The World and Beijing World Park: Film Tourism, Intermedia, Embodiment, and the Fake

Combining theories on the “performance turn” in tourism studies and theories on intermediality, this chapter examines the fake in The World (Jia Zhangke, 2008) and Beijing World Park and the ways it is experienced through the media of film, architecture, performance, and embodiment. By analyzing the self-ethnographic phenomenological and embodied experience of the film-induced tourist/pilgrim, it argues that cinema not only incorporates other media and encourages dialogue between them, but it also has affective draws on the film-induced tourist/pilgrim in that physically being present in the site shifts the engagement from vicarious and virtual (on screen) to active and embodied (in the site itself). It argues that through its multimedia artificiality, the fake (both on-screen and on-site) offers entertainment as well as stimulates further examination by the viewer/visitor, through attracting our attention through pleasure, and then encouraging us to examine reality further by adding the media of embodiment to the experience.