Toute la beauté du monde is a French movie directed by Marc Esposito and released in 2006. Frank (Marc Lavoine) falls madly in love at the first sight with Tina (Zoé Félix). But she cannot love him back. Her best love just died and she is deeply depressed. On a trip to Bali where Tina…
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 dark lens series of the photographer Cédric Delseau (a book at Editions Xavier Barral) is an artistic kind of materialization of fiction. The photographer takes pictures in contemporary urban sites of different countries (France, Dubai …) and add them characters and spaceships from the movie Star Warsby George Lukas. This is not just a collage…
Reality Bites is a 1994 romantic comedy film directed by Ben Stiller that tells the story of four young adults newly graduated who are looking for a place in the society. Among them, Troy (Ethan Hawke) loves Lelaina (Winona Ryder) in secret. Two maps appear in the movie. Génération 90 est une comédie romantique réalisée…
In Enemy of the State, Tony Scott addresses the topic of spying and global watch of citizens by US security forces when they are suspected to represent a threat to internal security. This is a recent film version of a classic theme, that George Orwell had already taken as the central subject of his book…
Un bar parfait is a French novel by Jean-Bernard Pouy published in September 2011. A white wine lover goes all over Paris in search of the perfect bar. The One that will offer him better than Cabernet or Sauvignon. He tries one bar after the other, all are different. In this book J.-B. Pouy uses…
Firefly is a TV series from 2002, wrote and directed by Joss Whedon (Buffy, Doll House, …). In Serenity, the film the same director released in 2005, the action takes place some time after the series. Firefly joyfully mixes and shakes up different film genres: science fiction, space odyssey, western, gangster and swashbuckler movies. It depicts in…
Minority Report is a Steven Spielberg film (2002) adapted of the eponymous short story that Philip K. Dick published in 1956. More than fifty years after being written, and although widely modified in the film version, the short story of Dr. K. Dick is still of a troubling modernity. When it was released, the film…
The Monster club is a 1980 horror movie directed by Roy Ward Baker. Eramus (Vincent Price) is a vampire. He approaches Ronald Chetwyn-Hayes (a real horror writer) who let him drink a little of his blood. In gratitude, the vampire invites his victim to the Monster club where he tells him 3 stories. A spatial…
Gordon Matta-Clark was a conceptual artist from the downtown New-York art scene during the 1970s whose work focused on the physical changes affecting New-York during the post-war decades. His work Real Properties : Fake Estates (RPFE) (1973-1974) documents some of these changes and their consequences on the urban fabric of the city. The course of…
Children of the Damned (Leader, 1963) is not really the sequel of the Village of the Damned but the topic of the movie is quite the same : a group of children with scaring psychic powers are threatening the world. The film is not as coherent as the first one, but there is an impressive scene…
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…
Desperate Measuresis a 1998 thriller film directed by Barbet Schroeder. The Police Officer Frank Conner (Andy Garcia) is in search of a compatible bone marrow donor for his ill son Matt. There is only one catch : Peter McCabe (Michael Keaton), a convicted serial killer. But McCabe is ready for anything to escape and he consults…
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…
Stalag 17 is a movie directed by Billy Wilder (1953) that tells the story of American prisoners in a German camp during the Second World War. They attempt to escape but they will first to unmask the traitor supposed to be in the group. Several spatial machineries appear in the movie. Stalag 17 est un film…
Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999, is considered as a genius film director. He made only 13 films in 46 years, mainly because of his perfectionism and because of his insistence to gather a very high level of details before beginning to make the film. However, he was also the writer and the producer of…
Le Cercle rouge is a 1970 movie directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The gangster Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte) escapes the Commissaire Mattei (André Bourvil) who escorted him in the night train from Marseille to Paris. During his escape, he meets Corey (Alain Delon) freshly released from prison. Associated to Jansen (Yves Montand), they decide to burgle…
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…
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.…
Great Guns (1941) is an American comedy directed by Monty Banks. Laurel and Hardy are the domestic servants of a rich and capricious boss. When the United States get involved in World War II, the boss joins the Army. Both friends decide then to enlist also in order to continue serving him. Many maps are…
The Blog.vodkaster.com is a blog dedicated to the video platform Vodkaster.com which aims to index movies through short excerpts. One of the posts presents about « 250 greatest movies of all times » as a subway map. See also this reference to the same technique applied to Rock’nRoll. Le site Blog.vodkaster.com accompagne la plateforme vidéo collaborative consacrée…
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…
Eric Rohmer was part of the « Nouvelle Vague » movement that radically changed the French cinema at the end of the ’50s and during the ’60s. He filmed the French urban landscapes and its profound transformation during these years. He has always been attentive in his films to the importance of urban places and more generally to…
The Killers (Siodmak,1946) is truly a classic of film noir. The opening scene is famous. Two men are sitting in front of a car driving at high-speed through the night. Then the camera scans the road and a sign shows up in the headlights: Brentwood, New Jersey. And below, in an ironic mode considering what…
The Sandmen (2000) is a French thriller movie directed by Pierre Salvadori and set in the 18th Arrondissement of Paris. When the film starts Alain (Serge Riaboukine) is giving a statement to the police. The scene ends with a shot of a map hang on the wall of the Police Station that shows the precinct.…
Funeral in Berlin is a 1966 British spy film directed by Guy Hamilton. British secret agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is sent to Berlin to arrange the defection of Colonel Stok (Oskar Homolka), an important Soviet officer who is in charge of the security of a part of the Berlin Wall. Some maps appearsduring the…
Creative mapping is a blog dedicated to the creative use of maps in art or how to map information creatively. Creative mapping est un blog dédié à l’utilisation créative des cartes dans l’art ou à la manière de cartographier l’information de façon créative.
The Italian movies of 50s, 60s and 70s invented a new way to depict geography of Italy after second world war, especially urban landscapes. By describing what was supposed to become the geography of the new Italy, as well as its new architecture, urbanism and land planning, the Italian filmmakers wanted to show future face…
Bob le flambeur is a French movie directed in 1955 by Jean-Pierre Melville. Bob, an old gangster and gambler, is almost broke now. In spite of the warnings of a friend, a high police official, he decides to rob a Casino in Dauville. Everything is carefully planed, but the police is informed about the coup.…
(e)space & fiction 