Dans ce film, les cartes sont partout : dans le nom du personnage Monsieur Sim, dans les menus et dans sa voiture où la voix du GPS tient un rôle majeur /\ « Cartes » (in French the same word is used for maps, cards and menus) are everywhere in this movie, adapted from Jonathan Coe’s novel Mr Sim.
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…
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…
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…
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.
Der Untergang (Downfall) is a 2004 German film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel that focuses on the last days of the Third Reich and the fall of Berlin. The movie is set in and around Hitler’s Bunker in late April 1945. It is a realistic reconstruction, based on eyewitness accounts, survivor memoirs and verified sources. Bruno…
The Eruption of Karamako is the second volume of The Secret Ray, a volume of the series The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko that Hergé published in 1952. In the book Jo was saved from certain death by a film crew who filmed the eruption of Karamak volcano from a seaplane. The pilot reported…
Sébastien Caquard already pointed out here that James Bond used a geographic tracking device as early as in 1964 (Goldfinger). At that time, the idea of GPS technology was just emerging. At (e)space & fiction, we couldn’t keep ourselves from reacting to the debauchery of geospatial tools used in Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie, directed…
The inventory of geodigital tools used in the final season of theTV series « 24 » was released on Monde Géonumérique. It is added to the inventories of seasons 4 to 7 (self-promotion). L’inventaire des outils géonumériques utilisés dans l’ultime saison de la série télévisée 24 est paru sur Monde Géonumérique. Il rejoint l’inventaire des saisons 4…
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.…
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…
National Treasure (released in 2004) and National Treasure: Book of Secrets (released in 2007) are two movies directed by Jon Turteltaub. Both films have the same narrative structure : Benjamin Gates (starring Nicolas Cage) goes to treasure hunt. By solving different clues he finds a treasure map. He succeeds in deciphering it to finally discover…
In 2005, almost 30 years after Dawn of the dead (see this post) second part of his « Dead series », George Romero directed a fourth movie Land of the dead. No paper maps here … Time has passed and computers and GPS are now available. En 2005, presque 30 ans après avoir réalisé Zombie (voir ce…
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 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 !),…
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…
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…
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…
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