Tous les dispositifs de la fiction que l’on peut trouver dans la littérature, la peinture, le cinéma,le jeu vidéo ou autres pour figurer l’espace : cartes, globes, noms, interfaces informatiques et autres objets …
All fictional apparatus found in literature, painting, cinema, video games, or other media to represent space: maps, globes, names, computer interfaces, and other objects…
(e)space&fiction already mentioned the London Underground map that Albert Dehousse learned by heart to enhance the credibility of his false engagement in the Resistance. One can found another very brilliant sequence later in the film when the « hero » travels to Germany for a military mission. Nous avons déjà mentionné dans (e)space&fiction le dispositif de la carte du…
Non ho sonno (Sleepless) is a 2001 Italian giallo film directed by Dario Argento. Seventeen years ago, in Turin, Italia, Giacomo’s mother was murdered. The alleged murderer was found dead and the investigation was closed. Unfortunately, a serial killer sows again terror in a same way, leaving small paper animal figurine by the side of bodies.…
La Classe américaine (American Class) also known as Le Grand Détournement is a 1993 French television film directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) and Dominique Mézerette. It is exclusively made of excerpts of old Warner’s movies (plus one extract of the French TV series Maigret). All of them are combined and dubbed with new lines.…
The Andromeda Strain is a 1971 American science-fiction film directed by Robert Wise and based on the novel The Andromeda Strain published in 1969 by Michael Crichton. It tells the story of a four-day major American scientific crisis, in a very structured way. Many and various spatial machineries support the narration : split screen, text…
On peut qualifier Patrick Modiano, récent Nobel de Littérature, de romancier géographique. Ses romans entrelacent d’une manière unique temps et espace dans des enquêtes à la fois pointilleuses et inabouties aux ambiances brumeuses. Les livres de Modiano sont remplis de lieux, essentiellement parisiens, d’adresses, d’itinéraires très précis, où l’on suit souvent un enquêteur croisant archives…
A quoi je prête attention dans les films : 1) l’intrigue, les personnages (très peu) 2) les écrans d’ordinateurs qui apparaissent brièvement à l’arrière plan (principalement). « – Attends! Sur cette carte floue derrière le général on voit qu’un des vaisseaux extra-terrestres se trouve au Groenland ! Pourquoi le Groenland ? – STP, est-ce qu’on peut…
A trap street, or errata, is a fictitious street inserted into maps to purposefully trap potential copyright violators of the map. Normally quite innocuous, these fictitious bits of information are used as proof to spot where plagiarism has taken place. The recent chinese feature film « Trap Street » inverts the usual meaning of this expression, becoming…
Superpowers might give superheroes a very specific experience of space. Some examples of spatial machineries in comic books and movies confirm this idea. The superheroes are often confronted with original cartographic issues and often invent very precursory geospatial devices. So here are already Supermap and Batmap, before possibly, if you dig into your old Marvel magazines to find…
The French artist Séverine Hubard (born in 1977) present at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS) a temporary exhibition called Village. Work specially made for MAMCS, Village consists of an assembly of 18 « huts », mainly in wood and metal, hung together. This monumental work is eleven meters high. Installed in the external…
Ward Ie-IIe siècle et Ward IIIe siècle are two books by French author Frédéric Werst, published respectively in 2011 and 2014. Born in 1970, Frédéric Werst is associate letters. He teaches in a high school in Paris. « By love of literature », the author has invented a new language, Wardwesân, rich more than 10,000 words. This…
In 1925, Abel Gance was the first director to use three cameras for shooting his movie Napoleon. By the juxtaposition of the three images he obtained a very large screen, three times the traditional format. This process, called « Polyvision », allows to increase not only the area shown by the images, but also to multiply the…
Between 22 October 2013 and 24 August 2014, the Cité Universcience (Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie) offers exhibition « Jeu vidéo l’EXPO » on a surface of 1000 m². This is the first major exhibition in France on video games, bringing their world a renewed look. Entre le 22 octobre 2013 et le 24 août 2014,…
The Dictator’s Guns is a 1965 French aventure movie directed by Claude Sautet. Jacques Cournot (Lino Ventura) is requested to assess the Dragoon, Mrs Osborne’s yacht, in the Caribbean. When the ship is stolen, Cournot is given the mission to find it. During the search, Cournot uses several maps. L’Arme à gauche est un film…
Chinese puzzle, the latest film by Cédric Klapisch is certainly not the first film to put Google Maps on screen. We did not attempt a systematic inventory of the Google map service apparitions in movies, but in 2010 Where are the Morgans? already used a sort of fake of Google Maps. Chinese puzzle may be…
We have gems in our « Cabinet of curiosities » that deserve some comments. This cartographic scene from the season 4 of the politically incorrect series Weeds is one of them. This is a prelude to the love affair between the valiant mum, Nancy Botwin, trafficking cannabis to support her family and the powerful and dangerous Mexican…
All works of the artist Till Roeskens proceed at the beginning from geography. When he chooses to use maps or landscape views, this is less for their aesthetic quality as for their primary function: restoring the form and the arrangement of space. But Till Roeskens always place « at man’s reach », i.e. at the level of…
While the 2nd opus of the movie « Hunger Games » is released in France, we come back to the first part (2012). Alors que le deuxième opus du film « Hunger Games » est à l’affiche fin novembre en France, nous revenons ici sur le premier volet sorti en mars 2012.
There is no representational spatial machinery in Gravity, the very impressive film by Alfonso Cuarón. No map, no device for locating characters, no screen for designatind targets. There is no computing tool in this sophisticated but somewhat abandoned technological world where manuals are in binders and where you crank up the retrorockets. In Gravity, you…
The Emperor’s New Groove is a Disney picture on screen in 2000. Transformed into a llama by his servant Ysma he just fired, Kuzko starts a race to find an antidote into the palace. The race is represented on a map by the routes of different characters … The map joins the territory when the line…
Jacques Tati directed Playtime in 1967. It his one of the 6 full-length movies of Tati that are briefly presented on this site. Modern space has always been a question of Tati’s cinema. Playtime is one of his movie where he develops an actual spatial thought. Playtime est un film réalisé par Jacques Tati en…
A film director meets an anthropology student who studies kiss mapping Une réalisatrice rencontre un étudiant en anthropologie qui étudie la cartographie de la bise
A novelty in (e)space & fiction, the reference to a map in a film not yet released and not even shot! If you were in August nearby the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, you could attend the first rehearsal of the shooting of the film Tomorrowland, whose release is scheduled for…
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American crime film directed by Don Siegel. It’s the first in the Dirty Harry film series. San Franscico Police Department Inspector « Dirty » Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), opposes Scorpio, a serial killer (Andrew Robinson). We can find several spatial machineries in the movie : maps, plans, model. Moreover, we note many…
The exhibition « Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy« which takes place from April 10 to August 8, 2013 at the Cinemathèque française in Paris, offers the opportunity to see closely the world of cities of this French filmmaker, who died in 1990. Jacques Demy, close to the « Nouvelle vague« , was a producer, but also a screenwriter,…
The day of the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe, considered today as one of the biggest stars of American cinema, California received the first images of Mars. How could one fail to notice this dual event occurring on the same day, that the American entertainment world, and especially in California, wanted to produce as well…
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), pioneer of abstract painting, is not in theory an artist inclined to evoke real places in his works. Since 1913 and the discovery of cubism in Paris, Mondrian has made it a goal to find out a visual language for reporting the abstract reality behind the natural one and looking for the…
Fred passed away yesterday and everyone is sad : Philémon, Barthélémy, Anatole, the Manu Manu and all of those who loved Fred and his logically crazy / madly logical poetic universe, always and never following him « to the letter » should we say. At (e)space & fiction we say good bye to the artist, inventor of…
La frontière invisible is an album of cartoonists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. This album includes two volumes and is part of the series « Les Cités obscures« , literary The Dark Cities but translated to English The Cities of the Fantastic. The book portrays the lives of characters who perceive too late the real challenges and…
La métamophoses des cloportes is a 1965 French crime movie directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre adapted from an Alphonse Boudard’s novel. Three gangsters, Edmond (Charles Aznavour), Arthur (Maurice Biraud) and Rouquemoute (Georges Géret)) plan to seize the content of a safe and ask for Alphonse’s help (Lino Ventura). Alphonse takes control of the operation … and …
Wolf Vostell is an eminent German artist, died in 1998 and considered as a pioneer of the Fluxus movement who questioned categories of the art and rejected institutions and the idea of art work itself. One of his works, realized in 1980, integrates a map of Berlin area. Wolf Vostell est un éminent artiste allemand, mort…
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