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…
« Immortel (Ad Vitam) » is a French sci-fi movie directed in 2004 by Enki Bilal, designer of world famous comics. It is one of three films directed by Enki Bilal, all directly inspired by his works, the atmosphere that emerges and their imaginary geographies. The stories all take place in a more or less distant future,…
There is no representational spatial machinery in Gravity, the very impressive film by Alfonso Cuarón. No map, no device for locating characters, no screen for designatind targets. There is no computing tool in this sophisticated but somewhat abandoned technological world where manuals are in binders and where you crank up the retrorockets. In Gravity, you…
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…
From 16 October 2013 to 19 January 2014, the exhibition « Astérix at the BnF » holds at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris,. This exhibition proposes a wide number of original sketches, videos and many by-products of Asterix’s world. It gives an occasion to pinpoint the use of maps and spatial means in one…
Jacques Tati directed Playtime in 1967. It his one of the 6 full-length movies of Tati that are briefly presented on this site. Modern space has always been a question of Tati’s cinema. Playtime is one of his movie where he develops an actual spatial thought. Playtime est un film réalisé par Jacques Tati en…
« Walkabout » (La randonnée) is a film by Nicolas Roeg in 1971. Its screenplay was written by Edward Bond from the novel by James Vance Marshall, published in 1959. The film contrasts the wide open spaces of the Australian bush to urban areas of western cities. This contrast of spaces allows the filmmaker to oppose two…
A novelty in (e)space & fiction, the reference to a map in a film not yet released and not even shot! If you were in August nearby the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, you could attend the first rehearsal of the shooting of the film Tomorrowland, whose release is scheduled for…
From 16 March to 12 May 2013, hold at the Hotel des Arts in Toulon, the exhibition « Mappamundi. Art & Cartography ». This exhibition proposed to address the many and multiple links between arts and mapping through twenty six major artists who have « worked the map and questioned mapping » for forty years. Du 16 mars au…
« The Trial » is a film directed by Orson Welles in 1962. In this adaptation of the eponymous novel by Franz Kafka, Orson Welles, who respected almost the entire story, shows distressing spaces of modern states bureaucracies after the Second World War and the experience of the atomic bomb.. « Le procès » est un film réalisé par…
Spy Game is a Tony Scott film where the map (and the satellite image) plays an important role both as an object of decoration that as a key element of the outcome of the plot. Spy Game est un film de Tony Scott où la carte (et l’image satellite) joue un rôle important tant comme…
Invasion is a film directed in 1969 by the Argentine film director Hugo Santiago, in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The film tells the story of a city, imaginary or real, besieged by powerful enemies and defended by a handful of men, who maybe are not heroes. They will fight to the…
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American crime film directed by Don Siegel. It’s the first in the Dirty Harry film series. San Franscico Police Department Inspector « Dirty » Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), opposes Scorpio, a serial killer (Andrew Robinson). We can find several spatial machineries in the movie : maps, plans, model. Moreover, we note many…
The exhibition « Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy« which takes place from April 10 to August 8, 2013 at the Cinemathèque française in Paris, offers the opportunity to see closely the world of cities of this French filmmaker, who died in 1990. Jacques Demy, close to the « Nouvelle vague« , was a producer, but also a screenwriter,…
The Cubic site has relayed the announcement by Google that Hashima (or « Battleship ») Island is now visible on GoogleStreetView. The Hashima island is an old mine in the Japanese archipelago, located off Nagasaki, which was abandoned in 1974. Since that time no regular human activity takes place there. However the island has served as decor…
The 39 Steps is a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock adapted in 1935 from the eponymous novel by John Buchan written in 1915 and adapted several times to the cinema. This was the first major success of the « English period » of Hitchcok who attracted attention of the American public.. Les 39 marches est un film…
Here is an exhibition of Centre Pompidou in Metz which seems specially designed for (e)space&fiction. Views from above considers how an elevated perspective, from aerial photographs or satellite images, has transformed artists’ perception of the world since the mid-nineteenth century. A gold mine of images and ideas we have to visit later in details. L’exposition…
On April 27 was held at the BnF a conference entitled « Drift and psychogeography » which took place in the framework of the exhibition « Guy Debord. Un art de la guerrer » which takes place from 27 March to 13 July 2013 in Grande Galerie at the BNF (François Mitterrand Site). This conference was given by Emmanuel…
We present here two recent French projects of cultural mapping. The first is developed by the association of libraries of the Ville de Paris. The second named Géoculture, a very ambitious cultural Web and mobile service with a mapping tool that aim to give access to the cultural works of a region. . Les initiatives…
The meeting with Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten, that we announced here, was held on Thursday, April 11, 2013 from 14h to 20h in the small auditorium of the BnF. A beautiful afternoon with the creators of The cities of Fantastic. Les rencontres avec Benoît Peeters et François Schuiten, que nous avons annoncées ici, ont…
Abel Ferrara’s China Girl, released in 1987, is the Romeo and Juliette story (in the movie : Tino and Ty), transposed to the eighties and to the Chinatown and Little Italy communities in Manhattan. Transformation of space (here the city of New York) is marked by the division, but the fusion as well of the…
François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, the authors of the cartoon series The Cities of the Fantastic (Les Cités Obscures) who includes the two volumes of La Frontière Invisible about which a first article was recently published on this site, will be present at the BnF (Site François Mitterrand) for two meetings with their public on Thursday, April…
Fred passed away yesterday and everyone is sad : Philémon, Barthélémy, Anatole, the Manu Manu and all of those who loved Fred and his logically crazy / madly logical poetic universe, always and never following him « to the letter » should we say. At (e)space & fiction we say good bye to the artist, inventor of…
La frontière invisible is an album of cartoonists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. This album includes two volumes and is part of the series « Les Cités obscures« , literary The Dark Cities but translated to English The Cities of the Fantastic. The book portrays the lives of characters who perceive too late the real challenges and…
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