Keywords

1 Introduction

The synergy of film and tourism industries has been the subject of much research, focusing on the growth of tourism in the location a film is filmed and the ways it promotes possible destination images [1,2,3,4], “including awareness, motivations, expectations, familiarity and complex images” [5]. By creating associations with the location and the story [5], films motivate potential tourists to visit the lands, re-experience the depicted scenes and/or personalize the film seen.

Greece is one of the countries that has appeared in many Hollywood film productions. From The Boy on a Dolphin (1957) to Mama Mia (2008) and the more recent Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Mama Mia 3 (2023), research shows an increase in visitor numbers at the filmed locations. As shown by the example of New Zealand’s successful destination brand creation, after Toklien’s trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” mediated the country’s natural landscapes to film audiences, or the similar case of Great Britain and Harry Potter films, the opportunity a Hollywood production offers to a place chosen for the background of a screen script can be capitalized on by local authorities and tourist organizations and combined with PR and creative marketing forward the destination at the top choices of potential tourists’ travel venues list.

The aspects of a place that a movie production chooses to promote to film audiences are crucial, as they can become indicators of the place’s personality, identity and aura, attracting both the tourists’ gaze [6] and their interest for their next holiday venue. This paper uses content analysis in order to examine the codes promoted through the trailers of the most popular Hollywood films filmed in Greece, starting from 1957 and until the establishment of the National Centre of Audiovisual Media and Communication in 2015. The aim is to highlight the “markers”/signs used by film industry to connote Greekness during the period of our study.

2 Theoretical Background

Emotional appeal, conversational capital and even celebrity value are the criteria set by Morgan et al. [7] for the choice of holiday destination by contemporary tourists. According to the World Tourism Organization, they mention, in twenty-first century tourism destinations can be paralleled to fashion accessories, expressing their possessor’s identity, as well as financial, social and cultural status. Proofs of one’s “been there, done that”, souvenirs/postcards/snapshots/selfies are treasurable items of auratic value to the tourists, displayed in one’s home or digital space as charismatic objects of cultural value [8, 9]. Tourist routes in the visited land and their representation through souvenirs and photographs are the status indicators of the metamodern human.

Places are chosen by tourists as holiday destinations on the grounds that they could offer them, besides status, rare experiences, different from the ones they encounter in their everyday lives [6]. For the attraction of Urry’s “tourist gaze”, the tourism industry’s stakeholders, local authorities and the media—both mass and new media—have formed various synergies and outlined many different models for destination brand building and marketing, aiming at the increase of tourists’ arrival numbers.

2.1 Tourism Industry Marketing

The Tourism Industry uses many channels in order to communicate its messages to its loyal and potential audiences. Rich content, designed by national entities or the private sector, appears in various printed material—tourist leaflets, posters, postcards and banners, for example—, audiovisual media, web pages and social media posts, in order to attract the tourist gaze and persuade potential tourists to visit the shown destination. Apart from promotional material and the media, other communicators send destinations’ messages to various audiences. The possibilities are endless and the synergies innovative and rather creative. From international media to celebrities that function as opinion leaders—or influencers—, cultural and creative industries—, from archaeology to gaming and the hand-crafting industry—, the promotion iconography of destination brands is increasingly filling one’s visual environment. Starting from one’s young age through school books and animation films [10], Barthes’ “language of travel” [11] is formed as an integral part of one’s cultural habitus [12].

Tourism iconography has in the twenty-first century occupied a large part of one’s surroundings. Tourism signs are decoded by individual factors, shaped by former experience and/or personal knowledge. Nevertheless, the media do, at a great extent, provide the potential tourist with much of his/her knowledge and recently digital, mediated, bodiless experience of the destination, shaping certain “markers” [13] and building specific “myths” [11] around a place. It is a vicious circle of co-shaping “imaginative geographies” [6], “invented traditions” [14], “staged” [13] and/or “emergent” [15] authenticity. The fact is that each potential tourist is aware—regardless of the ways he/she came to that end—of the recognizable landmarks and peculiarities of every famous destination, the ones he/she cannot miss if he/she were to visit the place.

The tourists’ ritual [8] to visit different lands and search for the familiar “markers” has been broadened in recent years so as to include the wish to participate in the “authentic” local experience, the distinctively local uniqueness of a place [10]. Even if one understands that authenticity might be “staged” for his/her eyes [13], its invented, recreated generation [14] is seen as its evolution, timely dynamism [16], a new emergent authenticity [15]. The creation of “authentic” experiences and thematic tourist routes, not necessarily close to the known forms of mass tourism, highlighted the value of targeted and personalized tourist messages, with the use of different communication channels. New media and digital applications have come to replace traditional media tourism marketing, but the search for differentiated communication vehicles is constant and uprising. One of the cultural industries that has helped tourism industry reach specific target audiences—and the focus of this research—is film industry.

2.2 Film (-Induced) Tourism

A new thematic form of tourism has recently been formed, that of film-induced tourism. Despite being non-touristic practices, films can promote destinations unconsciously and therefore successfully. An “authentic stage” tourist destination [17] could be shaped through film, with the opportunity to create strong brand relationships and increase tourist growth in the promoted place before the screening, during the filming and sustained for years after the film release. As a cultural industry’s product, film can create bonds with its audiences, create communities, even fandoms. In addition, film’s nature allows its viewer to fictionally participate in the storyline [18], identify with the protagonists, be ontologically transferred on screen and strongly appreciate the setting and by extension the place where the filming took place.

The potentials of film induced tourism have only recently started to be realized. Nevertheless, there is a gap in the scientific bibliography on the specific subject, as all research seems to reproduce the fact that filmic promotion is an important marketing strategy as regards to destination branding, providing statistical data on the increase of the numbers of tourist arrivals before and after the film release, but without examining the phenomenon further. Not all destinations that had the chance to host a film production have capitalized on the potentials this filmic promotion offers them. The opportunities presented by movies for destinations are linked to public relations and tourism marketing in ways yet under-explored. The aspects of the place shown on film and the ways they shape the destination’s personality have also not been examined extensively, and definitely not in accordance/synergy to the “markers” usually promoted through other media of a destination’s tourist marketing strategy.

3 Methodology and Results

In order to identify the main markers used to introduce the destination “Greece” to film audiences, the author applied content analysis on eleven trailers of Hollywood movies filmed in Greece. The sample includes the first American movie ever filmed in Greece in 1957 and goes until 2013, before the establishment of the National Centre of Audiovisual Media and Communication in 2015. The criteria for the selection of the American films filmed in Greece during these 57 years, were their exclusive or for the biggest part of the script filming in Greece, their box office success, as well as the reference to Greece, visually and/or linguistically, in their official trailers.

The decision to study the trailers rather than the films was not based solely on timely restrictions. As previews and “thresholds of meaning” [19], both cultural goods and marketing texts, the trailers include the most aesthetic visual codes of the film, as well as the main elements of the script that define the plot, including the setting. It was interesting, therefore, to examine, which elements of the Greek setting were seen as defining, key aspects of the film, so to be shown in the trailer. In addition, trailers, as “metatextual frames and filters” [20], function as textual bridge between film studio and audience [21]. Their promotional function outbalances, in many cases, their cultural one, trying to allure the audience into the films’ screening experience. Some of the trailers studied could be used as promotional texts for Greece.

The films of the sample include The Boy on the Dolphin (BoD), filmed in 1957 in Hydra, The Guns of Navarone (GoN) filmed in 1961 in Rhodes, Zorba the Greek (ZtG) filmed in 1964 in Crete, James Bond: For your eyes only (JB) filmed in 1981 in Corfu and Meteora, Summer Lovers (SL), filmed in 1982 in Santorini, The Big Blue (BB), filmed in 1988 in Amorgos, Mediterraneo (M), filmed in 1992 in Kastellorizo, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (CCM), filmed in 2001 in Kefalonia, Mama Mia (MM), filmed in 2008 in Skiathos, Skopelos and Pelion, My Life in Ruins, (LiR), filmed in 2009 in Olympia, Acropolis and Athens and “Before Midnight” (BM), filmed in 2013 in Mani and Peloponnese. Films like The Greek Tychoon (1978), The Bourne Identity (2002) or Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life (2003) were not included in the sample, as they were only partialy filmed in Greece, although their tourist impact was important.

Following the methodological steps for content analysis, the author selected specific categories, focusing on some of the familiar “markers” of Greece as a tourist destination, namely: cultural heritage, sun, sea, natural landscapes, tradition, music, architecture and local people. The codes chosen for every category can be seen in Table 1, where the films that build their narration on each of these codes are also stated.

Table 1 The codes under each category
Full size table

4 Discussion

We notice in Table 1 that 82% of the films are filmed in one of the islands, or at least includes filming in one of the islands of the country. The Greek islands are, unquestionably, one of the country’s main touristic assets, promoted in every tourist marketing effort, both by official bodies and the private sector. The Greek islands welcome the most tourists during the summer and it is obvious that they attract the most tourist gazes in every visual appearance of Greece on every medium, including film.

The most commonly used categories are sun and sea, while local people, traditional architecture and natural landscapes are also shown in most of the films. Most of the trailer scenes unfold in sunny days and the sea is in most of the cases the background of the protagonists’ adventures. In most of the trailers (91%) there is at least one scene where the film’s characters are swimming, while in many cases they are on a boat or at the beach. Sun and sea tourism is the main product of the mass tourism phenomenon [22], but also coastal tourism, where the distance of the hotel to the beach and the sea-view rooms are the main advantages of accommodation properties and the main reasons for increased prices. The “four Ss” in tourism—namely sun, sea, sand and sex, as a stereotyped cliché to characterize the type of tourism that finds the forementioned characteristics more important than the culture, tradition and general identity of the place [23]—is a well-known promotional narrative for Greece and attracts big numbers of tourists annually. “Summer lovers” is the film in the sample that promotes the specific kind of tourism in the island of Santorini. All of the films examined promote the 2Ss—sun and sea—, two widely shared signs that denote relaxing holidays, in order to attract the mass tourist gaze. The 2Ss are two of the most recognizable markers of Greece as a tourist destination. Since the 1970s, the “sun and sea” tourism model was a big trend and most tourists coming to Greece preferred the islands and coastal regions for their vacations.

Other visual codes are also offered, especially ones highlighting the “different” and/or “authentic” Greek scenery. Ancient monuments, archaeological sites and objects are seen in 10 of the 11 trailers studied. As the first poster promoting Greek tourism in 1929, so the first film filmed in Greece in 1957 was based on cultural monuments. It was a period of time that Greece attracted tourists mainly interested in Greek antiquities. Greek landscapes are seen in some of the trailers—mostly rocky landscapes, as most films are set on islands, but also mountains, and in some cases green images, e.g., of forests—attracting the gaze of nature lovers. Architecture is another aspect of visible locality and difference offered to the tourist gaze. Traditional architectural elements are visible in 91% of the trailers studied. Either through bird eyed views or following the actors inside a traditional local house, the viewer is acquainted with Greek traditional architecture and details such as traditional furniture and even traditional hand-painted ceramic dishes, where the protagonists of “Before Midnight” eat their dinner with friends in the courtyard, as many Greeks actually do. Local people, as the “others”—exotic, different, attractive—have also become an important part of tourism iconography, seen in many visual media promoting Greece, from postcards [8] and tourist brochures to documentaries and films. The “other” in anthropological terms refers to the notion of perceived differences, while in tourism studies it is mostly based on cultural differences. Local people appear in all film trailers, except one: “The Guns of Navarone”. In the films “Zorba the Greek”, “Mediterraneo” and “Captain Corelli’s Mantolin” Greek people participate in the plot at a great extent, being sketched as proud, passionate and free-living. Greek actors are seen as members of the film’s cast in 45% of the trailers. Traditional social activities, like sitting in a “kafeneio” (Greek traditional café) or attending a social event are seen in 55% of the films studied, while traditional clothing and local habits are seen in fewer films. Greek language is heard—through local people speaking and music—or seen—in labels on the streets—in 36% of the films. Greek music is heard either through a Greek instrument (27%), or the music soundtrack (27%). Traditional dances are seen in the trailers of two films.

The research shows that, parallel to the official bodies of the Greek government that were responsible for promoting Greece as a tourist destination, films used similar codes in order to attract the gazes of audiences and potential tourists. If we place the codes in a chronological order, we will see that first, the focus was on cultural heritage, then the “sea and sun” model and afterwards the need for “authentic” images—e.g., tradition, local people, architecture, etc. The visual codes in all the films follow this motif, while the linguistic codes come to clarify the message—filmic and touristic. Greece is characterized firstly as “the land of the Golden Gods” (BoD), then a “sea-bathed and sun-washed” world (ZtG) and “a secret of paradise on earth” (M). The Greek islands are characterized as “magical” (M), places “of enchantment” (M) and “untouched by time” (CCM). All these phrases promote Greece as a tourist destination, even if that was not the primary goal of the films, and actually follow Greece’s official promotion strategy—and the chronological circle of the tourist phenomenon: sightseeing (the Grand Tour), relaxation (the 4 Ss), search for difference and authenticity and finally genuine experiences. The first “Mama mia” film trailer, to give another example of the parallel route between Greek tourist promotional strategy and film industry, was released in 2008 and includes scenes of Greek nightlife. During that period—from 2007 onwards—, the Greek National Tourist Organization (GNTO) tried to reposition Greece in the tourist industry [24] and show other aspects of it, like nightlife, as the focus was on experiences, rather than sightseeing or relaxation by the sea. By 2012, the promotional iconography returned to that of “all time classic” Greece [24]. In the 2013 film of our sample, “Before Midnight” we see the typical wandering of the protagonists in a graphic coastal area of southern Greece and we hear the phrase “a place filled with thousands of years of myth and tragedy” (BM).

5 Conclusions

The paper examined 11 films filmed in Greece during the period 1957–2014, as tourist marketing tools. The analysis revealed that all films use the familiar at the time symbols of the country and promote these specific signs as “authentically” Greek. Greece has always been promoted as a summer holiday destination and this fact is evident through the visual signs of sea and sun in all the trailers of our sample. Cultural tourism is also promoted and to a minor extent so is nature-based tourism. The viewers and potential tourists’ search for authenticity is satisfied with images of Greek tradition, as expressed in architectural elements of traditional Greek houses, traditional music and dances, as well as traditional clothing, habits and the Greek language. These singled out and promoted destination images denote Greekness in ways already familiar, strengthening the existent brand and verifying the identity image of the place, in parallel ways to the country’s official promotional tourist strategy.