our dead ancestors - but we say it!” 

One does not find among the tourists any similar lightness of 

sensibility... 

“This is what frightened me most about the film. The tourists, 

throughout, seemed incapable of a conscious detachment from their 

values, which was so evident a feature of the New Guinean images and 

discourse. The tourists’ detachment takes the form of repression and 

denial of the myth of modernity so it necessarily expresses itself always 

as an out-of-control force leading to non-ritual violence. The New 

Guineanans do not see this difference between themselves and the 

Europeans. They rigorously maintain there is no difference with the 

single exception that the Europeans have the money and they don’t. 

This film is a reminder that the task of anthropology is far from done - 

we have yet to explain ourselves. 

There are certain statements about tourism, which I find interesting in 

the context of the film. Claude Lévi-Strauss said "It is the differences 

between cultures that makes their meetings fruitful. But this exchange 

leads to progressive uniformity.” The second part is clear, but what does 

he mean by ‘fruitful’? If he means commercially fruitful, I might 

agree. As the village leader says,  “They want the photographs, so they 

pay” (even if what they pay is a small fraction of what they pay for one 

Gin-and-Tonic on board the ship). If he means sexually, even 

romantically, fruitful, then I saw some evidence of that between the 

Papua New Guinean ship’s crew and some of the more adventurous 

female passengers. 

But I saw little fruitful interchange of any other kind, such as cultural, 

educational or spiritual. As the old villager, Camillus, states in the film: 

“Now we live between two worlds...  All we know is that they are from 

another country. We sit here confused while they take pictures of 

everything.” 

I suppose it’s an improvement on one hundred years ago, when the 

villagers thought the Europeans were from another planet, and I can 

see that the voyeuristic experience in tourism works both ways. On the 

Sepik River, where tourism is a relatively new phenomenon, the natives 

still do experience the thrill of looking at the tourists. It is for this that 

the film begins with a self-composed epigram: "There is nothing so 

strange in a strange land as the stranger who comes to visit it." 

Since ours is a society - now a global society - which strains to reach 

certain objectives, of which profit towers above all the others, it is 

obvious that tourism as a Twentieth Century phenomenon and 

‘leisureactivity’ is strongly, intensely, utilised to this end: profit. Following the 

laws of capitalism, in order to satisfy and capitalise on the demand for 

leisure, this demand is itself stimulated, promoted and, at times, totally 

created so that the tourist business can continue to exist. This leads to 

the situation depicted in “CANNIBAL TOURS” - the commodification of 

the actual act of living of a group of people. This, to my way of thinking, 

has to be less than ‘fruitful’.  

But this quest for profit is not only economic profit; it often is an 

ideological profit. I mean the achievement of influence by one culture 

(the culture of the West and all post-industrial nations) over the people 

of the underdeveloped countries who are visited. As my film evidences, 

modern-day tourism is, in a sense, the successor to the colonial 

expeditions. It is interesting to note how tourists from countries, which 

had colonies, tend to favour their former colonies as holiday 

destinations.  

This could be due to the fact of a shared language and some inherited 

practices – like the baking of baguettes, but I feel it is more due to 

nostalgia for the ‘romantic’ colonial era.  There is a nostalgic wish to 

revisit ‘the scene of the crime’.  As the German tourist says in the film, 

“I met a native man who was something like a mayor, he explained how 

his village had been under the control of the Germans, and what a good 

time it was!” 

The raw display of economic and technological power, in the form of 

television American television, for example (I cite my film YAP...HOW 

DID YOU KNOW YOU’D LIKE TV?), which is transmitted by satellite to the 

remotest villages of the Third World, is given flesh and concreteness 

when the tourists - the living examples from the Hollywood sitcoms - 

step ashore. One hundred years ago they may have been perceived as 

dead ancestors but now the natives believe they are the relatives of 

Arnold Schwartznegger and Sharon Stone. 

The villagers know that when it comes to appreciating their culture the 

average tourist cannot go much closer towards understanding it than a 

certain condescending curiosity. They realise that, at best, to the 

Western tourists they are merely picturesque (“... they take pictures of 

everything”). Therefore, it is reasoned, to be taken seriously and on 

equal terms they must cease being picturesque and replace traditional 

customs, behaviour and clothing by things Western. It is a new form of 

colonialism. 

How can young men and women from the Sepik River villages fully 

believe that their cultural way of life is satisfactory in the face of this 

juggernaut? Europeans, the Japanese, Australians, Brazilians, the 

Chinese – the rest of the world - cannot resist it - they watch American 

TV, eat American food, play American sports, wear American clothes; 

and they have allowed their antiquities and great public places and 

rituals to become tourist theme parks. An American woman while 

climbing Greek ruins said: “You’d think, with all these tourists around, 

that they would put in an elevator here.” 

The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialogue between cultures’ is, I 

believe, a myth; because there exists such an economic and cultural 

disparity between the protagonists and all human encounter is 

inevitably distorted. Another obvious reason is that the actual 

touristencounters with the people who are the culture are too short - squeezed 

into the three-week annual holiday and the ‘free days for shopping’ 

before going home.  

The occasional word is exchanged - someone gives directions, a tip is 

paid - and people stare at each other, but what else? The tourists who 

wish to engage naturally find themselves in the company of the local 

people who are the most confidently acculturated - hotel staff, tour 

guides, trinket sellers, prostitutes – those who are relatively well-off and 

who cynically profit through the cultural naivety and confused guilt of 

the tourists. Meanwhile, the truly poor get nothing. Some would claim 

this as ‘progress’, in the sense of modernisation and development. 

However rapid social change and cultural transformation is traumatic 

and it causes more havoc and damage to the society than can be offset by 

any improvement in the balance-of-trade statistics. 

Mr Claude Lévi-Strauss also claimed that in order for the Western world 

to continue to function properly it must constantly get rid of vast 

quantities of waste matter, which it dumps on less fortunate peoples. He 

went on to say: “What travel discloses to us first of all is our own 

garbage, flung in the face of humanity.” 

The following anecdote will (only obliquely, I hope) illuminate some of 

what I have been saying. When I was filming “CANNIBAL TOURS”, I had 

to negotiate with the leaders of the various villages along the river and 

explain my film to them at a series of community meetings. This was 

made a little easier for me because I speak Melanesian Pidgin, and 

because I had a history of involvement with the Sepik region going 

back to before Papua New Guinea became independent. I had visited 

some of the villagers with Mr Michael Somare who was the first and 

long time Prime Minister of the country, and who is a Sepik chief. 

Agreement to film was achieved easily and amicably at all places except 

for one village, Tambunam. This was the place where the redoubtable 

American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, had done a lot of her famous 

work. The villagers were angry, they told me that they resented how she 

had profited from them and that, despite promises, she had not even 

returned copies of her books. I promised, as I always do, to supply the 

village with copies of the finished film. Some of the younger men were 

distrustful and so, as a gesture of sincerity, I offered to provide them 

with several copies my other films about Papua New Guinea. The offer 

was accepted and I was told how useful the videocassettes would be for 

showing in the community (I should state that the tourists also saw my 

other films - the tour operator had them on the ship and they were 

watched in the evenings as part of their itinerary). 

A few weeks later, when I returned to the village of Tambunam with a 

different group of tourists, I was astounded when, as we were leaving 

the village, one of the tourists came up to me on the ship, proudly 

holding one of those videocassettes, saying: “Guess what!  A young man 

was selling your films and I bargained him down from fifty to twenty 

Kina!” 

Semiotics takes as a basic premise that meaning is determined by what 

something is not.  It is established differentially.  Tourism is about 

actively seeking out difference.  Tourism therefore throws semiotic 

exchanges into sharp relief. The subjects as tourists, finding themselves 

in a location where symbolic codes are not necessarily shared, are 

moreanxious to interpret signs and locate meaning than the subject in their 

own homes. If meaning is only possible within shared codes, then the 

tourists are challenged by incomprehension. A lack of understanding 

threatens the established unequal power relations which characterise 

tourism: between the observer and the observed, the penetrator and 

penetrated.  

The tourists, seeking a 'natural' and unmediated experience of ‘the 

other’, and of general or exotic difference, paradoxically also demand 

something easily readable and well provenanced. In these 

circumstances, guidance in the form of clear 'markers', or a simulated 

experience - rich in signifiers and easily consumable - is often 

preferred to the more complex and problematic everyday ‘real’. The 

tour guide leads the hapless American matron through the process of 

bargaining, she is propagandised to think that this is the correct way to 

relate, the cultural norm: “Then what do I say... ‘half price?’” The 

villagers wearingly go through this theatre-of-the-absurd, playing the 

role which the tour operator requests, because he (the tour operator) 

thinks the tourists require their trip to be like something from a 1940’s 

Hollywood jungle movie. 

It is a doomed search for meaning. 

In fact, our semiotic abilities as tourists are unlikely to be any greater 

than our semiotic abilities in any other situation. Semiotic play is, 

however, the stuff of the tourist industry, which carefully nurtures and 

directs our conscious semiotic inclinations, exploiting the anxiety 

generated by immersion in an unfamiliar code. A key manifestation of 

that anxiety is this futile quest for 'authenticity. There is no place to go, 

and so we travel, you and I; and what for? Just to imagine we could go 

somewhere else 

One condition of modernity is that nobody knows who they are any 

more. "CANNIBAL TOURS”, like most of my work, is situated out on what I 

call the shifting terminus of civilisation; where modern mass-culture 

grates and pushes against the original, essential aspects of humanity 

and where much of what passes for 'values' and ‘good taste’ in Western 

culture is exposed, in stark relief, as banal and fake. Some of the actions 

and throwaway lines of the tourists, which seem so ridiculous in the 

context of the film, would pass unnoticed if uttered at home. 

People have asked about the film, "Where did you get those amazing 

characters?” They thought that they were actors. The reality seems too 

fantastic. But they weren't characters in that sense; they were actual 

Western tourists - they were, in the jargon term, ‘the real thing’. I 

certainly didn't find them at the Central Casting Agency and they 

certainly never saw themselves as amazing characters. Yet they reveal 

the ignorance and insensitivity that lies under the surface in all of us 

when we are tourists. But these are not bad people, no worse than you or 

me, and I am sympathetic to them all. 

I've had the opportunity to show the film to many of those people in it 

and, with one or two exceptions, they loved the film and enjoyed 

recognising their own personalities. However, instructively, their 

reactions changed after reading newspaper commentaries or reviews, 

which described them as "ugly tourists". I am sure that the writers of 

these articles were wallowing in a process of ‘cognitive dissonance’ 

(thinking to themselves:  “I couldn’t possibly behave like that!”) as they

identified the “ugly tourists”. To be a tourist is in part to dislike tourists. 

Tourists can always find someone more ‘touristy’ than themselves to 

sneer at. 

However, in the context of my film, all of these real tourists are, in part, 

invented characters and they should not vilified because of what they 

reveal about us. This can be understood by accepting that all my films 

are not so much 'documentary' but 'fiction', because they don't purport 

to be the objective truth.  

In the act of first imagining a film and then photographing and editing 

it, all my subjects lose their authenticity as individuals and become 

manipulated characters in the drama that is created. The authenticity of 

the film - its 'truth' - is entirely subjective.  There is this amazing and 

simplistic notion, almost universally believed, that documentary films 

are found objects - a box, neatly wrapped and tied with a ribbon, with 

the ‘truth’ inside. I think it stems from the same idea I talked about 

earlier - that people really want their truths as fantasies.  

I like to think of "CANNIBAL TOURS” not so much as a film about the 

negative effect of mass tourism on fragile cultures, which should be 

obvious to everybody; but more as a philosophical meditation set in the 

milieu of this kind of tourism. The film is much more about the whole 

notion of 'the primitive' and 'the other', the fascination with 

primitivism in Western culture and the wrong-headed nostalgia for the 

innocence of Eden. 

It is this nostalgia which fuels the ‘Noble Savage’ myth. I think it stems 

from our quest to conceive and define that pristine state of existence we 

intuitively feel that we once enjoyed and have now lost. I believe that 

this nostalgia is inseparable from our pessimism, religious, sexual and 

otherwise. I believe that we all have a particular longing to be 

elsewhere, to be alive in a timeless past. 

And the film is about voyeurism and the act of photography itself. This 

is described in both the acts of the tourists and in my acts of 

photographing. You must see that I incorporate all kinds of self- 

reflexive moments, which create the embarrassment of complicity 

which I talked about before. 

My camera will shift from a point where its/my/your gaze is privileged, 

‘correct’, and safe – where it looks at the natives beyond the tourists who 

are photographing them – to a new frame, where no tourist appears, and 

where my camera and my act of photography replicates the tourists’ 

framing. Then its/my/your gaze is reciprocated by the one who is 

preyed upon; then we feel uncomfortable, and no longer so privileged 

and correct. 

For the tourists the camera is simply a mediating device, carving out 

distance between tourist and attraction, capturing experience to be re- 

lived in the safety of one's own living room. The artefacts, which are 

haggled for would not be so valued on that living room wall without the 

story of the so called ‘authentic’ transaction it took to acquire them. The 

only points of intersection between tourists and villagers are two: the 

act of photography and the act of bargaining. Is this a process, which 

can lead to greater understanding between cultures? There must be a 

better way.It could be said that I am painting a very bleak picture of tourism as it 

affects traditional societies. It could be said that I have concentrated on 

the negative aspects of tourism; and that I have failed to consider what 

positive aspects there are, especially as they might be perceived by the 

host countries. However, the history of encounters between the West 

and these societies, from colonialism to tourism, has not been a happy 

one and I strongly believe that we must confront this reality before 

contemplating a progressive future for tourism. It is not a solution to 

leave things as they stand and hope that by incanting the mantra 

“Economic Development” all these essential problems of unequal 

relations will evaporate.  

It might be considered that this is a problem without solution - a 

problem as profound as ‘original sin’. Tourism forms part of a general 

framework of unequal North-South relations just as it is a manifestation 

of the impoverishment of human relations in the post-modern, post- 

cultural, consumerist world. In order to change this one element of the 

system one has to first, and the same time, change the whole. 

To modify the relationships of tourism also means to modify all attitudes 

towards ‘modern’ life - ours and theirs.  For surely, if the tourists in my 

film had known what was in the minds of the natives before they visited 

them, the experience for all parties would have been as Mr Claude Lévi- 

Strauss suggested ‘fruitful’. 

If what I have written seems to you to be too personal, even solipsistic, I 

am sorry. As I explained at the beginning, I can only speak about 

things, which are within my own orbits of experience and imagination. 

Certainly, I do not feel that I am insulated from the problematic 

condition, which I have described. Under the thrall of our separate 

agendas and desires, we are all implicated in some way. 

 Dennis O’Rourke 1999