An Authentic Experience of History: Tourism in Ulrike Ottinger's Exil Shanghai

A sign of commodification and mass culture, tourism is usually treated as a disturbance and contamination of the otherwise "authentic" atmosphere of historical artifacts. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer's and Susan Sontag's theories of photography, this paper argues that transgressions of the genre of historical documentary in Exil Shanghai (1997) cast tourism as an authenticating factor in the perception of historical sites. The film thus suggests a notion of historical authenticity grounded in a perception of the passing of time, rather than the authority of witness accounts or archival material. This notion of historical authenticity relies on a feminist epistemology that debunks the traditional binary opposition between subject and object by suggesting that the experience of the other is essentially a reflexive experience of the self.