As a spoof on popular travel films, Crossing the Great Sagrada highlights what it perceives as stereotypes of this genre. The ‘intrepid explorers – Holmes – Sweet and Holmes’ are immediately defined by their costumes. One is dressed in a fur coat and hat, another as a colonial figure all dressed in white, with monocle, hat and nose raised, while the third wears a kilt. The film depicts a rich, greedy benefactor, and gently mocks the grandiose nature of these travel films, announcing at the film’s conclusion that ‘thus ends another chapter of All-British heroism’. The film also plays on the educational function of the travel film, as it offers maps, first with ‘a diagram of the direction in which we were going’ and then later with a ‘diagram of the direction in which we thought we were going.’ This title is followed by a map of the train stations of London.

Brunel explained the nature of this humour in Film Production: ‘It lies in the unexpectedness of the shot that follows each introduction in title or spoken word’ (Brunel, 1936, 88). Yet while the disparity between the image and title produces the comedy – so that for example a title announcing Blackfriars Bridge ‘crowded with mid-day traffic’ is followed by two ‘natives’ walking gingerly over a rope bridge in Papua – this comedy relies on, and highlights, a number of assumptions about these colonial travel films.

First, the film foregrounds the division between the authoritarian voice and the ‘real’ images, so that the title ‘Some native fishermen’ precedes an image of a fishmonger’s shop advertising ‘Special Today Torbay Soles’. The film thus relies on the audience questioning the information provided by the titles. Many travel films may exaggerate the images through the intertitles, but Crossing the Great Sagrada also derives humour from devaluing the ethnographic shots so that, for example, a shot of mud huts in Africa is described as ‘Wapping’.

Secondly, the film highlights the artificiality of these colonial narratives. The film represents Blackpool beach as the desert, but more significantly uses and re-appropriates stock footage within a consciously fictional narrative. In doing this, the film reveals the widely used ethnographic shots used to represent Africa, and highlights some of the popular misrepresentations of Africa. The film shows topless African women (‘we stayed here some time’) and then a local African male (‘but we left rather hurriedly’) as it produces comedy from the cultural stereotype of the ‘dangerous’ and ‘wild’ African. A censor certificate for what appears to be ‘Cannibals of the South Seas’, the 1912 faux documentary from Martin and Osa Johnson, flashes on screen during these ethnographic shots. The film thus displays the process of producing ethnographic and travel films and, through its blatant artificiality, questions the authenticity of these colonial documentaries.

Tom Rice (March 2008)