Cannibal Tours (1988) Director: Dennis O’Rourke

At the beginning of this film, a sentence appears on the screen that best describes the content, “there is nothing so strange in a strange land as the stranger who comes to visit it”. In Cannibal Tours the natives live on the land with their friends and family and everything is normal accept for the foreign people who come to watch and photograph them. It is apparent that the people of Papua New Guinea do not appreciate the arrogant tourists who come to observe their culture and bargain for their creations. As I watched this film, a strong feeling of invasion and lack of privacy consumed me. Dennis O’Rourke thoroughly depicts how ignorant tourists can be throughout this documentary.

People should treat people the way they wish to be treated, which should be told to the bourgeois tourists who visit New Guinea. Through translations in subtitled form, I was able to see from the perspective of the natives how badly they feel about the interactions they have with the tourists. It is interesting how O’Rourke would go from interviewing a native about the hard work that goes into their carvings and then how he would switch to a scene where a tourist is trying to bargain with them for lower prices. Selling their carvings and charging for photographs of “The Spirit House” are how these people earn their money and it is devastating when the tourists try to get them to reduce to “2^nd or 3^rd prices”. Although O’Rourke does not say any of his opinions, he shows through editing how he negatively feels about these tourists and their choices.

During the course of this film it is interesting to see how O’Rourke makes his editing choices to contrast the two very different ways of life.  At one part during the film, the tourists are shown on the boat discussing the amount of calories in their eggs. The camera then cuts to the natives and how they barely have any money for food because the tourists are not even willing to pay the asking price for their carvings. It is interesting to see the difference between the two groups of people through which scenes O’Rourke strategically chooses to place side by side.

When one native woman is being interviewed she explains how the tourists don’t help them, “they don’t buy our things, they just come to stare and take pictures”. It is as if they are being watched like caged animals at a zoo. It is great how O’Rourke captures material that expresses the native’s emotions so people can hopefully stop this kind of horrible tourist behavior. There are so many public service announcements on television that show people in third world countries filming the natives and we never get to hear their side of the story. The only people we ever hear from are the tourists or the people claiming that they are trying to help. It is intriguing to hear from the people who live in these places and what they think of these people invading their territory.

In the end there is a weird combination of the tourists being jealous of the simple ways in which these people live and the natives being jealous of the tourist’s money; I guess the grass really is greener on the other side.