A picture is worth a thousand words says the favorite adage of people working with images. The two first pages of the novel The Betrothed (in Italian I Promessi sposi) by Alexandro Manzoni published in 1825, could illustrate this adage since they could be summarized with a map like this one. This novel starts with…
Everybody knows or thinks he knows Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world. But it is also a mysterious work that has given rise to many rumors and speculations. We propose here an original interpretation that considers the painting as a sophisticated spatial and cartographic arrangement. We first build our reasoning upon an…
According to wikipedia the GPS concept was born in 1963: « Project 57 was worked in 1963 and it was « in this study that the GPS concept was born. » » The following year James Bond was already following the car of the villain Goldfinger in real-time on a screen map in his Aston Martin through Europe and…
Fantastic Mr Fox is a great animated film by Wes Anderson. It incorporates several space machineries, mostly master plans and battle plans. One of them takes the form of an animated map. The most original is certainly the picture painted by Felicity Fox to support the fight of « wild animals » against evil farmers. She uses…
A systematic inventory of maps in The Adventures of Tintin has still to be be done, but, surprising though it might seem, the reporter and globetrotter does not use maps very often. Take just one example : the Red Rackham’s Treasure album, that Steven Spielberg is adapting for the cinema. No map is shown in…
Before Google Earth there was WorldWind and Keyhole (the company that created the application used to develop Google Earth). Before Keyole, there was the movie Powers of Ten (dir. Charles and Ray Eames 1977). Indeed, one of the co-founders of Keyole – Avi Bar-Zeev – recognized the inspirational dimension of Power of Tens in the…
Up in the Air, a film by Jason Reitman (2009), is full of various spatial arrangements. The film itself is built as an erratic journey throughout the United States : Detroit, Michigan, Omaha, Nebraska, Las Vegas, Nevada, Florida, Wisconsin, Chicago… It is also a subtle evocation of the spatial dimension of personal, family and work…
My favorite war room map is the one that appears in Dr. Strangelove (Dir. Stanley Kubrick 1964). In this scene the paranoic and anticommunist US general Turdgison (hilarious George C Scott) is using the map (« the big board ») as the irrefutable proof that the russian president « Dimitri » is lying when he says that one B52…
Suggestion proposed by Simon in this comment. The Video Game Call of Duty 4 is literally peppered with spatial features, since many mission briefings are integrally presented with military graphic animations – maps, satellite images, troop movements … » Any supplementary information is welcome. Suggestion proposée par Simon dans ce commentaire. Le jeu Call of Duty…
In the latest Marc Lawrence’s movie Did You Hear About the Morgans?, with Hugh Grant and Jessica Parker, a killer searches on Google Maps for the name of the city where his targets have hidden. He finds : Ray, Wyoming. The spectator follows the entire search on the screen until the very detailed final map.…
There is one map in the Watchmen movie (see also Wikipedia). It appears in the War Room scenes behind President Nixon when the Army staff presents a simulation of the consequences of a Russian response to a US strike. This is an animated world map, first displayed at a medium scale, followed by a zoom…
In his geocriticism (‘géocritique’) approach, Bertrand Westphal (2007) attempts to reconnect the mimetic arts such as literature, cinema and painting to the real world through the spaces they represent. To do so, Westphal proposes a set of conceptual tools relevant to understanding how human spaces structure themselves ‘by and in the text, by and in…
We can find a very interesting and spectacular spatial machinery in the Prison Break TV show. In Season 1, Michael Scofield has incorporated elements of his escape plan in a tattoo that covers his upper half. The tattoo has hidden within it the blueprint of the prison and specific references for items and places that…
Angosto (La noche de los girasoles) is a Spanish-French movie film directed by the Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo and released in 2006. A cave was discovered in the surroundings of Cerredo in the Spanish Pyrenees. Two cavers come from the city to explore it. Two maps appear furtively in the movie. La Nuit des tournesols (La noche…
Each one of the two parts of the movie Che (dir. Steven Soderbergh 2009) starts with an animated map (at least in the North American version of the film): An animated map of the different Cuban provinces in Part I and an animated map of the different countries of South America in Part II. Both…
« Le Jardin de la France » (The Garden of France) is one of the most famous Max Ernst’s paintings. It depicts a woman’s body lying between sandbanks and islands near the confluence of Indre and Loire rivers. The work is fully representative of surrealism by the collage of different elements of reality that creates this feeling…
« Tom Conley has a sharp eye for capturing maps on the silver screen. The kinds of maps he deciphers are political, historical, emotional, aesthetic, narrative and metaphorical. As he decodes them, he takes his reader on a stimulating and engaging journey into the uncharted world of Cartographic Cinema. » Tom Conley voit des cartes partout…
24 is certainly one of the most original and most influential TV series in recent years. It is also one of those with Alias that systematically use geospatial tools for telling stories. 24 (24 heures chrono en France) est certainement une des séries télévisées les plus originales et les plus marquantes de ces dernières années.…
Is this the first animated map ever? At least it is one of the first ones. It was created for a 1918 docudrama entitled Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (Martin E. Johnson, 1918). An animated black line traces the journey of director Martin Johnson and his wife Osa from the New Hebrides…
On revient sur la fameuse et habiel carte qui ouvre chaque album d’Astérix, de Uderzo et Gosciny /\ Let give a look at the very famous and clever map that opens every Asterix’s album.
Google Maps appears in Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time that Google Maps appears in a literary work. If you have an earlier example, please write us a comment. Of course Google Maps doesn’t play a central role in the book. Google Maps appears in two…
Il n’y pas d’extrait, car cet article est protégé.
Il n’y pas d’extrait, car cet article est protégé.
(e)space & fiction is about the relations between space and fiction (novels, movies, paintings, music, comics, art works …). It is first a collection of 1) spatial machineries used to represent space in fiction, as maps or narratives, and 2) real places where imaginary worlds may end by materializing. Read the definitions. You can also…
(e)space & fiction 