The Paul Dini Museum of Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône, France) presents from 03/23/2013 to 09/15/ 2013 an exhibition entitled « Landmark. » Le Musée Paul Dini de Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône, France) propose du 23 mars au 15 septembre 2013 une exposition temporaire intitulée : « Point de repère ».Le musée présente ainsi cette exposition : « Depuis que l’Homme est sur Terre,…
La métamophoses des cloportes is a 1965 French crime movie directed by Pierre Granier-Deferre adapted from an Alphonse Boudard’s novel. Three gangsters, Edmond (Charles Aznavour), Arthur (Maurice Biraud) and Rouquemoute (Georges Géret)) plan to seize the content of a safe and ask for Alphonse’s help (Lino Ventura). Alphonse takes control of the operation … and …
James Shapman published on Tumblr a map locating 113 American TV series including Friends, Frasier, The Wire, Community, The Office, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, CSI, Dexter, Homeland, The West Wing, Glee … The title of the map America, The Home of Television, is a bit presumptuous. Yes, American series dominate the television landscape but…
Wolf Vostell is an eminent German artist, died in 1998 and considered as a pioneer of the Fluxus movement who questioned categories of the art and rejected institutions and the idea of art work itself. One of his works, realized in 1980, integrates a map of Berlin area. Wolf Vostell est un éminent artiste allemand, mort…
Les maîtres cartographes (Mapping Masters) is a series of 6 comic books published between 1992 and 2002, drawn by Paul Glaudel and written by Scotch Arleston. This author is well-known for his large collection of heroic fantasy comic books, including the famous Lanfeust de Troy‘s series. Les maîtres cartographes est une série BD de 6…
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.…
Relief maps have a rather elegant rendering. Despite their decorative aspect, they are quite rare in fiction movies. This post attempts to begin an inventory of films with relief maps, beginning by 4 French movies. Les cartes en relief donnent un résultat assez élégant. Cependant il est plutôt rare d’en rencontrer dans les œuvres de…
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.…
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 Iron Lady is a 2011 movie directed by Phyllida Lloyd. This movie is a biography of Margaret Thatcher played by Meryll Streep. Despite the very minor interest of this movie, an original spatial machinery is shown. This machinery makes a direct reference to the Falklands War in 1982, which played a major role in the political…
La Bandera is a 1935 French drama film directed by Julien Duvivier and based a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan. On the run after having committed a murder, Pierre Gilieth (Jean Gabin) enlists in the Spanish Foreign Legion, with a police informant, Fernando Lucas (Robert Le Vigan). A great scene shows us an original spatial…
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…
Snake Eyes is a 1998 movie directed by Brian De Palma. Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage), a corrupt police detective, came to attend a boxing match in Atlantic Ciy ‘s Arena. He meets his friend Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise) who escorts the United States Defense Secretary. The Secretary is the victim of an assassination attempt and…
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…
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…
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…
Tropic Thunder is a 2008 action comedy film directed by Ben Stiller. While the shooting of a movie about Vietnam War is going badly, the director decides to immerse 5 actors in the jungle. He hopes to film them using candid cameras. Unfortunately, not everything goes as expected: they quickly find themselves isolated in the…
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…
Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) is an amazing film directed by Gerald Hustache-Mathieu that tells in a very original and subtle manner the tragic fate of Candice Lecoeur, a small-town woman and aspiring model who thought she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. Deeply rooted in Mouthe region in the Jura, famous for holding the…
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…
The fourth animation movie of the Ice Age series offers us a very fancy version of the theory of continental drift! Here, the upper mantle convection currents are no longer responsible for the movements of the crust. The cause is the rotation of a tiny core similar to a wheel in a hamster cage. Some other…
In 1994 and 1995, the artist and engraver Marc Jurt and the writer Michel Butor initiated an artistic collaboration inspired by maps; all kind of maps : city maps or aerial photographs, world maps or topographic maps, aeronautical maps or meteorological maps. Marc Jurt started with geographical documents and juxtaposed or superimposed engravings or paintings…
The exhibition Paris en Chansons is now closed but the interactive map is still on line : http://www.chansons.paris.fr/carto. Dans le cadre de l’exposition, maintenant terminée, Paris en Chansons, une jolie carte interactive des lieux évoqués dans les chansons françaises est en ligne : http://www.chansons.paris.fr/carto.
On (e)space and fiction we already have written about tattoos (Prison Break, Waterworld). But we present here a non fictional example. The Long March was a military retreat undertaken by the Red Army of the Communist Party of China to escape Tchang Kaï-chek’s Kuomintang army, during the Chinese Civil war. From 2002 to 2005, 250…
About a Mountain is an essay by John d’Agata about nuclear waste issue. The book has another title in the French edition (Yucca Mountain) and the cover represents a face drawn with the traditional cartographic symbols. The illustration does not exist on the original book’s cover. Why ? Publié en 2012 en France, Yucca Montain…
The Conquest is a biographical film about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power. La conquête est un film biographique qui évoque l’ascension au pouvoir de Nicolas Sarkozy.
The exhibition « Circuler. Quand nos mouvements façonnent les villes » held at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris from April 4, is ending August 26, 2012. This exhibition deals with urban spaces and with space between cities. It also presents how cities have evolved, both in their principles…
Ni à vendre ni à louer is a French comedy by Pascal Rabaté. Several stories intertwine in this offbeat film without a word. A spatial machinery can be found in this film that we already mentioned twice (Dogville et Bob la flambeur): a 1:1 scale plan. Ni à vendre ni à louer est une comédie…
Matthiew Cusick is an American artist born in New York in 1970 and currently working in Dallas. Among other techniques he uses acrylic with inlaid map fragments from different kinds : school atlases, topographic maps or road maps. He also simply sticks maps as overlaid layers. He composes beautiful landscapes viewed from above or at…
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