We present here two recent French projects of cultural mapping. The first is developed by the association of libraries of the Ville de Paris. The second named Géoculture, a very ambitious cultural Web and mobile service with a mapping tool that aim to give access to the cultural works of a region. . Les initiatives…
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…
Fred passed away yesterday and everyone is sad : Philémon, Barthélémy, Anatole, the Manu Manu and all of those who loved Fred and his logically crazy / madly logical poetic universe, always and never following him « to the letter » should we say. At (e)space & fiction we say good bye to the artist, inventor of…
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…
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…
Art and Geography – Aesthetics and practices of spatial knowledges conference takes place in Lyon (France) from the 11 to 13 Feb 2013. It offers a very rich program of communications and art performances. Le colloque Art et Géographie – Esthétiques et pratiques des savoirs spatiaux a lieu à Lyon du 11 au 13 févr. 2013…
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.…
The big Grand Palais Hopper’s exhibition in Paris is closing tonight. It is an opportunity to publish a post somewhere between news, spatial machinery and materialization of fiction. The New-York Time magazine published in July 2012 – and le Monde in September 2012- wrote about the work of the photographer Gail Albert Halaban. In this…
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…
[Ajouté le 20/01/2013 : en empruntant sans le créditer la quasi-totalité du contenu de ce site original (pratique condamnable, voir le premier commentaire à ce billet) ], Contre-champ, le magazine documentaire vidéo du Monde.fr sur Dailymotion consacré au cinéma, note que les cinéastes tournent toujours aux même endroits ce qui fait que des lieux réels…
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…
The U.S. administration has given its answer: there will be no replica of the famous Star Wars space station, in spite of the petition which had gathered nearly 35,000 signatures. The Death Star will not join Yoda in our collection of materializations of Star Wars fiction … Too bad ! (?) L’administration américaine a donné sa…
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…
For some time, (e)space & fiction has opened an account on Vodcaster, « le site du cinéma à partager », a French site for collecting, sharing and commenting movie excerpts already available on YouTube and Daylymotion. We have begun to keep a play-list entitled Cinemaps, les dispositifs géographiques au cinéma (Cinemaps, geographical apparatus in movies), which gives…
This famous drawing titled New Yorker map of the World is from Saul Steinberg. The New Yorker published it on its cover on March 29, 1976. It is often seen as a satire of the New Yorkers’ « smug provincialism ». Actually, it is a beautiful and satiric expression of a much more general mental geography. People…
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…
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