The Little Prince created by Saint-Exupery has become a universal character. Translated into more than 200 languages, the poetic and philosophical tale written by the French aviator touches the hearts of people all around the world. Were you aware he left his planet to materialize on the Earth ? Do you want to know where and…
Predator is a 1987 movie directed by John McTiernan. In Val Verde, a country bordering Guatemala, a joint task force, led by Major Alan « Dutch » Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is assigned to rescue hostages in the jungle. The group is hunted by an extraterrestrial creature: the Predator. Two spatial machineries appear in the movie. One is…
Lola is a sort of abstract ballet movie whose the scene is the town of Nantes. The film is about wait and boredom, planned departures and expected returns . There are two world maps in the film, both of them related to the character Roland Cassard. Both are a bit mysterious and fully cinematic. Both…
As already shown in this post, geographic space plays a fundamental role in the work of Hergé. In The ‘Manitoba’ No Reply, first volume of The Secret Ray from The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko, published in 1952, the liner SS Manitoba indicates its position by radio, remains silent for 20 hours and send…
« The Social Network » . Excerpt of the trailer – Extrait de la bande-annonce How to visualize a virtual network in a movie? It is the question the director David Fincher had to answer with his new film The Social Network, that tells the story of the young and famous Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. There is…
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 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…
Everybody knows or thinks he knows Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world. But it is also a mysterious work that has given rise to many rumors and speculations. We propose here an original interpretation that considers the painting as a sophisticated spatial and cartographic arrangement. We first build our reasoning upon an…
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…
« Le Jardin de la France » (The Garden of France) is one of the most famous Max Ernst’s paintings. It depicts a woman’s body lying between sandbanks and islands near the confluence of Indre and Loire rivers. The work is fully representative of surrealism by the collage of different elements of reality that creates this feeling…
Google Maps appears in Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time that Google Maps appears in a literary work. If you have an earlier example, please write us a comment. Of course Google Maps doesn’t play a central role in the book. Google Maps appears in two…
(e)space & fiction 