From 16 October 2013 to 19 January 2014, the exhibition « Astérix at the BnF » holds at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris,. This exhibition proposes a wide number of original sketches, videos and many by-products of Asterix’s world. It gives an occasion to pinpoint the use of maps and spatial means in one…
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
« Walkabout » (La randonnée) is a film by Nicolas Roeg in 1971. Its screenplay was written by Edward Bond from the novel by James Vance Marshall, published in 1959. The film contrasts the wide open spaces of the Australian bush to urban areas of western cities. This contrast of spaces allows the filmmaker to oppose two…
« The Trial » is a film directed by Orson Welles in 1962. In this adaptation of the eponymous novel by Franz Kafka, Orson Welles, who respected almost the entire story, shows distressing spaces of modern states bureaucracies after the Second World War and the experience of the atomic bomb.. « Le procès » est un film réalisé par…
Spy Game is a Tony Scott film where the map (and the satellite image) plays an important role both as an object of decoration that as a key element of the outcome of the plot. Spy Game est un film de Tony Scott où la carte (et l’image satellite) joue un rôle important tant comme…
Invasion is a film directed in 1969 by the Argentine film director Hugo Santiago, in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The film tells the story of a city, imaginary or real, besieged by powerful enemies and defended by a handful of men, who maybe are not heroes. They will fight to the…
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 exhibition « Macchiaoli 1850-1874. Italian impressionist? » which held at the Orangerie Museum in Paris from 10 April to 22 July 2013, offers to see the influence that some representatives of this Italian art movement had on filmmakers, especially for the representation of landscapes. The pictorial movement Macchioioli developed in Florence during the second half of…
The Cubic site has relayed the announcement by Google that Hashima (or « Battleship ») Island is now visible on GoogleStreetView. The Hashima island is an old mine in the Japanese archipelago, located off Nagasaki, which was abandoned in 1974. Since that time no regular human activity takes place there. However the island has served as decor…
The 39 Steps is a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock adapted in 1935 from the eponymous novel by John Buchan written in 1915 and adapted several times to the cinema. This was the first major success of the « English period » of Hitchcok who attracted attention of the American public.. Les 39 marches est un film…
(e)space & fiction invites you to join the new Cinemaps session that will be held on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 from 18h to 20h during the SIG La Lettre meeting at ENSG in Marne-La-Vallée. An open contest is organized on this occasion. Post images or videos of cinemaps or geomechineries you have found in movies…
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…
We present here two recent French projects of cultural mapping. The first is developed by the association of libraries of the Ville de Paris. The second named Géoculture, a very ambitious cultural Web and mobile service with a mapping tool that aim to give access to the cultural works of a region. . Les initiatives…
Abel Ferrara’s China Girl, released in 1987, is the Romeo and Juliette story (in the movie : Tino and Ty), transposed to the eighties and to the Chinatown and Little Italy communities in Manhattan. Transformation of space (here the city of New York) is marked by the division, but the fusion as well of the…
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 …
Peut-être (1999) is a film directed by Cédric Klapisch. This film takes place alternately in present time, the Eve of the Year 2000, and a future time, located in 2070. But the film exhibits also an apartment within an Haussmann type building in Paris, and outside of it, located in a wealthy neighborhood of Paris.…
Relief maps have a rather elegant rendering. Despite their decorative aspect, they are quite rare in fiction movies. This post attempts to begin an inventory of films with relief maps, beginning by 4 French movies. Les cartes en relief donnent un résultat assez élégant. Cependant il est plutôt rare d’en rencontrer dans les œuvres de…
Inception is a film written, directed and produced in 2010 by Christopher Nolan. The film tells the story of an « extractor », the hero, who enters the dreams of others to obtain information. Recruited for the sake of his faculties in the field of industrial espionage, the hero has lost his family and had to flee.…
Der Untergang (Downfall) is a 2004 German film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel that focuses on the last days of the Third Reich and the fall of Berlin. The movie is set in and around Hitler’s Bunker in late April 1945. It is a realistic reconstruction, based on eyewitness accounts, survivor memoirs and verified sources. Bruno…
The Iron Lady is a 2011 movie directed by Phyllida Lloyd. This movie is a biography of Margaret Thatcher played by Meryll Streep. Despite the very minor interest of this movie, an original spatial machinery is shown. This machinery makes a direct reference to the Falklands War in 1982, which played a major role in the political…
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…
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…
Snake Eyes is a 1998 movie directed by Brian De Palma. Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage), a corrupt police detective, came to attend a boxing match in Atlantic Ciy ‘s Arena. He meets his friend Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise) who escorts the United States Defense Secretary. The Secretary is the victim of an assassination attempt and…
For some time, (e)space & fiction has opened an account on Vodcaster, « le site du cinéma à partager », a French site for collecting, sharing and commenting movie excerpts already available on YouTube and Daylymotion. We have begun to keep a play-list entitled Cinemaps, les dispositifs géographiques au cinéma (Cinemaps, geographical apparatus in movies), which gives…
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…
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…
Tropic Thunder is a 2008 action comedy film directed by Ben Stiller. While the shooting of a movie about Vietnam War is going badly, the director decides to immerse 5 actors in the jungle. He hopes to film them using candid cameras. Unfortunately, not everything goes as expected: they quickly find themselves isolated in the…
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…
(e)space & fiction 