Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a unique ethnography of the documentary film making process in a community that has experienced transformation from a fishing village to tourist destination.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides a unique ethnography of the documentary film making process in a community that has experienced transformation from a fishing village to tourist destination. The documentary film, 'The Last Place in England' shot in Sennen Cove, West Cornwall in the realist tradition, offers the audience, as potential tourists, a romantic vision of the cultural and natural landscape.

The film operates at a number of levels, drama documentary, destination promotion and ethnographic record. What is unusual about this is the way in which the anthropologist is able to study the film making process as it is experienced by the Producer and the production team, the host population and the subjects of the documentary.

The concern is less with the techniques used in filming, but with ethnographic value of the film. For example what does the documentary tell us about the Producer and his audience? It is argued that the documentary film maker is in fact a special category of tourist. The subjects of the documentary while rooted through strong ties of kinship to the host community are also marginal people acting as cultural brokers.

In documenting a community, which the Producer has described as 'almost hostile to the outside world' he provides an view of culture recognisable the wider tradition of ethnographic films as 'man vis nature'. The documentary that is screened is as result of painstaking negotiation that leads to a cultural product that tells us much about how tourist destinations are constructed and portrayed.