The war lover is an 1962 American film directed by Philip Leacock. The storie takes place during the Second World War, on an English air base. It focuses on captain Buzz Rickson’s personality (Steve McQueen), pilot of a B-17 called The Body, and his relationship with people and life. With his co-pilot, Lieutenant Ed Bolland (Robert Wagner),…
Mona Hatoum’s exhibition, held at the Centre Pompidou until the 28th of September, gathers over 100 works of this internationally renowned artist, in media as varied as performance, video, installation and sculpture. A dozen of these works give a particular overview of Mona Hatoum’s fascination for maps, which she represents as figurative images of real…
Megaforce is a 1982 american action film directed by Hal Needham. It is a real nanar, French expression for saying that a movie is so bad that it becomes rare. To make the pitch simple, it is the story of flying bikes (Megaforce, « a phantom army of super elite fighting men whose weapons are the…
(e)space&fiction already mentioned the London Underground map that Albert Dehousse learned by heart to enhance the credibility of his false engagement in the Resistance. One can found another very brilliant sequence later in the film when the « hero » travels to Germany for a military mission. Nous avons déjà mentionné dans (e)space&fiction le dispositif de la carte du…
Non ho sonno (Sleepless) is a 2001 Italian giallo film directed by Dario Argento. Seventeen years ago, in Turin, Italia, Giacomo’s mother was murdered. The alleged murderer was found dead and the investigation was closed. Unfortunately, a serial killer sows again terror in a same way, leaving small paper animal figurine by the side of bodies.…
La Classe américaine (American Class) also known as Le Grand Détournement is a 1993 French television film directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) and Dominique Mézerette. It is exclusively made of excerpts of old Warner’s movies (plus one extract of the French TV series Maigret). All of them are combined and dubbed with new lines.…
The Andromeda Strain is a 1971 American science-fiction film directed by Robert Wise and based on the novel The Andromeda Strain published in 1969 by Michael Crichton. It tells the story of a four-day major American scientific crisis, in a very structured way. Many and various spatial machineries support the narration : split screen, text…
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…
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…
« 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.…
A trap street, or errata, is a fictitious street inserted into maps to purposefully trap potential copyright violators of the map. Normally quite innocuous, these fictitious bits of information are used as proof to spot where plagiarism has taken place. The recent chinese feature film « Trap Street » inverts the usual meaning of this expression, becoming…
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…
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…
Between 22 October 2013 and 24 August 2014, the Cité Universcience (Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie) offers exhibition « Jeu vidéo l’EXPO » on a surface of 1000 m². This is the first major exhibition in France on video games, bringing their world a renewed look. Entre le 22 octobre 2013 et le 24 août 2014,…
Land art emerged in the late 60’s. This contemporary art movement uses real spaces, with their various natural or human components, to support sustainable or ephemeral artistic creation, where real space pertains to the work itself. Early forms of land art emerged in the West of the USA. Some works of Land Art are huge…
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…
The exhibition « Le Surréalisme et l’objet« , which takes place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 30 October 2013 to 3 March 2014, reveals, among others, a work by Marcel Jean entitled « La fille de l’horoscope« from 1970. This is a small model (38.5 x 22 x 15.5 cm), such as larger used in sewing,…
Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 are 1992 and 1993 movies realized respectively by Penelope Spheeris and Stephen Surjik. The first one tells the adventures of Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey) who host a TV program from a cellar in Aurora, Illinois, USA. They attract an unreliable producer’s attention. Moreover, Wayne…
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…
The Dictator’s Guns is a 1965 French aventure movie directed by Claude Sautet. Jacques Cournot (Lino Ventura) is requested to assess the Dragoon, Mrs Osborne’s yacht, in the Caribbean. When the ship is stolen, Cournot is given the mission to find it. During the search, Cournot uses several maps. L’Arme à gauche est un film…
Chinese puzzle, the latest film by Cédric Klapisch is certainly not the first film to put Google Maps on screen. We did not attempt a systematic inventory of the Google map service apparitions in movies, but in 2010 Where are the Morgans? already used a sort of fake of Google Maps. Chinese puzzle may be…
We have gems in our « Cabinet of curiosities » that deserve some comments. This cartographic scene from the season 4 of the politically incorrect series Weeds is one of them. This is a prelude to the love affair between the valiant mum, Nancy Botwin, trafficking cannabis to support her family and the powerful and dangerous Mexican…
All works of the artist Till Roeskens proceed at the beginning from geography. When he chooses to use maps or landscape views, this is less for their aesthetic quality as for their primary function: restoring the form and the arrangement of space. But Till Roeskens always place « at man’s reach », i.e. at the level of…
While the 2nd opus of the movie « Hunger Games » is released in France, we come back to the first part (2012). Alors que le deuxième opus du film « Hunger Games » est à l’affiche fin novembre en France, nous revenons ici sur le premier volet sorti en mars 2012.
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…
The Emperor’s New Groove is a Disney picture on screen in 2000. Transformed into a llama by his servant Ysma he just fired, Kuzko starts a race to find an antidote into the palace. The race is represented on a map by the routes of different characters … The map joins the territory when the line…
From 16 October 2013 to 26 January 2014, the exhibition « Pasolini Roma » holds at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. This exhibition proposes six sections corresponding to different periods of Pasolini’s life, especially in Roma, which was both the place where he lived from 1950 to his death in 1975, and the place where he made…
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