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CRITICAL SOURCES FOR MAKING SENSE OF THE THEORY-PRACTICE DIVIDE IN FILM AND VISUAL STUDIES SynopsisIn this paper I explore the theory-practice nexus as it manifests itself within film and visual studies. Starting from an institutional history of the troubled relation between film theory and the teaching and conduct of imaging practice, I locate this disjuncture in a broader analysis of the social division between intellectual and manual labour within capitalist society. I discuss Aristotle's distinctions between theoria, praxis and techne and relate this to the contemporary divisions between the theoretical, critical and technical elements of teaching film. I argue that a discussion of the relationship between theory and practice within film and the visual arts is best approached by a serious consideration of the 'politics of theory'. The ProblemThe last twenty years has seen a massive growth in film, media and communication studies within further and higher.

In this paper we examine how our images of the landscape are framed in and through the media practices involved in tourist promotion. Through a case study of the selling of Ireland as a holiday destination for the German tourist market, we explore the processes of cultural translation and intertextuality which link traditions of landscape painting, photoart and the contemporary tourist brochure. We argue that communication analysis can play a key role in the critical study of tourism.

We give a sociological reading of the landscape as a formation not primarily of the natural world but of the social. Landscape is best seen as a terrain on which socially constructed and historically determined significatory practices are at work shaping our perception of nature. Accordingly we must attend to the media forms and practices through which landscape has been represented if we are to understand the inter-textual nature of our experience of nature. We explore in particular sociological attempts to understand tourist representations of the landscape. We engage with Urry's postmodern analysis of picturesque tourism and argue that a more historically informed analysis is needed that links representations of landscape to power relations in colonised societies.