Mercury Rising is a movie released in 1998 and directed by Harold Becker. In this film, the character played by Bruce Willis protects an autistic child who threatens the national security of the United States by deciphering « Mercury », the most advanced and expensive encryption algorithm developed ever. In an early scene, we see the young…
In his movie Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer uses some very original « spatial machineries », especially to represent the distance between Al Roberts (Tom Neal) and his fiancée Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake). Dans Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer utilise quelques dispositifs spatiaux très originaux pour matérialiser notamment la distance qui sépare Al Roberts (Tom Neal) de sa fiancée…
Le photographe is a graphic novel (3 albums) created by Emmanuel Guibert (script, design and colors), Frédéric Lemercier (colors and layout) and Didier Lefevre (scenario and photographs). It retraces the journey of a Médecin sans frontières team (MSF is an independent humanitarian medical aid organisation). The story takes place between Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1986…
In 1982, the members of an U.S. Antarctica research program are confronted with bizarre phenomena. A Norwegian team not far from them has been decimated. While watching videos collected in the Norwegian camp, the heroes are intrigued by their discovery and decide to get there. They consult a map for preparing their journey. En 1982,…
The stylistic innovations that made the success of the TV series 24 are now influencing movies. A very clear example is Greenzone, the movie of Paul Greengrass. It is saturated with maps, navigation softwares, satellite images and many other representations of the space of action. Of course Green Zone is based on a true story…
In the movie High and Low – original title “Tengoku to jigoku”- (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1963), the police searches the kidnappers of the son of Gondo, the executive director of a shoe company in Japan (the child of Gondo’s chauffeur was in fact kidnapped by mistake). What’s interesting in this movie in terms of spatial…
In Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau collects « 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the « S » bus , witnesses an argument between a man with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later getting advice…
In his movie Die Hard, John MacTierman has to face a difficult problem: how to allow John MacClane (Bruce Willis) to locate in a tower where all floors are designed on a similar plan. He has also to be sure that the spectator will not get lost when the hero passes from a level to…
On the cover of « Le meilleur du Chat » album, Philippe Geluck makes a joke by inventing an interaction between the map and the user. Such an interaction was impossible at the release of the album (1994 for this Best Of and years before for the original). As new technologies (GPS, GSM, IP geolocation…) allow now…
In Sneakers, a 1992 film, Robert Redford is the leader of a security expert team. We can notice 2 spatial machineries that are complete opposites (and some other stuff, too). Quand Robert Redford est à la tête d’une bande de « spécialistes » en sécurité, cela donne « Les experts » (à ne pas confondre avec la série !),…
Released in 2003, Greendale is a concept album by Neil Young & Crazy Horse, which tells the story of a family facing a murder in the small town of Greendale (a fictional California seaside town). The album cover shows a map of the city. Complementary to the album, a website uses the same map to…
Navigation tools in a helicopter, map and plans… many spatial devices are used by the 4 heroes of George Romero’s Dawn of the dead (the second part of his « Dead series ») for escaping from zombies and getting to the mall which will become their sanctuary. It is interesting to notice that the relationship to space…
The film Dogville directed by Lars Von Trier (2003) takes literally place on a map. The action unfolds in a small town in the U.S. The houses are drawn on the ground, some elements are represented by symbols (e.g. some bushes), and the names of the streets are written on the ground. Only few pieces…
Directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, The Shining is a horror film shot during the winter in a hotel isolated in the mountains of Oregon. Two sequences are located in a maze. Kubrick uses a map and a scale model of the maze in one of these sequences. Réalisé en 1980 par Stanley Kubrick, Shining…
In Alien, the Ridley Scott’s movie, the science officer Ash designs a tracking device to detect moving objects. By this way, the Nostromo’s crew hopes to locate and eliminate the « 8th Passenger » that is hidden in the ventilation ductwork. Dans Alien de Ridley Scott, Ash, l’officier scientifique, conçoit un détecteur permettant de repérer les objets…
Dexter’s GPS device has an important impact in the end of Season 2. Dexter Morgan is a forensics blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department and a « nice » serial killer (he kills other killers who escaped the legal system). He maintains a close relationship with Lila West, a young English woman that has psychopath…
The adventures of Nestor Burma, the private detective created by the French writer Leo Malet, have been brilliantly adapted as a comic book, first by Jacques Tardi (4 albums) and then by Emmanuel Moynot (3 albums). Each investigation takes place in a different Paris arrondissement, which is mapped at the beginning of the album. Nestor…
Suggestion proposed by Mathias in this comment and completed by Gaëtan in this comment In Waterworld, movie by Kevin Reynold released the 28 July 1995, the young Endola has tattooed on her back the map that she will use to find Dryland. Any supplementary information is welcome. Suggestion proposée par Mathias dans ce commentaire et…
In The Ghost Writer (2010), Roman Polanski creates a captivating scene by using a GPS navigation device. For more details, click on Read More. Be careful, if you have not seen the movie yet. I reveal some elements of the story. Roman Polanski crée une scène d’anthologie au moyen d’un GPS dans son film The…
A picture is worth a thousand words says the favorite adage of people working with images. The two first pages of the novel The Betrothed (in Italian I Promessi sposi) by Alexandro Manzoni published in 1825, could illustrate this adage since they could be summarized with a map like this one. This novel starts with…
Everybody knows or thinks he knows Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world. But it is also a mysterious work that has given rise to many rumors and speculations. We propose here an original interpretation that considers the painting as a sophisticated spatial and cartographic arrangement. We first build our reasoning upon an…
According to wikipedia the GPS concept was born in 1963: « Project 57 was worked in 1963 and it was « in this study that the GPS concept was born. » » The following year James Bond was already following the car of the villain Goldfinger in real-time on a screen map in his Aston Martin through Europe and…
Fantastic Mr Fox is a great animated film by Wes Anderson. It incorporates several space machineries, mostly master plans and battle plans. One of them takes the form of an animated map. The most original is certainly the picture painted by Felicity Fox to support the fight of « wild animals » against evil farmers. She uses…
A systematic inventory of maps in The Adventures of Tintin has still to be be done, but, surprising though it might seem, the reporter and globetrotter does not use maps very often. Take just one example : the Red Rackham’s Treasure album, that Steven Spielberg is adapting for the cinema. No map is shown in…
Before Google Earth there was WorldWind and Keyhole (the company that created the application used to develop Google Earth). Before Keyole, there was the movie Powers of Ten (dir. Charles and Ray Eames 1977). Indeed, one of the co-founders of Keyole – Avi Bar-Zeev – recognized the inspirational dimension of Power of Tens in the…
Up in the Air, a film by Jason Reitman (2009), is full of various spatial arrangements. The film itself is built as an erratic journey throughout the United States : Detroit, Michigan, Omaha, Nebraska, Las Vegas, Nevada, Florida, Wisconsin, Chicago… It is also a subtle evocation of the spatial dimension of personal, family and work…
My favorite war room map is the one that appears in Dr. Strangelove (Dir. Stanley Kubrick 1964). In this scene the paranoic and anticommunist US general Turdgison (hilarious George C Scott) is using the map (« the big board ») as the irrefutable proof that the russian president « Dimitri » is lying when he says that one B52…
Suggestion proposed by Simon in this comment. The Video Game Call of Duty 4 is literally peppered with spatial features, since many mission briefings are integrally presented with military graphic animations – maps, satellite images, troop movements … » Any supplementary information is welcome. Suggestion proposée par Simon dans ce commentaire. Le jeu Call of Duty…
In the latest Marc Lawrence’s movie Did You Hear About the Morgans?, with Hugh Grant and Jessica Parker, a killer searches on Google Maps for the name of the city where his targets have hidden. He finds : Ray, Wyoming. The spectator follows the entire search on the screen until the very detailed final map.…
There is one map in the Watchmen movie (see also Wikipedia). It appears in the War Room scenes behind President Nixon when the Army staff presents a simulation of the consequences of a Russian response to a US strike. This is an animated world map, first displayed at a medium scale, followed by a zoom…
(e)space & fiction 