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 Conference « Littérature et géographie. L’écriture de l’espace à travers les âges » will be held at University Jean Moulin Lyon 3 les 12 et 13 mars 2015. The engaging program is already Online. Un colloque « Littérature et géographie. L’écriture de l’espace à travers les âges » se tiendra à l’Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 les 12…
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…
The temporary exhibition « Revoir Paris » held on 20 November 2014 to 9 March 2015, offers the opportunity to engage a dialog between the work of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, cartoonists, writers and screenwriters, with the one of Jules Verne, Robida or Le Corbusier, and, on the other hand, with development projects in Paris and…
From October 1, 2014 to January 18 2015, the exhibition « Hokusai » is held at the Grand Palais in Paris. This exhibition presents nearly 500 works by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), one of the most famous Japanese artists in the world today. Much of the works presented will never leave Japan after the opening…
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…
A quoi je prête attention dans les films : 1) l’intrigue, les personnages (très peu) 2) les écrans d’ordinateurs qui apparaissent brièvement à l’arrière plan (principalement). « – Attends! Sur cette carte floue derrière le général on voit qu’un des vaisseaux extra-terrestres se trouve au Groenland ! Pourquoi le Groenland ? – STP, est-ce qu’on peut…
« 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…
To define the geography of Westeros and Essos, several initiatives emerged in the form of web maps. It aims to show character’s journeys and also where take place the Game of thrones TV series and books. We list here some of them. Afin de mieux cerner la géographie des lieux et espaces dans lesquelles prennent…
Cité de verre (City of Glass) by Paul Auster was published in 1985. This is the first volume of the New York Trilogy by this author. An adaptation of this work in comics was published in 2005 by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. David Mazzucchelli is an American cartoonist, best known for his versions of Batman…
With the opening today of the World Football in Brazil, the sports news offers an opportunity to discuss a world famous movie: Brazil, a film made in 1985 by Terry Gilliam. Brazil has been seared on the kind of anticipation films, himself taking his legacy of previous genre films, including Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life…
Superpowers might give superheroes a very specific experience of space. Some examples of spatial machineries in comic books and movies confirm this idea. The superheroes are often confronted with original cartographic issues and often invent very precursory geospatial devices. So here are already Supermap and Batmap, before possibly, if you dig into your old Marvel magazines to find…
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…
Quand la Google car a parcouru Earl’s Court Road, à Londre, elle surpris le TARDIS, célèbre machine à voyager dans le temps et l’espace, aux allures de « Police Box », utilisée par le Doctor Who. /\ When the Google car mapped Short Earl’s Court Road, London, it caught the TARDIS, famous Doctor Who’s time machine and spacecraft, which looks like a Police Box.
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…
The French artist Séverine Hubard (born in 1977) present at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS) a temporary exhibition called Village. Work specially made for MAMCS, Village consists of an assembly of 18 « huts », mainly in wood and metal, hung together. This monumental work is eleven meters high. Installed in the external…
Rocky, Yoda or The Little Prince are not the only fictional characters who have been materialized. Superman and Lois Lane have also their own materialization. Even if Metropolis, the city where Superman lives is fictional, a city in Illinois has the same name and beyond this resemblance, the city host… Superman and Lois Lane! Rocky, Yoda…
Avec « Chaos : ordre et désordre » l’édition 2014 de Géocinéma, le festival de cinéma organisé par les géographes bordelais, invite les spectateurs à plonger dans l’abîme et la confusion pour revenir ensuite à la lumière et au monde. Dans un temps marqué par l’incertitude, la figure du chaos révèle la crise de l‘ordre qu’il soit social,…
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…
Between 22 October 2013 and 24 August 2014, the Cité Universcience (Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie) offers exhibition « Jeu vidéo l’EXPO » on a surface of 1000 m². This is the first major exhibition in France on video games, bringing their world a renewed look. Entre le 22 octobre 2013 et le 24 août 2014,…
Land art emerged in the late 60’s. This contemporary art movement uses real spaces, with their various natural or human components, to support sustainable or ephemeral artistic creation, where real space pertains to the work itself. Early forms of land art emerged in the West of the USA. Some works of Land Art are huge…
Après Fred, il y a quelques mois, voici qu’un autre de la bande à Hara-Kiri se fait la malle. Dans les journaux bêtes et méchants qu’il a dirigés pendant 50 ans, Cavanna a écrit sur tous les sujets. Il a raconté sa vie dans les Ritals et les Ruskoffs. Il est l’auteur d’un nombre astronomique…
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…
The exhibition « Le Surréalisme et l’objet« , which takes place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 30 October 2013 to 3 March 2014, reveals, among others, a work by Marcel Jean entitled « La fille de l’horoscope« from 1970. This is a small model (38.5 x 22 x 15.5 cm), such as larger used in sewing,…
Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 are 1992 and 1993 movies realized respectively by Penelope Spheeris and Stephen Surjik. The first one tells the adventures of Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey) who host a TV program from a cellar in Aurora, Illinois, USA. They attract an unreliable producer’s attention. Moreover, Wayne…
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…
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…
(e)space & fiction 