Avoiding the (tourist) gaze: pursuit of the ‘authentic’ in the Tbilisi edgelands

Abstract

The making of Micro-district II, a digital film made by the author in the edgelands of Tbilisi, Georgia, is used as a vehicle for exploring the tourist gaze and the observer’s paradox amongst ethnographic filmmaking methods and documentary modes of observation. The observer’s paradox describes how the receiver of the gaze may become influenced through the processes of being observed, altering the quality of observing ‘naturalistic’ events. The tourist gaze is a similarly two-way process where the pursuit of the authentic is negotiated or constructed according to the type of gaze encountered. Whilst this article is more about the observation of urban landscapes, architecture and street ephemera, than human subjects, the mode of observation and the gaze play a vital role in the author’s personalised accounts of ways of ‘avoiding the gaze’ and getting to what is perceived as filming an ‘authentic’ experience of the ex-soviet micro-districts of Tbilisi. Through a process of autoethnography the author examines ways of avoiding the tourist gaze including navigating the streets, filmmaking techniques and by experimenting with documentary styles of realism. Drawing on the field notes of the author/filmmaker, the problematic quest for the ‘authentic’ and ‘naturalistic’ experience of the tourist are discussed, in terms of the complex elements which determine the constructive gaze, with a conclusion that suggests the impossibility of avoiding the tourist gaze.