Les lieux clichés du cinéma

[Ajouté le 20/01/2013 : en empruntant sans le créditer la quasi-totalité du contenu de ce site original (pratique condamnable, voir le premier commentaire à ce billet) ], Contre-champ, le magazine documentaire vidéo du Monde.fr sur Dailymotion consacré au cinéma, note que les cinéastes tournent toujours aux même endroits ce qui fait que des lieux réels…

La bandera – Duvivier

La Bandera is a 1935 French drama film directed by Julien Duvivier and based a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan. On the run after having committed a murder, Pierre Gilieth (Jean Gabin) enlists in the Spanish Foreign Legion, with a police informant, Fernando Lucas (Robert Le Vigan). A great scene shows us an original spatial…

Star Wars : No materialization for the Death Star / Pas de matérialisation pour l’Étoile Noire

The U.S. administration has given its answer: there will be no replica of the famous Star Wars space station, in spite of the petition which had gathered nearly 35,000 signatures. The Death Star will not join Yoda in our collection of  materializations of Star Wars fiction … Too bad ! (?) L’administration américaine a donné sa…

Kafka (Soderbergh): les espaces de l’absurdité de la bureaucratie/ Spaces of Bureaucracy’s Absurdity

Kafka is a film directed by Steven Soderbergh in 1991. The screenplay mixes events from the life of the Czech German  speaking writer and themes of several of his major novels, mainly the absurdity of the world, especially in the context of bureaucracy. The use of black and white in a part of the film…

The Eruption of Karamako / L’éruption du Karamako. Hergé

The Eruption of Karamako is the second volume of The Secret Ray, a volume of the series The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko that Hergé published in 1952. In the book Jo was saved from certain death by a film crew who filmed the eruption of Karamak volcano from a seaplane. The pilot reported…

Cartographier une planète où les lieux sont mobiles : Donjon. Sfar, Trondheim et al.

Donjon is a series of satirical fantasy comic books created and supervised by two famous French artists, Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. Many other talented designers have contributed to this collective work: Manu Larcenet, Christophe Blain, Blutch or Andreas. The world of the series is extremely complex and changing, and the question of mapping this…

L’Enfer, Clouzot : Places and Spaces of an Extraordinary Project / Lieux et espaces d’un projet extraordinaire

L’Enfer is a 2009 film directed by Serge Bromberg based on rushes of the unfinished film by Henri Georges Clouzot. Started in 1964, the project was never finished, due particularly to the director’s serious heart problems. Between 1964 and 2009, this film became a legend, based on the fact that it was never completed and…

Skyfall. James Bond. Power and Map / Carte et puissance

Sébastien Caquard already pointed out here that James Bond used a geographic tracking device as early as in 1964 (Goldfinger). At that time, the idea of GPS technology was just emerging. At (e)space & fiction, we couldn’t keep ourselves from reacting to the debauchery of geospatial tools used in Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie, directed…

« Le Seigneur des Anneaux » : les cartes des mondes imaginaires de Tolkien/ »The Lord of the Rings »: maps of imaginary worlds of Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings is the first film of a trilogy directed by Peter Jackson based on the eponymous books of JRR Tolkien. The film relies heavily on cartographic representations of imaginary worlds, among which Middle-earth, the main land where the trilogy takes place. To trace the origins of Middle-earth, we must refer to…

Poupoupidou. Marylin Monroe is (not) well and (no more) living in Mouthe, France

Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) is an amazing film directed by Gerald Hustache-Mathieu that tells in a very original and subtle manner the tragic fate of Candice Lecoeur, a small-town woman and aspiring model who thought she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. Deeply rooted in Mouthe region in the Jura, famous for holding the…

Kiki la petite sorcière ou l’initiation à la lecture des cartes/ Kiki’s Delivery Service, an initiation to map reading

Kiki’s Delivery Service is an animated film directed in 1989 by Hayo Miyazaki, based on a book by Eiko Kadono and illustrated by Akiko Ayashi. The story is about a young witch who, at the age of 13, must leave her home, as all young witches do, and has to go to a new city for…

Ice Age, a new theory of the continental drift / L’Age des Glaces 4, une nouvelle théorie de la dérive des continents…

The fourth animation movie of the Ice Age series offers us a very fancy version of the theory of continental drift! Here, the upper mantle convection currents are no longer responsible for the movements of the crust. The cause is the rotation of a tiny core similar to a wheel in a hamster cage. Some other…

« Carte certifiée conforme à notre imagination ». La géographie parallèle de Marc Jurt et Michel Butor

In 1994 and 1995, the artist and engraver Marc Jurt and the writer Michel Butor initiated an artistic collaboration inspired by maps; all kind of maps : city maps or aerial photographs, world maps or topographic maps, aeronautical maps or meteorological maps. Marc Jurt started with geographical documents and  juxtaposed or superimposed  engravings or paintings…

Yucca Mountain – John d’Agata, une carte entre vérité et exactitude.

About a Mountain is an essay by John d’Agata about nuclear waste issue. The book has another title in the French edition (Yucca Mountain) and the cover represents a face drawn with the traditional cartographic symbols. The illustration does not exist on the original book’s cover. Why ? Publié en 2012 en France, Yucca Montain…

Des chambres en ville. Agnès Varda

Those who have seen Une chambre en ville the movie by Jacques Demy (1982) probably remember the creepy televisions shop run by the scary Edmond Leroyer (Michel Piccoli), jealous and crazy husband of the beautiful Edith (Dominique Sanda). As part of Le voyage à Nantes, artistic event held in Nantes from 15 June to 18…

La baston – Missiaen

La baston is a 1985 french movie directed by Jean-Claude Missiaen. René Levasseur, ex-safecracker, accepts a last burglary to collect funds in order to bring his sick son to an US hospital for cardiac surgery. Unfortunately, things do not happen as expected. La baston est un film réalisé en 1985 par Jean-Claude Missiaen. René Levasseur,…

Moonrise Kingdom : Maps for Locating Places in a Film/ Des cartes pour suivre les lieux d’un film

Moonrise Kingdom is an American film directed by Wes Anderson, which was presented during the opening session of the 65th Cannes Film Festival 2012. The screenplay was written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford Coppola. Moonrise Kingdom is an unusual film, at once funny, touching and quirky. One can easily find…

Le Trône de Fer / Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is an American television series adapted from the G.R.R Martin’s series of fantasy novel A song of Ice and Fire, and has been broadcast since April 2011.  Set in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, Game of Thrones chronicles the violent dynastic struggles among the kingdom’s noble families for control of the Iron…