Une affaire d’état is a 2009 french political thriller directed by Eric Valette. This movie is an adaptation of Dominque Manotti’s novel, Nos fantastiques années fric. It is about an affair of state, arms trafficking between France and Africa, covert financing, governmental security agencies, prostitution… and criminal investigation.We take a special interest in two characters.…
Duel, le premier film de Spielberg, qui raconte la poursuite d’une voiture par un camion fou est entièrement tourné au niveau du sol. Aucune vue aérienne, très peu de recul. La caméra est à hauteur des pare-chocs et de l’habitacle des véhicules, plus rarement sur un bas-côté à peine surélevé. Ce filmage tangentiel participe du…
After 23 seasons, the Simpsons have traveled to many countries. To discover them, Slate.fr website offers an interactive map that shows which countries the most famous family of the United States have visited and in which season of the famous TV serie). Après 23 saisons, les Simpsons ont parcouru de nombreux pays. Pour les découvrir,…
Invisible Target is a 2007 Hong-Kong action movie directed by Benny Chan. Three police officers join their forces together to fight a mafioso organization. The main spatial machinery is a phone localization in order to identify his owner. Invisible Target est un film d’action hongkongais réalisé par Benny Chan et sorti en salles en 2007.…
Total Recall is a 1990 science-fiction action film directed by Paul Verhoeven. It is an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick’s novel, Remember it for You Wholesale. The movie tells the discovery by Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) he is not the man he believed he was. A spatial machinery takes a major role in the…
The Sunchaser is a 1996 movie directed by Michael Cimino. Brandon « Blue » Monroe (John Seda) is a 16 years old half-blood Navajo. He is in jail, suffering from an incurable cancer. During an examination at the UCLA Medical Plaza, Los Angeles, he takes the oncologist Reynolds (Woody Harrelson) hostage. He begins a desperate trip to…
Toute la beauté du monde is a French movie directed by Marc Esposito and released in 2006. Frank (Marc Lavoine) falls madly in love at the first sight with Tina (Zoé Félix). But she cannot love him back. Her best love just died and she is deeply depressed. On a trip to Bali where Tina…
The dark lens series of the photographer Cédric Delseau (a book at Editions Xavier Barral) is an artistic kind of materialization of fiction. The photographer takes pictures in contemporary urban sites of different countries (France, Dubai …) and add them characters and spaceships from the movie Star Warsby George Lukas. This is not just a collage…
We announced here the Cinematheque Française exhibition from October 19, 2011 to January 29, 2012 about Metropolis, the Fritz Lang’s film . On this occasion, the new version of the film, restored in 2010, will be shown to the public. This version is 150 minutes long with the 30 minutes extra discovered in Buenos Aires in…
Reality Bites is a 1994 romantic comedy film directed by Ben Stiller that tells the story of four young adults newly graduated who are looking for a place in the society. Among them, Troy (Ethan Hawke) loves Lelaina (Winona Ryder) in secret. Two maps appear in the movie. Génération 90 est une comédie romantique réalisée…
In Enemy of the State, Tony Scott addresses the topic of spying and global watch of citizens by US security forces when they are suspected to represent a threat to internal security. This is a recent film version of a classic theme, that George Orwell had already taken as the central subject of his book…
The Cinémathèque Française in Paris presents a new exhibition from the 19th October 2011 to the 20th January 2012. It is dedicated to Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s master work. This movie is famous for having influenced most of science-fiction films and has been considered as « the matrix of cities in the future ». Read also this post: …
Yoda is THE Jedi Grand Master in Georges Lucas’s epic space opera: Star Wars. He appears in 5 of the 6 movies (I, II, III, V et VI). He materializes mainly in two places of the real world. Yoda est LE grand maître Jedi du space-opera Star Wars imaginé et réalisé par Georges Lucas. Il…
Thomas Klimowski is an artist who publishes his french blog « a kind of virtual workshop which outlines some work and some research workshops. » These posts of July 6th, July 7th and August 8th display screenshots of films of spatial machineries (mostly maps). Thomas Klimowski est un artiste qui publie sur son blog « une sorte d’atelier…
Minority Report is a Steven Spielberg film (2002) adapted of the eponymous short story that Philip K. Dick published in 1956. More than fifty years after being written, and although widely modified in the film version, the short story of Dr. K. Dick is still of a troubling modernity. When it was released, the film…
The Monster club is a 1980 horror movie directed by Roy Ward Baker. Eramus (Vincent Price) is a vampire. He approaches Ronald Chetwyn-Hayes (a real horror writer) who let him drink a little of his blood. In gratitude, the vampire invites his victim to the Monster club where he tells him 3 stories. A spatial…
Children of the Damned (Leader, 1963) is not really the sequel of the Village of the Damned but the topic of the movie is quite the same : a group of children with scaring psychic powers are threatening the world. The film is not as coherent as the first one, but there is an impressive scene…
La comunidad is a black comedy directed in 2000 by Álex de la Iglesia. Julia (Carmen Maura), an estate agent, discovers three hundred million pesetas in a dead man apartment. But neighbors want this fortune. Julia find the money thanks to an original spatial machinery. Mes chers voisins est une comédie noire réalisée en 2000…
Desperate Measuresis a 1998 thriller film directed by Barbet Schroeder. The Police Officer Frank Conner (Andy Garcia) is in search of a compatible bone marrow donor for his ill son Matt. There is only one catch : Peter McCabe (Michael Keaton), a convicted serial killer. But McCabe is ready for anything to escape and he consults…
In Synecdoche, the first film he directed, Charlie Kaufman offers us a crazy game based on the impossible paradox of the perfect representation of reality. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a depressive and hypochondriac theater director. He wants to create the absolute play by putting on stage an exact and faithful reproduction of his…
Stalag 17 is a movie directed by Billy Wilder (1953) that tells the story of American prisoners in a German camp during the Second World War. They attempt to escape but they will first to unmask the traitor supposed to be in the group. Several spatial machineries appear in the movie. Stalag 17 est un film…
Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999, is considered as a genius film director. He made only 13 films in 46 years, mainly because of his perfectionism and because of his insistence to gather a very high level of details before beginning to make the film. However, he was also the writer and the producer of…
Le Cercle rouge is a 1970 movie directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The gangster Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte) escapes the Commissaire Mattei (André Bourvil) who escorted him in the night train from Marseille to Paris. During his escape, he meets Corey (Alain Delon) freshly released from prison. Associated to Jansen (Yves Montand), they decide to burgle…
Easy Rider (Hopper,1968) is considered as the typical road movie, even as a manifesto of this type. The film was directed by the American actor Dennis Hooper, who died in May 2010. In late 2008, the Cinemathèque Française presented a wonderful exhibition entitled « Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood ». As Matthew Orleans, curator of the…
RoboCop is a 1987 science fiction and action film directed by Paul Verhoeven. The Detroit Police Departement is, by contract, under the control of a private consortium, OCP (Omni Consumer Product). But the hidden objective of OCP is to destroy the old town of Detroit and replace it with a new urban complex, Delta City.…
Great Guns (1941) is an American comedy directed by Monty Banks. Laurel and Hardy are the domestic servants of a rich and capricious boss. When the United States get involved in World War II, the boss joins the Army. Both friends decide then to enlist also in order to continue serving him. Many maps are…
The Blog.vodkaster.com is a blog dedicated to the video platform Vodkaster.com which aims to index movies through short excerpts. One of the posts presents about « 250 greatest movies of all times » as a subway map. See also this reference to the same technique applied to Rock’nRoll. Le site Blog.vodkaster.com accompagne la plateforme vidéo collaborative consacrée…
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…
Eric Rohmer was part of the « Nouvelle Vague » movement that radically changed the French cinema at the end of the ’50s and during the ’60s. He filmed the French urban landscapes and its profound transformation during these years. He has always been attentive in his films to the importance of urban places and more generally to…
The Killers (Siodmak,1946) is truly a classic of film noir. The opening scene is famous. Two men are sitting in front of a car driving at high-speed through the night. Then the camera scans the road and a sign shows up in the headlights: Brentwood, New Jersey. And below, in an ironic mode considering what…
(e)space & fiction 