Dans le deuxième souffle de Jean-Pierre Melville un plan sert à localiser deux truands dans Paris /\ In « Le deuxième souffle » by Jean-Pierre Melville, a map is used to locate two mobsters in Paris.
En hommage à l’écrivain Roger Grenier, à son sentiment géographique et à son évocation précise et sensible de Paris /\ An homage to Roger Grenier, the very personal « sentiment géographique » that pervades his writing through sensitive and precise evocations of Paris.
Les éditions Gallimard viennent de publier Souvenirs dormants, le dernier roman de Patrick Modiano, Prix Nobel de littérature en 2014, auquel (e)space&fiction a déjà consacré deux billets ici et ici. Dans Souvenirs dormants, l’auteur de Dora Bruder ou encore de Place de l’étoile, revisite ses souvenirs dans le Paris des années 50 et 60, avec…
Dans un entretien en 1954-1955 Georges Simenon explique comment il construit ses romans. /\ Georges Simenon explains in an interview how he starts a novel.
Utiliser Google Earth pour retrouver son village natal /\ Using Google Earth to try to find his native village
Billet de saison : personnage de légende ou de fiction, le Père Noël a certainement le record des matérialisations locales, y compris sa maison. /\ Seasonal post : as a legendary or fictional character, Santa Claus has the record of local materializations, including his house.
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…
The city of Le Havre (France) has now its literary tour map. Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal on Geocriticism, Sonia Anton, professor of literature at the University of Le Havre, has developed a literary tour of the city through 20 places evoked by famous writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Honoré de Balzac. This…
On peut qualifier Patrick Modiano, récent Nobel de Littérature, de romancier géographique. Ses romans entrelacent d’une manière unique temps et espace dans des enquêtes à la fois pointilleuses et inabouties aux ambiances brumeuses. Les livres de Modiano sont remplis de lieux, essentiellement parisiens, d’adresses, d’itinéraires très précis, où l’on suit souvent un enquêteur croisant archives…
« Description d’Olonne » is a little book by Jean-Christophe Bailly, which was published in 1992 by Editions Christian Bourgois, and was reissued in 2010 by the same publisher. This book is the careful and sensitive description, imbued with a certain nostalgia, of an imaginary city, Olonne, located on a river estuary bottom, near the Atlantic coast.…
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…
Florent Chavouet, Manabe Shima, ©Éditions Philippe Picquier, 2010 Tokyo Sanpo and Manabe Shima, are actually at the intersection of comics, travel guides and travelogues. The maps of Tokyo and of the island of Manabe Shima that Florent Chavouet proposes in his two books are directly inspired by the geographic reality of of these places in…
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a comedy-drama written and directed in 2014 by Wes Anderson, and inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.This movie was entirely filmed in Görlitz and other parts of Saxony as well as at Studio Babelsberg. This film tells the story of a grand hotel in Art Deco style, which experienced…
Ward Ie-IIe siècle et Ward IIIe siècle are two books by French author Frédéric Werst, published respectively in 2011 and 2014. Born in 1970, Frédéric Werst is associate letters. He teaches in a high school in Paris. « By love of literature », the author has invented a new language, Wardwesân, rich more than 10,000 words. This…
In 1925, Abel Gance was the first director to use three cameras for shooting his movie Napoleon. By the juxtaposition of the three images he obtained a very large screen, three times the traditional format. This process, called « Polyvision », allows to increase not only the area shown by the images, but also to multiply the…
Carte de Tendre de François Chauveau dans Clélie, Histoire romaine, première partie de Madeleine de Scudéry, Paris, Augustin Courbé, 1654, © BnF La Carte de Tendre is a map of an imaginary country called Tendre, imagined by Madeleine de Scudéry in her novel Clélie, histoire romaine, published in 10 volumes from 1654 to 1660. This…
In the main work of Marcel Proust « In Search of Lost Time« , geography holds a prime position. It is not a descriptive geography, neither a geography with a scientific purpose nor exactly anchored on the reality, but a geography born from the imagination of the author where reality is closely intertwined with his imagination. According to…
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…
« 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…
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…
« 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…
« 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
