Village of the damned is a 1960 movie directed by Wolf Rilla. It is an adaptation of John Wyndham’s science fiction novel, The Midwich Cuckoos. All inhabitants and animals of Midwich, UK, fall unconscious for several hours. Anyone entering in a perimeter around the village loses consciousness too. A few months later, all women and…
Isle of Flowers is a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado about globalization.You can watch it (12 min) on line. Here are the part one and the part two in English). The film starts with a spinning globe and the next shot focuses on a field of tomatoes. A voice locates the action very…
Duane Hanson ( 1925-1996 ) is an American sculptor known for the realistic and life-sized works of people he created with various materials (polyester resin, fiberglass, bronze, Bondo). His work is associated with hyperrealism and Pop Art movement. One of these works, Tourists, represents a couple of tourists, caricatures of the stereotypical American tourists. In…
In Tunis, the suburban rail service TGM (Tunis-Goulette-Marsa) leads from the Tunis Marine station to the beaches of La Goulette and Mersah via the very picturesque and touristic village of Sidi Bou Said. Several stations serve the very large site of the ruins of Carthage. The first one is Carthage Salammbô, name that evokes of…
The Good, the Bad and the Weird (dir. Ji-woon Kim, 2008) is a remake of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Beyond the fact that both versions unfold in different locations and at different times (1860s American civil war and 1930s Mandchuria), the presence of maps in both versions leads…
Released in 1966, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (It buono, brutto it, it cattivo) is a western directed by Sergio Leone. It is the last Sergio Leone’s westerns with Clint Eastwood. In this film he co-starred with Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. The three protagonists are in search of a treasure. One…
Many today American TV series are very close to a B-movie from the end of the 40s, He walked by night (1948), directed by Alfred L. Werker (and Anthony Mann (uncredited)). This incredibly modern movie presents all the codes of the detective series and movies (solidarities, widowhood, systematic police track down, suspicion of murderous cop,…
Elective Affinities (1996) is a movie directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani based on the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Edouard (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and Charlotte (Isabelle Huppert), a couple of aristocrats, invited a childhood friend of Edouard (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) to join them in their villa in Tuscany. This friend is an architect. In the…
Of course place matters in this story where a modern hospital built upon a swamp is subject to a supernatural menace coming from the past. Bien sûr le lieu a de l’importance dans cette histoire qui raconte comment un hôpital moderne construit sur des marais est soumis à une menace surnaturelle venue du passé.
In 1974, Garry Marshall created a cult sitcom: Happy Days about a family in 1950s/1960s Milwaukee. One of the characters, originally planned to be secondary, became the lead role: Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli alias Fonzie, The Fonz, Fonzta! or just Fonz, played by Henry Winkler. He became popular that he had his own statue in 2008,…
Imagine that the lines of the New-York subway system became the strings of a cello plucked by the trains. You would have the musical map of Alexander Chen. Et si les lignes du métro new-yorkais devenaient les cordes d’un violoncelle que viennent pincer les trains qui les croisent ? Cela donnerait la carte musicale d’Alexander…
Released in 1965 Le corniaud is a French road-movie directed by Gérard Oury. Leopold Saroyan, godfather of a syndicate of gangsters, persuades Antoine Maréchal to drive a Cadillac from Naples to Bordeaux. He does not know that various illicit substances are hidden in the vehicle in order to cross illegally the border. During a meeting,…
In Evil Dead, Sam Raimi uses two ways to indicate where the characters of his movie are coming from and where they are. Dans Evil Dead, Sam Raimi nous donne indirectement deux informations : d’où viennent les protagonistes et où ils se trouvent.
Created in collaboration between Yona Friedman, a theoretician of architecture and Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, a photographer and a videographer, this exhibition transposed the fictitious geography of an island situated in the far north of Canada to the middle of the Lake of Vassivière in Limousin. Visitors were invited to discover the mapping of the imaginary Balkis…
The Little Prince created by Saint-Exupery has become a universal character. Translated into more than 200 languages, the poetic and philosophical tale written by the French aviator touches the hearts of people all around the world. Were you aware he left his planet to materialize on the Earth ? Do you want to know where and…
Predator is a 1987 movie directed by John McTiernan. In Val Verde, a country bordering Guatemala, a joint task force, led by Major Alan « Dutch » Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is assigned to rescue hostages in the jungle. The group is hunted by an extraterrestrial creature: the Predator. Two spatial machineries appear in the movie. One is…
The X-Men are a group of superheroes created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. There adventures were published in X-Men # 1 by Marvel Comics in September 1963. The book was adapted for three movies released in 2000, 2003 and 2006 (plus a prequel in 2009 telling the story of one of the main characters:…
Short Cuts, another movie of Robert Altman (see this post about The Gingerbread Man), is adapted from short stories of Raymond Carver transposed to Los Angeles. When the stories of Carver about several couples were independent, Altman connects them by inventing family or neighborhood links or by making a character the cause of events that…
The stairs in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art are very famous as the training ground of Rocky Balboa, in the 1976 movie Rocky, directed by John G. Avildsen. The stairs appear successively in Rocky II (directed by Sylverster Stallone in 1979), Rocky III (Sylverster Stallone, 1985), Rocky V (John G. Avildsen, 1990) and…
The Gingerbread Man (1998) is a thriller directed by Robert Altman. The lawyer Rick Magruder (Kenneth Branagh) helps young and pretty Mallory Doss, harassed by his father. He launches a procedure to confine him to a mental institution. Several maps are shown in the movie. The Gingerbread Man est un thriller réalisé par Robert Altman…
The Potemkin Stairs are a giant stairway in Odessa, Ukraine. This stairway marks the formal entrance into the city from the direction of the sea and is the most famous symbol of Odessa. It was constructed between 1837 and 1841. Originally known as Richelieu Steps, because of the monument located at the top of the…
Lola is a sort of abstract ballet movie whose the scene is the town of Nantes. The film is about wait and boredom, planned departures and expected returns . There are two world maps in the film, both of them related to the character Roland Cassard. Both are a bit mysterious and fully cinematic. Both…
Braveheart is an American historical movie directed by and starring Mel Gibson and released in 1995. The film refers to the life of William Wallace, hero and symbol of Scottish independence. In the late thirteenth century, Wallace united the Scottish clans and fought the forces of King Edward Ist of England, who attempted to invade…
After the Nakatomi Plaza (see this post), the Washington Dulles International Airport is the new John McClane’s playground in this second opus of the Die Hard series directed in 1990 by Renny Harlin. Terrorists try to exfiltrate Ramon Esperanza, a general in exile from Val Verde, awaiting his trial in the United States. There are…
Patrick Galbraith (graphic designer) and Nick Grant (metal historian) drew a Map of Metal with some pieces of leather, chains, nails, skulls … This interactive map lists all the sub-genres and the links between them. It does not forget other associated sub-genres as punk, hardcore… We note a main continent and many small islands. The…
The latest novel by Michel Houellbecq deals not only with art and society, but also with places and their representations. The title « The map and territory » can be interpreted as a synthesis of the artistic journey of the hero, Jed Martin. The international career of this visual artist starts in the 2010s through a series…
As already shown in this post, geographic space plays a fundamental role in the work of Hergé. In The ‘Manitoba’ No Reply, first volume of The Secret Ray from The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko, published in 1952, the liner SS Manitoba indicates its position by radio, remains silent for 20 hours and send…
As a first example of a local materialization of fiction, we present the cell of Edmond Dantès in the Chateau d’If, near Marseille and, more specifically, the tunnel that this character of the Count of Monte-Christo, novel by Alexandre Dumas, would have made to get Abbé Faria, his prison companion. Le premier exemple de matérialisation…
Suddenly is an American movie directed by Lewis Allen and released in 1954. In the late 40’s, Tod Shaw, the sheriff of Suddenly in California learns that a special train with the President of the United States on board is going to stop in the small town. Shortly afterwards, a Secret Service team arrives, led…
Kendama is the second short-movie of Jam Films, a project bringing together seven Japanese directors. A kendama is a Japanese cup-and-ball game… In this film, a company director offers his employee one of this object to show his gratitude … But it is actually hiding the plan of a treasure hunt that leads to the…
(e)space & fiction 