Peut-être (1999) is a film directed by Cédric Klapisch. This film takes place alternately in present time, the Eve of the Year 2000, and a future time, located in 2070. But the film exhibits also an apartment within an Haussmann type building in Paris, and outside of it, located in a wealthy neighborhood of Paris.…
Inception is a film written, directed and produced in 2010 by Christopher Nolan. The film tells the story of an « extractor », the hero, who enters the dreams of others to obtain information. Recruited for the sake of his faculties in the field of industrial espionage, the hero has lost his family and had to flee.…
Kafka is a film directed by Steven Soderbergh in 1991. The screenplay mixes events from the life of the Czech German speaking writer and themes of several of his major novels, mainly the absurdity of the world, especially in the context of bureaucracy. The use of black and white in a part of the film…
Donjon is a series of satirical fantasy comic books created and supervised by two famous French artists, Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. Many other talented designers have contributed to this collective work: Manu Larcenet, Christophe Blain, Blutch or Andreas. The world of the series is extremely complex and changing, and the question of mapping this…
L’Enfer is a 2009 film directed by Serge Bromberg based on rushes of the unfinished film by Henri Georges Clouzot. Started in 1964, the project was never finished, due particularly to the director’s serious heart problems. Between 1964 and 2009, this film became a legend, based on the fact that it was never completed and…
The Lord of the Rings is the first film of a trilogy directed by Peter Jackson based on the eponymous books of JRR Tolkien. The film relies heavily on cartographic representations of imaginary worlds, among which Middle-earth, the main land where the trilogy takes place. To trace the origins of Middle-earth, we must refer to…
Kiki’s Delivery Service is an animated film directed in 1989 by Hayo Miyazaki, based on a book by Eiko Kadono and illustrated by Akiko Ayashi. The story is about a young witch who, at the age of 13, must leave her home, as all young witches do, and has to go to a new city for…
Atanarjuat, the legend of fast runner is the first of a series of three Inuit films, called the trilogy « The fast runner« : Atarnajuat (2000), The journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), Before Tomorrow (2009). This film evokes space and other aspects of Inuit culture through one of its legends. Atanarjuat is Canada’s first feature-length fiction film…
« On the Road » is a film by Walter Salles, adapted from the novel by Jack Kerouac. This film was presented at the 65th Cannes Film Festival and was released on screens on May 23, 2012. Kerouac’s novel, published in 1957, and one of the best known of this author, relate trip Kerouac between the east…
Moonrise Kingdom is an American film directed by Wes Anderson, which was presented during the opening session of the 65th Cannes Film Festival 2012. The screenplay was written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford Coppola. Moonrise Kingdom is an unusual film, at once funny, touching and quirky. One can easily find…
Il deserto di Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars) shot in 1976 by Valerio Zurlini is a French-German-Italian production. This film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Dino Buzzati. The script is very similar in topic and atmosphere to the novel. It benefits from a good casting and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.…
Un balcon en forêt is a film shot in 1979 by Michel Mitrani from the book of the same title of Julien Gracq, published in 1958 by Editions Jose Corti. This editor published in 2011, Manuscrits de guerre of the same author, written while he lived as a military the few weeks of the German…
Duel, le premier film de Spielberg, qui raconte la poursuite d’une voiture par un camion fou est entièrement tourné au niveau du sol. Aucune vue aérienne, très peu de recul. La caméra est à hauteur des pare-chocs et de l’habitacle des véhicules, plus rarement sur un bas-côté à peine surélevé. Ce filmage tangentiel participe du…
The Dorothy Art Collective created a Song Map where streets and places names are replaced by song titles, bands names, albums titles. Some examples below (Song / Artist / Album). Le collectif Dorothy a créé Song Map, un plan où les rues et les lieux ont été baptisés en utilisant des titres de chansons ou…
Here is a seasonal post. Christmas time is for children and children’s stories. It is the perfect moment to present the simple and naive but very effective spatial machinery Jean de Brunhoff imagines when he relates the discovery of the house of Father Christmas by Babar in the album Babar and Father Christmas(1941). It illustrates…
The French singer Florent Marchet, sometimes compared to Alain Souchon despite their very different universes, likes also to refer to places in his songs. His personal geography is located slightly further south than Souchon’s Sologne. Florent Marchet evokes his natal Berry in Gargilesse, an instrumental that refers to « one of the most beautiful villages in…
The Commission on Art & Cartography of the International Cartographic Association is organizing a workshop in Zurich in June 2012 on « cartography and narratives. » This workshop aims to bring together artists, scholars and students from cartography, geography, the humanities and the arts interested in exploring further the multiple relationships between maps and narratives. The deadline…
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…
In Synecdoche, the first film he directed, Charlie Kaufman offers us a crazy game based on the impossible paradox of the perfect representation of reality. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a depressive and hypochondriac theater director. He wants to create the absolute play by putting on stage an exact and faithful reproduction of his…
In the early 70’s, the young Maxime le Forestier, 21, spent a month in a house of San Francisco, experiencing the life of a hippie community. One or two years later, this stay inspired him to write the song San Francisco: « There is a sky blue house/Built right up against the hill/ They all come…
Easy Rider (Hopper,1968) is considered as the typical road movie, even as a manifesto of this type. The film was directed by the American actor Dennis Hooper, who died in May 2010. In late 2008, the Cinemathèque Française presented a wonderful exhibition entitled « Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood ». As Matthew Orleans, curator of the…
As clearly described in its subtitle, the movie Zig-Zag (dir. Raul Ruiz 1980) is « a didactical fiction about cartography. » This “cine-cartographic” essay navigates between the documentary and the fiction, the map and the territory, the dream and the reality. Made in the context of the art exhibit “Cartes et figures de la terre” that took…
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…
Filmed in 1966, The Swimmer by Frank Perry was a commercial failure when it was released in 1968 and has long been misunderstood. However, it is an intense and disturbing masterpiece. One morning between late summer and early autumn, a man in a bathing suit (B. Lancaster) enters the garden of a beautiful house and…
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…
« The Social Network » . Excerpt of the trailer – Extrait de la bande-annonce How to visualize a virtual network in a movie? It is the question the director David Fincher had to answer with his new film The Social Network, that tells the story of the young and famous Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. There is…
Via the excellent pop-up-urbain.com, here is an amazing map of the places cited in Rap lyrics, offered byRap Genius, the site that helps to decrypt the words of Gangsta Rap. New-York, and overall Manhattan, stand at the top of the locations. The space of Rap lyrics is – unsurprisingly – mainly urban and almost exclusively…
M (dir. Fritz Lang 1931) tells the story of a serial killer who preys on children in 1930s Berlin, and who is on the run from police and an organized crime syndicate. The film begins with the murder of Elsie, the eighth child to be murdered. At the crime scene police find a paper bag…
« Who is the murderer of the subway? Who is this man who pushes innocents under the train? And who are its victims? » Such is the plot of the thriller written by Frederic H. Fajardie in 1982. Police inspector Padovani (recurring character in the work of Fajardie) investigates. During a briefing with his staff, he says:…
The subway is an important part of Paris urban landscape. It inspired many French song-writers, as shown in a compilation that can be heard on Amazon. There is even a sub-genre of the metropolitan song that is based on a constraint: tell a sex story through a series of puns with the names of metro…
(e)space & fiction 