Educational Film Archives: A Tool for Sustainable Tourism

Lucia Di Girolamo

 

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Abstract

In recent years, the rise of media-induced tourism—driven by film and television representations—has further increased visitor interest in cities that were already major travel destinations, but it has also stimulated interest in small, lesser-known locales. COVID-19 contributed to this phenomenon by incentivising the creation of websites and apps devoted to film and TV locations. Many of these websites, which are still in use today, play the role of veritable archives, in which, alongside the function of preserving filmic memory, navigation paths are created that stimulate users to explore the locations in an original and personal way. The main impact of this phenomenon, in both economic and cultural terms, is felt by the communities where the films and series are located, as they become more aware of the value of their territory and the importance of preserving it. Campania Landtelling of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli is one of several initiatives stemming from academic institutions and projects focused on the construction of digital archives of regional locations used by audiovisual productions. By means of specific navigation paths built according to a geocritical perspective, Campania Landtelling produces a new touristic image of the territory, which stimulates the community to adopt a critical approach of its own heritage.

Dossier

An archive, even one that contains memories located in a distant past, is always a sort of living body capable of initiating a dialogue rich in interpretative perspectives with those who approach it, whether for study purposes, for creative aims, or out of simple curiosity. Such a multiplicity of perspectives arises from the type of relationship established by each individual user with the collections they consult. A dimension of this relationship comes alive as a fruitful space for negotiating personal, collective, sociological, or anthropological issues. An archive speaks to us all at once of the producers of meaning—the authors of the documents, whether written, photographic or filmic—of those who have collected and catalogued the memories, nurturing them across generations, and of those who turn to the archive looking for answers to their research questions. The exchanges established within such relationships go far beyond the mere transmission of information; they become networks of discourses in which past and present intertwine.

In this article, I will use the term archive in a broad sense to refer to nontraditional contexts and media. The term “archive” preserves the memory of its highly specialised origin, of a time when archives were concrete places; today, we cannot ignore that archives are, above all, a digital universe. This article focuses on how collecting and rereading film and media images with the help of digital platforms, aimed at an audience of both specialists and nonspecialists, can stimulate the renewal of personal and collective memory linked to a specific place. My analysis refers to the Italian context and to Italian archives in general, as an example of reworking of cultural heritage meanings, while paying specific attention to a project of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Campania Landtelling, a website born to promote media- and literature-induced tourism linked to the Campania region, in Southern Italy.

Another aim of this article is to look at the relationship between different temporal dimensions and how they can stimulate reflections on the role played by film cultural heritage in understanding our contemporary life; for example, how the past influences the present, or how the landscape created by filmic imaginary preserved by local archives can enrich daily life and identity.

 

The “Double” Face of the Archives

An archive is not an abstract and static concept, it is a tangible and evolving dimension; its materiality renders any encounter with it a transformative process, “rather than a documentary encounter” (Lester 111). Those who consult documents also interpret them, and in doing so, often revise their understanding of historical events; at the same time, the documents themselves are recontextualized within new semantic frameworks.

The “metamorphic” potential of the archive and its intrinsic ability to renew itself emerge in particular from collections linked to the cinema and, more generally, from those archives that preserve audiovisual materials. These have always been and are today increasingly being “used” by professionals and amateur filmmakers to create new films through the editing of old images. Found footage, the practice of “inventing”—in the Latin sense of inventio: discovering and creating—new films by reediting pre-existing materials stored in public and private collections is but one of the outcomes of this vital relationship with the archive, a relationship rooted in the growing recognition of the importance for the public of accessing the national film heritage. In Europe, this path begins thanks to a number of dedicated individuals revolving around the establishment of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) in 1938, such as the cinephile Henry Langlois, who in the 1930s introduced “the public to the great masterpieces of the past” (Cavallotti et al. 13; my trans.).

The archive, then, when it is “used”, enters into a dialogue with the environment in which it is located. In doing so, it intrinsically acquires a dual nature, suspended between past and present. If we wanted to find an image to symbolise such a condition, the most suitable would be that of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as interpreted by Walter Benjamin; a being with its face turned towards the past and the rest of its body stretched towards the future:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (249)

Benjamin conceives of the research process as a descent into the depths of history, not to uncover immutable objects, but to reveal unseen realities, or to regard familiar ones from a new perspective. The items of the archive are constituent parts of broad discourses built on mnestic traces: memory, writes Benjamin, is the engine of every path of investigation and transformation; it is the primary energy that projects the archive into the future. It was Jacques Derrida who subsequently and perhaps definitively illuminated this founding characteristic of the archive, when he wrote that it presents a question of “responsibility for tomorrow” (36). Despite its connection to death, for it accumulates, preserves, and catalogues, above all, to forestall the danger of oblivion, an archive can be understood long after its constitution, “in times to come” (36). In recent years, the digital turn has revealed the archive’s capacity to support the construction of dynamic imaginaries, no longer fixed or static, but shaped as networks that generate fluid and evolving meanings. This shift influences how individuals and communities perceive themselves, positioning the archive as an active participant in social processes—one with significant pedagogical potential.

This type of archive has a great impact on the relevant public, because it is more accessible than the physical one and can complement the content offered by film collections. The latter have motivated professional and amateur directors to breathe new life into inert film material by reusing it in new productions, influenced by historical contexts very different from those of the original works. The aforementioned found footage practice is the most striking example of this, but there are other ways to build on what we might call the “mythopoetic energy” of the archive to produce unprecedented discourses, revolutionary in the way they weave relationships with institutions, society, and the territory, and for their pedagogical potential.

This is precisely the aim of some online Italian projects involving universities or other public institutions. For the most part, they aim to identify recurring figures and circulating discourses in collections of images connected to particular themes, to the point of creating databases through which a user can explore a historical context via multiple recommended paths. The leads to thematic archives conceived beyond the more “classical” logic of the archive, namely that of conservation and preservation. Examples of this practice are the CAOS – Catastrophes of Southern Italy: Photogénie and Remediation of Natural Disasters project, led by the University of Calabria and the University of Catania, which aims to build a database and a platform of images on the disastrous events that affected Southern Italy in the twentieth century; MOV.I.E. – Moving Images Exhibitions: Film Museums, Audiovisual Heritage: Historical Perspectives, Strategies of Enhancement and Contemporary Ecosystems, led by the University of Catania, a platform of exhibitions and displays set up by film and audiovisual museums; and Archivi del Sud, a project of the University of Calabria focused on the documentary representation of Southern Italy, which, like the previous two, constructs a platform aimed at both researchers and other users. For the most part, these projects have given or will give rise to digital environments that offer users the possibility, starting from sets of already selected materials, to build their own paths, in which collective and personal memory can be interwoven to create original readings of the chosen themes.

 

A Filmic Archive, a Crossroads of Discourses

Human history has always been marked by a strong desire to collect and preserve the traces of its passage on Earth. However, collecting objects is not enough. One cannot preserve without being clear about why certain materials are kept in a certain place. The act of archiving always requires an upstream decision, and there always is a clear reason behind the choice: an archive of amateur films recorded by families during their holidays or celebrations, for example, birthdays or weddings, has a very different rationale from one that exclusively preserves film produced by large film companies.

As Jussi Parikka notes, it was thanks to Michel Foucault and his The Archaeology of Knowledge that the archives went from being “physical places of storage of cultural data to the discourses that govern modes of thinking, acting and expression” (113). Foucault’s historical a priori that stands behind the archive is not a condemnation to immobility, but rather a condition for triggering a transformative process that derives from an intrinsic historicity of knowledge, from an actual tangibility. For the organisation of the archive, archivists must implement basic rules of archiving and librarianship, but in each period an archive undergoes transformations in response to changes in its historical and cultural context. Over the years, a collection that was previously valued may fall into oblivion and make way for new and different collections. In all these changes, social practices have a role to play, but without any doubt the choices of a singular archivist can determine the success or the failure of an archive.

An archive “determines a negotiation of power, democracy, citizenship and cultural belonging” (Catanese and Petrucci 9; my trans.). It can be at the centre of complex interactions that construct cultural memory as a process that involves the synthesis of the personal and collective spheres (Assmann). According to Giovanni Leghissa, the archive comes into being “in continuous interaction both with the memories deposited in the minds of other individuals and with the memory that a community produces through specific data storage procedures” (240; my trans.). In relation to the involvement of the personal spheres, Derrida’s reference to psychoanalysis seems to be central. Having ascertained the existence of a primary will to archive, of an incontestable choice that sets order in collections, these nevertheless continue to retain an element of elusiveness, and thanks to this mysterious heart, the act of reading the archive can become an act of appropriation and recreation of “strata that are once superimposed” (Derrida 22).

From the beginnings of the Lumière cinematograph in 1895, “up to today’s practices of moving images”, the audiovisual heritage “has made it possible to record, document and understand collective and personal memory” (Catanese and Petrucci 2–3; my trans.). No other form of art or performance has had such an influence on the construction and reworking of imagery in human societies, perhaps with the exception of music and popular theatre, but to a much lesser extent. It is no surprise, then, that digital film archives—often developed in collaboration with experts in interface design and computational languages—have recently experienced such success and proliferation. The act of preserving a collection of film documents acknowledges cultural references based on specific, commonly accepted images, in which entire communities, even those scattered around the world, usually recognise themselves. An example in the Italian context is the Istituto LUCE’s digital archive, in which, through the website linked to the institute, films of both pre- and post-Fascist era can be watched and explored by anyone interested in that historical period.

The work that many Italian university institutions are carrying out today on digital archives is precisely around this concept. The idea is to build pathways for the exploration of cultural memories, starting from a specific historical issue or theme. Cultural memory serves as the foundation for these approaches to archiving. The process of building these types of archives presupposes the digital dimension as the ideal locus to set up environments that can be explored by users who are increasingly involved in the interpretative process by bringing their own experience into play.

 

 

Interact Through the Web, Educate with the Cinema

Nowadays, the phenomenon of overproduction of archival material is evident to all. This transformation does not only concern projects involving the digitisation of “classic” archives, whose collections often go beyond dusty historical buildings and are accessible on specific web portals. The profound change is in the concept of the archive itself, which today takes on always new forms. The spread of simple computer skills, access to the internet, and knowledge of basic notions of document sharing have made a decisive contribution. Over the last two decades, the web has become a sort of infinite archive. Within this “universe”, the audiovisual image plays, without a doubt, a central role, as it can be seen from the many social media users sharing and commenting on different film genres. The audiovisual component very clearly implies a greater involvement because, together with the technical support, it activates, more markedly than other forms of expression, an “interactive participation of the users” (Maiello par. 3; my trans.). The presence of technology transforms “the work of the imagination to the level of a shared elaboration of experience, choices and strategies that support our forms of life” (Cecchi 5; my trans). Digital media have shifted the terms of interaction with users, who are no longer rooted in a fixed position, but have become highly mobile entities dominated, as Ruggero Eugeni states, by a model of “interactive multimedia hypertext” (Eugeni 24; my trans.).

Interactivity creates a participatory horizon, a concept increasingly at the centre of modern pedagogical theories. The idea that the student is a mere receiver of information has been abandoned for decades. Classroom time has become a time for shared experience among students, between teachers and learners, and between the latter and the context. The interactivity, which often characterises the teaching time, “promotes engagement, motivation, and, ultimately, better learning outcomes” (“Enhancing”).

Today, an interactive arrangement is ever more present at most levels of the dissemination of cultural content. Museums, for example, are inclined to create digital environments to implement “many-to-many” communication in which “the networked user, therefore, becomes himself a potential protagonist of museum communication, being able to emancipate themselves from the role of passive spectator and assert their individuality, offering their own contribution not only to the dissemination of knowledge but also to its creation” (Solima; my trans.). The blurring of boundaries between the source of content and the recipient activates mechanisms of active involvement, which have indicative repercussions on learning and the modelling of cultural memory. A similar process can be observed in the contemporary use of archives, which—thanks to the digital turn and the rise of online platforms—are increasingly designed to engage users and be structured around specific themes, becoming “cultural amplifiers” (Bruner et al.) As Jerome Bruner argues, a “cultural amplifier” has a central role in strengthening students’ learning abilities and understanding of the world. In the perspective of this article, the archive is a “cultural amplifier” because of how it highlights and reshapes the characteristics of a community’s memory, i.e., by reinforcing some central elements of this memory and giving these elements the status of cultural pillars of a society. The mere presence of an archive establishes within a community the existence of a heritage of memories and knowledge. Through digital media and platforms, the archive establishes with its users a relationship that is not merely one of transmission of information, but of shared understanding and construction of their heritage, therefore expanding the meaning of heritage for the present and for the future. We can perhaps then speak of a true “educational function” of the archive within society.
In this context, new forms of archives are emerging, grounded in sharing and collaboration, and aimed at providing users with access to documents through which they can construct their own personalized knowledge paths around a specific topic. The individual user’s research, then, builds their knowledge through dynamics that are well described by Johan Huizinga, according to whom knowledge “does not spring from play like a living fruit bursting from its mother’s body, but develops in and as play” (249; my trans.). Such dynamics often characterise educational projects in the contemporary world, not only those belonging to traditional pedagogical contexts, namely the educational establishments, but to the whole variegated cosmos that has arisen around the varied institutions that collect, preserve and keep alive the memory of communities.

 

Collecting, Reflecting, and Creating Community Through Film

The inextricable connections between the various personal and collective levels undoubtedly determine changes in the construction of cultural memory. If it is true that personal memory cannot be separated from the social context, it is also true that the hybridity of its nature suspended between the particular and the universal grants it a margin of movement within which it can change and renew itself. This movement has been captured by today’s archival and media practices, in touch with the continuous metamorphoses of the contemporary and capable of providing communities with the possibility of grasping the changes in their history and attempting renewed readings of their identity.

The concept of community can also have many definitions. In a classical sense, community is linked to “specific places or localities in which social relations developed among people within their immediate contexts” (Sanz Sabibo 1–2). Today, this idea has been extended to broader contexts and, as Ruth Sanz Sabibo notes, “has come to reflect the fact that social groups come together for a variety of reasons, beyond the traditional possibilities and limitations of the immediate local sphere” (2). The reasons Sanz Sabibo speaks of may also have to do with how habits, images, and perspectives on the world that identify a specific group are represented. As Benedict Anderson has shown, the imaginative element is decisive in the formation of communities, which, in turn, are in part the result of a narrative that describes them and extols specific characteristics. Arjun Appadurai’s modern anthropology teaches us that the imagery associated with communities is, today, more than before, a social practice: “The imagination has become an organised field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organised practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility” (31).
 
Any community is thus the result of a network of relationships. Nowadays, this network of relations has been enriched by the discourses produced by new media, a dimension that is very closely linked to the dailyness of people’s digital practices and thus endowed with authenticity. The digital dimension is a privileged channel for reprocessing images of social groups (think, for example, of the role of TikTok in the life of young generations) and it affirms itself as the origin and the outcomes of new practices, involving also older media such as the cinema and, increasingly, television series. In the wide field of studies on visual culture, the agentive value of images is now well defined: they are never detached from the context and in it they build relationships with tangible effects in the socio-anthropological sphere (Mitchell). This is above all true for cinematographic and television images, which can touch the users in their personal sphere and at the same time bind them to collective memory. When this process is added to the influence that these images exert on the use of places, a short circuit is generated, which, if well managed, can become extremely useful for the sustainable development of territories. This type of transformation can be particularly evident in specific sectors, such as tourism, which can influence the evolution or involution of cities or even entire regions. In this perspective, political representatives link this possible development to issues related to environmental impact and sustainability, the latter intended as an action aimed at building a responsible and consciousness-oriented care of the territory and the formation of a community spirit.

 

Campania Landtelling: An Archive for the Community

Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development is an action programme whose objectives have forced Europe to reflect on the concept of sustainability. In Agenda 2030, tourism is a key feature, especially in the version of the phenomenon of film-induced tourism (Beeton), a type of tourism where the destinations of travellers are the places chosen by producers and directors as locations of famous films and television series. Today, thanks (regretfully) to the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, this practice makes use of channels, such as websites and apps dedicated to the promotion of the locations of various audiovisual productions. It is above all regional or municipal institutions that take the initiative to advertise the places where films and TV series have been shot. Websites and apps are often linked to a specific context, around which institutional bodies (film commissions, local tourism agencies) or private entrepreneurs build real “local media ecosystems”, which are a set of discourses designed to promote the image of a specific region or city, for instance Let’s Movie (Film Commission Regione Campania), launched at the beginning of the health emergency by the Digital Ecosystem of the Campania Region (Di Girolamo). Through photos and clips from locations of films and television series set in Campania, the app promotes historical sites of local heritage through a double reading, related to the cinematographic reprocessing and the personal reading of those who navigate the site, a kind of post-tourist cinema, which builds a unique and personal discovery path. Through a continuous reference to the history of the places and their artistic value, each location is presented as part of a heritage to be protected.

In this sense, digital humanities can make a fundamental contribution to understanding how digital spaces construct discourses on cultural heritage and strengthen local imagery and identity, thus promoting responsible citizenry. There is a need to reflect on the transmedia connections that digital environments born out of audiovisual imagery can build around communities and their heritage. This includes the ways in which the active user participation in the construction of film routes can stimulate new forms of awareness in communities, stimulating a sense of belonging and renewed interest in their history.

In October 2020, the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli published Campania Landtelling, an online digital archive designed to promote sustainable cultural tourism.[1] The perspective from which the paths are built is geocritical and ecocritical. Through the comparison between representation and referent, it tries to lead the user to reflect on how some fiction has a complex and “poetic” relationship with reality. The theoretical and methodological starting point of Campania Landtelling is based on the work ofBertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. The relationship between images of the world narrated by literature is the central point of Westphal’s work, which analyses the varied ways in which the “virtual world” interacts “in a modular fashion with the world of reference” (101). This modulable way reveals an intrinsic mobility in the relationship between fiction and reality, which is based on “mismatching” and different modes of “overlap” between universes. The aim is to stimulate a deep and alternative view of the place of interest in the user.

By weaving a network of images around a specific site—where a fiction or film was shot and which holds natural or artistic interest—the location is simultaneously narrated as an articulated reality: layered with historical and cultural significance, and as a heritage site worthy of preservation for future generations. Campania Landtelling adopts this approach, by deconstructing stereotypes and restructuring knowledge, fostering awareness of the strong territorial identities embedded in these places. Focusing on a region once only regarded as a place from which to emigrate or as a land of corruption and criminality, the Campania Landtelling archival project becomes an instrument of enquiry as well as a stimulus to understand, not only for those who look at Campania as a tourist site, but also for the local communities, who are confronted with a different, more profound and varied account of themselves and the places they occupy.

In the last two decades, in the Campania region, the contradiction between reality and its representation has been particularly significant, with the region becoming one of the favourite destinations of both Italian and foreign tourists. It is also true that Campania has been the favourite destination of travellers and holidaymakers for centuries; it suffices to think of its centrality to the grand tour routes travelledby the well-to-do British aristocracy and upper middle classes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Sweet). Currently, the proliferation of audiovisual productions set in all the provinces of the region has further contributed to the appeal of this tourist destination. Campania’s manifold sights have become part of a kaleidoscopic imagery, suspended between old icons and the invention of new points of view on the territory.

Starting from the construction of an archive of frames and clips from films and TV series shot in the region since the early twentieth century, the project is designed to disseminate, through an educational platform, a reinterpretation of the tourist image of Campania and to promote a critical and sustainable approach to the use of its territory, overturning negative stereotypes and strengthening positive knowledge about the region. Tourism forms a central nexus, as it is rooted in places and landscapes—spaces of communal recognition with which local communities identify. A particularly well-known example is the case of the Inspector Montalbano (1999–2021) television series, which not only brought further renown to the traditional Sicilian tourist attractions but also enhanced the identity of the territory in which it is set, and arguably contributed to the improvement of tourist flows. The series was indeed “an opportunity for a location to be identified as a tourist destination, […] attract tourists and capture visitor awareness” (Asero and Ponton 174). The idea of Campania Landtelling is very straightforward, but it also has an educational function: researchers and students collect for the website images of places where short stories, novels, films, and TV series are set, organised under a number of thematic areas. The frames of the fiction scenes and the sections of the novels in which specific places are described are compared with the images of real places, which in turn are geolocatable through links to Google Maps. The user can then surf through a series of image-based routes drawing on literary, audiovisual, and photographic narratives from the entire region. The material is organised according to seven motifs: “Campania Felix” (on the ancient image of the region), “Lavoro Femminile” (“Women’s Work”, representations of women workers in Campania from 1945 to 2025), “Miseria e Nobiltà” (“Poverty and Nobility”, on the coexistence of the rich and the poor in the region), “Ombre e Malacque” (“Shadows and Tainted Waters”, on crime), “Sui Generis” (on new gender perspectives), “Tempi Moderni” (“Modern Times”, on the industrial history of the place), and “Terra Nostra” (“Our Land”, on traditions) (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: The list of themes in the Campania Landtelling website.
Courtesy of University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli.

 

Six of these themes are in a fruitful dialogue with the stereotypes that have arisen around Naples and Campania. The routes they trace touch on most of the well-known clichés about the region, from those steeped in the past linked to the Roman empire—Campania was the favourite holiday spot of the Roman aristocracy, a place considered fertile and lush and, for this reason, called Felix (“Happy”)—to contemporary ones, such as the failed industrialisation of the eastern part of Naples, with its corollary of unemployment, social marginalisation, and environmental degradation. “Sui Generis” highlights how the capital of the region, Naples, has always succeeded in integrating into the social fabric those who placed themselves beyond normative definitions of gender, as demonstrated by the case of the Neapolitan transgender women, the “femminielli”, who, in most cases, have always been an integral part of the life of the urban communities (Cannella). Other thematic sections explore paths that intersect with anthropological, ethnographic, and sociological perspectives—frameworks that have shaped and disseminated the region’s most iconic image worldwide, especially that of Naples. “Miseria e Nobiltà” reflects on the dichotomy between splendour and poverty that has always characterised the city, while “Terra Nostra” highlights the representations of the territory that are directly connected to the identity of its inhabitants. Perhaps, in terms of the local history of the last three decades, the most significant route is, however, the one followed by “Ombre e Malacque”, which focuses on the image of a Campania devastated by the environmental pollution connected to the Camorra, the local criminal organisation, which sold disused quarries and once lush land to industries to illegally bury their toxic production waste.

Campania Landtelling gives its users the possibility to retrace virtually, and according to personal choices, known places, perhaps previously experienced through fiction, thus enabling a process of individual appropriation of the memory of the territory. It thus assumes a dual role: at once collective and private. To the universally recognised historical, artistic, and cultural value of the places, is added a layer of meanings shaped by individual desires, emotions, and curiosity. The heritage of the past thus becomes part of a process of subjectivation of the tourist experience, one that, with the support of appropriate strategies by institutions, operators, and the diverse stakeholders, can be transformed into critical awareness and into actions of care grounded in the specific context. This perspective offers a complex vision, a synthesis of the variety of cultural expressions that characterise Campania. The storytelling communicated by the set of photos, film and TV stills, synopses, and news reports opens a multifaceted universe, where the regional stereotypes are interpreted in their anthropological, historical, and sociological context. In this sense, Campania Landtelling has the function of a living archive, demonstrating that today even digital versions of the heritage preserved in libraries, traditional archives, companies, and institutions are not material assets but represent an opportunity to undertake strategies for innovation and cultural dissemination. It is from this new type of heritage that a new social, cultural, and economic value can be produced.

 
Conclusion

Audiovisual archives are a particularly useful instrument for understanding the dynamics that govern the development of societies and for analysing the formation of discourses and cultural processes that characterise particular moments in history. The digital existence of archives and their organisation in accessible databases provides ample possibilities for innovation, thanks, above all, to a flexibility that “allows the user a freer range of actions” (Thylstrup 32). Campania Landtelling is an example of digital archive that encourages users to develop a critical approach to the territory, not least in the hope of fostering a more sustainable form of tourism, with travellers who might visit the region having developed respect for the conservation and identity of the places. As noted at the start, the concept of sustainability is here understood in a broad sense and is oriented above all towards the creation of sustainable communities focused on the care of heritage and territory, as well as through forms of collaboration between private and/or public institutions. Audiovisual media play a central role in this process; alongside digital technologies, they function as ecomedia (Cubitt)—a necessary dimension for understanding and negotiating the relationships between the human and the environment, the social and the cultural today.

In this context, university institutions can play a central role in taking geo-ecocritical topics out of the academy to support and promote a conscientious approach towards the territory. In the vision of Campania Landtelling, the university is a true “digital humanist” that assembles “thematic collections to create new interpretations, theoretical frameworks, and knowledge” (Sabharwal 11). The emerging profile is that of a shared dimension of knowledge oriented towards real actions.

Note

[1] The project is part of university-led programmes cofunded by the European Union: “PON Research and Innovation 2014-2020”, pursuant to Article 24, paragraph 3, letter a), of Law no. 240 of 30 December 2010, as amended by Ministerial Decree no. 1062 of 10 August 2021.

 

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Suggested Citation

Di Girolamo, Lucia. “Educational Film Archives: A Tool for Sustainable Tourism.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 29–30, 2025, pp. 281–294. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.2930.17

 

Lucia Di Girolamo is former research associate in cinema, photography, television, and new media at University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli. Her research interests are in the representation of southern Italy in cinema, in cinematic women representations and in cultural processes related with film-induced tourism. She is the author of the monograph Visioni a Sud: la narrazione audiovisiva della Campania: sguardi turistici e idee di sostenibilità (Liguori, 2024). She has authored chapters in the volumes Basilicata and Southern Italy Between Film and Ecology, edited by A. Baracco and M. Gieri (Springer, 2022) and Sesto senso. Immagini di memorie, identità e luoghi tra letteratura e arti performative, edited by M. R. De Luca, I. Rizzo and G. Seminara (Mimesis, 2023).