Un joli et original géodispositif graphique accompagne le texte de La cache, le roman de Christophe Boltanski /\ We find a beautiful and original spatial machinery in La cache, Christophe Boltanski’s novel.
Local Materialization of Fiction: ‘Le passe muraille’ (Pass through the wall) is a short story of Marcel Ayme published in 1943. It depicts « an excellent man named Dutilleul who had the singular gift to pass through walls without any trouble. He was a third class employee at the Ministry of Registration and wore a pince-nez…
For those who didn’t come to Saint-Dié-des-Vosges Festival this year (so am I), I warmly recommend to listen to this radio podcast (french only), which echoes the main topic of this year’s festival : http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-planete-terre-de-peter-pan-a-tintin-geographie-des-pays-imaginaires-2015-09-30 This program touches on many subjects and comic books already mentionned in this blog. Pour ceux qui, comme moi, n’ont…
The Conference « Littérature et géographie. L’écriture de l’espace à travers les âges » will be held at University Jean Moulin Lyon 3 les 12 et 13 mars 2015. The engaging program is already Online. Un colloque « Littérature et géographie. L’écriture de l’espace à travers les âges » se tiendra à l’Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 les 12…
The city of Le Havre (France) has now its literary tour map. Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal on Geocriticism, Sonia Anton, professor of literature at the University of Le Havre, has developed a literary tour of the city through 20 places evoked by famous writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Honoré de Balzac. This…
The temporary exhibition « Revoir Paris » held on 20 November 2014 to 9 March 2015, offers the opportunity to engage a dialog between the work of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, cartoonists, writers and screenwriters, with the one of Jules Verne, Robida or Le Corbusier, and, on the other hand, with development projects in Paris and…
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…
« Description d’Olonne » is a little book by Jean-Christophe Bailly, which was published in 1992 by Editions Christian Bourgois, and was reissued in 2010 by the same publisher. This book is the careful and sensitive description, imbued with a certain nostalgia, of an imaginary city, Olonne, located on a river estuary bottom, near the Atlantic coast.…
To define the geography of Westeros and Essos, several initiatives emerged in the form of web maps. It aims to show character’s journeys and also where take place the Game of thrones TV series and books. We list here some of them. Afin de mieux cerner la géographie des lieux et espaces dans lesquelles prennent…
Cité de verre (City of Glass) by Paul Auster was published in 1985. This is the first volume of the New York Trilogy by this author. An adaptation of this work in comics was published in 2005 by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. David Mazzucchelli is an American cartoonist, best known for his versions of Batman…
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…
Florent Chavouet, Manabe Shima, ©Éditions Philippe Picquier, 2010 Tokyo Sanpo and Manabe Shima, are actually at the intersection of comics, travel guides and travelogues. The maps of Tokyo and of the island of Manabe Shima that Florent Chavouet proposes in his two books are directly inspired by the geographic reality of of these places in…
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a comedy-drama written and directed in 2014 by Wes Anderson, and inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.This movie was entirely filmed in Görlitz and other parts of Saxony as well as at Studio Babelsberg. This film tells the story of a grand hotel in Art Deco style, which experienced…
Rocky, Yoda or The Little Prince are not the only fictional characters who have been materialized. Superman and Lois Lane have also their own materialization. Even if Metropolis, the city where Superman lives is fictional, a city in Illinois has the same name and beyond this resemblance, the city host… Superman and Lois Lane! Rocky, Yoda…
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…
Après Fred, il y a quelques mois, voici qu’un autre de la bande à Hara-Kiri se fait la malle. Dans les journaux bêtes et méchants qu’il a dirigés pendant 50 ans, Cavanna a écrit sur tous les sujets. Il a raconté sa vie dans les Ritals et les Ruskoffs. Il est l’auteur d’un nombre astronomique…
Carte de Tendre de François Chauveau dans Clélie, Histoire romaine, première partie de Madeleine de Scudéry, Paris, Augustin Courbé, 1654, © BnF La Carte de Tendre is a map of an imaginary country called Tendre, imagined by Madeleine de Scudéry in her novel Clélie, histoire romaine, published in 10 volumes from 1654 to 1660. This…
In the main work of Marcel Proust « In Search of Lost Time« , geography holds a prime position. It is not a descriptive geography, neither a geography with a scientific purpose nor exactly anchored on the reality, but a geography born from the imagination of the author where reality is closely intertwined with his imagination. According to…
Here is another example of participative literary mapping proposed by the Ivres de livres bookstore in Strasbourg. The idea is to submit an excerpts of literary work evocative of a place. You can access the excerpts an author index or by a map. The technical option of a mapping module that add a location to…
« Immortel (Ad Vitam) » is a French sci-fi movie directed in 2004 by Enki Bilal, designer of world famous comics. It is one of three films directed by Enki Bilal, all directly inspired by his works, the atmosphere that emerges and their imaginary geographies. The stories all take place in a more or less distant future,…
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…
« Mémoire morte » (this title could be translated either by « Read-Only Memory » or « Dead Memory ») is neither the latest album nor the most original one of Marc-Antoine Mathieu (a famous french comic-books author, who received many awards at Angoulême Festival). But in a way, it could be considered as one of his most visionary creation. Published…
« 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…
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…
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…
On April 27 was held at the BnF a conference entitled « Drift and psychogeography » which took place in the framework of the exhibition « Guy Debord. Un art de la guerrer » which takes place from 27 March to 13 July 2013 in Grande Galerie at the BNF (François Mitterrand Site). This conference was given by Emmanuel…
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…
The meeting with Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten, that we announced here, was held on Thursday, April 11, 2013 from 14h to 20h in the small auditorium of the BnF. A beautiful afternoon with the creators of The cities of Fantastic. Les rencontres avec Benoît Peeters et François Schuiten, que nous avons annoncées ici, ont…
François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, the authors of the cartoon series The Cities of the Fantastic (Les Cités Obscures) who includes the two volumes of La Frontière Invisible about which a first article was recently published on this site, will be present at the BnF (Site François Mitterrand) for two meetings with their public on Thursday, April…
(e)space & fiction 