Performing the Film Industry-Tourism Complex | Eva Sporer, Gran Sasso Science Institute
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This work explores how conceptions of Southern urban living lie behind the rise of a ‘film industry-tourism complex’ which plays an important role in the process of tourism-driven urban revival. Empirically, this research centres on the re-emerging interest of film makers and related touristic activities that has developed around the historical Neapolitan neighbourhood of Rione Sanità in the last decade. This urban area is emblematic of Naples’ rapid transformation due to the advent of mass tourism and highly illustrative of such Southern imaginaries, with some of them, namely the ‘porous city’, originating from Naples itself.
This paper shows how the Southern representation of urban life is generative of a ‘film industry-tourism complex’ that incorporates the characteristics of urban society, particularly its precarious living forms. Extending Jameson’s concept of reification of mass culture towards the ‘thingification’ of precarious life, the performative relevance of this work is twofold: Firstly, the local film industry is shaped by precarious practices of operating in the context of increased economic interest in filmmaking. Secondly, a socially dense and lively urban neighbourhood is enacted as a ‘living stage’, producing atmospheres, images and economies and vice versa the said industry complex reifies this animated landscape onto an image to be sold on the global marketplace.
Eva Sporer is a PhD Candidate in Regional Science and Economic Geography at the GSSI - Gran Sasso Science Institute in L'Aquila, Italy. She holds a MA in Human Geography from the University of Vienna with a specialisation on Urban Studies (VUB Vrije Universiteit Brussels - ULB Université Libre de Bruxelles) and a BSc in Geography from the University of Innsbruck. She has been a junior lecturer at the University of Vienna and a research assistant at the University of Bonn. After graduation, Eva has worked as a Research Assistant for Housing Europe (European Federation of Public, Cooperative and Social Housing) in Brussels and later as a Project Assistant for the Italian Association of Inhabitants' Cooperatives (Legacoop Abitanti) on EU housing recovery initiatives and fragile housing needs in post-pandemic Italy.
Eva currently does research on the urban dimension of performative and ideational economies in a Southern European touristifying context, and that of Naples more specifically. More recently, her research looks at the way in which tourism-driven urban revival processes are generative of a new creative industry, particularly in cinema and the audiovisual sector, in deprived, previously stigmatised urban settings.