The city of Le Havre (France) has now its literary tour map. Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal on Geocriticism, Sonia Anton, professor of literature at the University of Le Havre, has developed a literary tour of the city through 20 places evoked by famous writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Honoré de Balzac. This…
« A girl is trapped in the map and desperately needs your help to escape. Have you got what it takes to navigate her out of this dangerous photographic maze. The clock is ticking. » This is the pitch for an advertisment campain that was organized in 2011 by Mercedes around a interactive commercial produced by an…
The Commission on Art & Cartography of the International Cartographic Association is organizing a workshop in Zurich in June 2012 on « cartography and narratives. » This workshop aims to bring together artists, scholars and students from cartography, geography, the humanities and the arts interested in exploring further the multiple relationships between maps and narratives. The deadline…
As clearly described in its subtitle, the movie Zig-Zag (dir. Raul Ruiz 1980) is « a didactical fiction about cartography. » This “cine-cartographic” essay navigates between the documentary and the fiction, the map and the territory, the dream and the reality. Made in the context of the art exhibit “Cartes et figures de la terre” that took…
The Good, the Bad and the Weird (dir. Ji-woon Kim, 2008) is a remake of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Beyond the fact that both versions unfold in different locations and at different times (1860s American civil war and 1930s Mandchuria), the presence of maps in both versions leads…
The latest novel by Michel Houellbecq deals not only with art and society, but also with places and their representations. The title « The map and territory » can be interpreted as a synthesis of the artistic journey of the hero, Jed Martin. The international career of this visual artist starts in the 2010s through a series…
M (dir. Fritz Lang 1931) tells the story of a serial killer who preys on children in 1930s Berlin, and who is on the run from police and an organized crime syndicate. The film begins with the murder of Elsie, the eighth child to be murdered. At the crime scene police find a paper bag…
In animated films, ways of representing space are unlimited. Everything is possible in an animated cartoon. From the beginning of the 20th century, animated movie makers have been inventing new ways of representing space (e.g. The flying house by Winsor McCay, 1921). Le dessin animé est un domaine dans lequel les formes de représentation de…
In the movie High and Low – original title “Tengoku to jigoku”- (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1963), the police searches the kidnappers of the son of Gondo, the executive director of a shoe company in Japan (the child of Gondo’s chauffeur was in fact kidnapped by mistake). What’s interesting in this movie in terms of spatial…
The film Dogville directed by Lars Von Trier (2003) takes literally place on a map. The action unfolds in a small town in the U.S. The houses are drawn on the ground, some elements are represented by symbols (e.g. some bushes), and the names of the streets are written on the ground. Only few pieces…
A picture is worth a thousand words says the favorite adage of people working with images. The two first pages of the novel The Betrothed (in Italian I Promessi sposi) by Alexandro Manzoni published in 1825, could illustrate this adage since they could be summarized with a map like this one. This novel starts with…
According to wikipedia the GPS concept was born in 1963: « Project 57 was worked in 1963 and it was « in this study that the GPS concept was born. » » The following year James Bond was already following the car of the villain Goldfinger in real-time on a screen map in his Aston Martin through Europe and…
Before Google Earth there was WorldWind and Keyhole (the company that created the application used to develop Google Earth). Before Keyole, there was the movie Powers of Ten (dir. Charles and Ray Eames 1977). Indeed, one of the co-founders of Keyole – Avi Bar-Zeev – recognized the inspirational dimension of Power of Tens in the…
My favorite war room map is the one that appears in Dr. Strangelove (Dir. Stanley Kubrick 1964). In this scene the paranoic and anticommunist US general Turdgison (hilarious George C Scott) is using the map (« the big board ») as the irrefutable proof that the russian president « Dimitri » is lying when he says that one B52…
Each one of the two parts of the movie Che (dir. Steven Soderbergh 2009) starts with an animated map (at least in the North American version of the film): An animated map of the different Cuban provinces in Part I and an animated map of the different countries of South America in Part II. Both…
« Tom Conley has a sharp eye for capturing maps on the silver screen. The kinds of maps he deciphers are political, historical, emotional, aesthetic, narrative and metaphorical. As he decodes them, he takes his reader on a stimulating and engaging journey into the uncharted world of Cartographic Cinema. » Tom Conley voit des cartes partout…
Is this the first animated map ever? At least it is one of the first ones. It was created for a 1918 docudrama entitled Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (Martin E. Johnson, 1918). An animated black line traces the journey of director Martin Johnson and his wife Osa from the New Hebrides…
(e)space & fiction 