The Desert of the Tartars (Buzzati) : space and fiction of a military no man’s land / Le Désert des Tartares : espace et fiction d’un no man’s land militaire

Il deserto di Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars)  shot in 1976 by Valerio Zurlini is a French-German-Italian production. This film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Dino Buzzati. The script is very similar in topic and atmosphere to the novel. It benefits from a good casting and a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.…

escapethemap

« A girl is trapped in the map and desperately needs your help to escape. Have you got what it takes to navigate her out of this dangerous photographic maze. The clock is ticking. » This is the pitch for an advertisment campain that was organized in 2011 by Mercedes around a interactive commercial produced by an…

Quiz 1 : Answer / Réponse

The correct answer to Quiz # 1 is Poupoupidou, a 2011 movie by French director Gerald Hustache-Mathieu. The film tells the story of David Rousseau, a writer, who investigates the tragic and mysterious death of Candice Lecoeur, a young starlet of Mouthe in Jura (France), which sees herself as a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.  On…

(e)space & fiction aux Rencontres SIG La Lettre

Pour la 4ème année, les géomaticien-nes, spécialistes des SIG, néogéographes, fous de cartes et assimilés venant de France, de Navarre et d’ailleurs convergent début avril à Marne-la-Vallée près de Paris pour les Rencontres SIG la Lettre. Cette année, (e)space & fiction participe doublement à l’événement. Nous organisons le mercredi 4 avril de 18h à 20h…

Personal and fictional spaces of Julien Gracq – Un balcon en forêt / Espaces personnels et fictionnels de Julien Gracq

Un balcon en forêt is a film shot in 1979 by Michel Mitrani from the book of the same title of Julien Gracq, published in 1958 by Editions Jose Corti. This editor published in 2011, Manuscrits de guerre of the same author, written while he lived as a military the few weeks of the German…

Une affaire d’état. Valette

Une affaire d’état is a 2009 french political thriller directed by Eric Valette. This movie is an adaptation of Dominque Manotti’s novel, Nos fantastiques années fric. It is about an affair of state, arms trafficking between France and Africa, covert financing, governmental security agencies, prostitution… and criminal investigation.We take a special interest in two characters.…

Duel (Spielberg) : cartographier la route du récit / mapping the road of the narrative

Duel, le premier film de Spielberg, qui raconte la poursuite d’une voiture par un camion fou est entièrement tourné au niveau du sol. Aucune vue aérienne, très peu de recul. La caméra est à hauteur des pare-chocs et de l’habitacle des véhicules, plus rarement sur un bas-côté à peine surélevé. Ce filmage  tangentiel  participe du…

Some news from Mona Lisa / Des nouvelles de la Joconde

La Croix and many other newspapers mentioned the discovery that the copy of the Mona Lisa in the Prado Museum in Madrid is older than it was previously thought and was painted in Da Vinci’s workshop itself. It appears the painting is contemporary with the original,and could be a preparatory study for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.…

Invisible Target – Benny Chan

Invisible Target is a 2007 Hong-Kong action movie directed by Benny Chan. Three police officers join their forces together to fight  a mafioso organization. The main spatial machinery is a phone localization in order to identify his owner. Invisible Target est un film d’action hongkongais réalisé par Benny Chan et sorti en salles en 2007.…

Crossroads in Maus – Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman, creator of the graphic narrative Maus, is the President of the 39th Angoulême International Comics Festival in Angoulême. It is the opportunity to celebrate on (e)space & fiction this exceptional designer by presenting this deeply moving frame issued from page 127 in the first volume of Maus. The road network that forms a…

Babar and Father Christmas’s House/ Babar et la Maison du Père Noël – Jean de Brunhoff

Here is a seasonal post. Christmas time is for children and children’s stories. It is the perfect moment to present the simple and naive but very effective spatial machinery Jean de Brunhoff imagines when he relates the discovery of the house of Father Christmas by Babar in the album Babar and Father Christmas(1941). It illustrates…

Rio Baril – Florent Marchet

The French singer Florent Marchet, sometimes compared to Alain Souchon despite their very different universes, likes also to refer to places in his songs. His personal geography is located slightly further south than Souchon’s Sologne. Florent Marchet evokes his natal Berry in Gargilesse, an instrumental that refers to « one of the most beautiful villages in…

Workshop – Cartography & Narratives – Zurich – June 11-13, 2012

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…

Star Wars Back on Earth / Retour sur terre de la Guerre des étoiles

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…

Metropolis : at the Origin of Modern Urban Imagination / A la source de l’imaginaire urbain moderne

We announced here the  Cinematheque Française exhibition  from October 19, 2011 to January 29, 2012 about  Metropolis, the Fritz Lang’s film . On this occasion, the new version of the film, restored in 2010, will be shown to the public. This version  is 150 minutes long with the 30 minutes extra discovered in Buenos Aires in…

Enemy of the State: a location-based conspiration / Ennemi d’Etat: une conspiration géolocalisée

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…

Metropolis à la Cinémathèque Française

Cinémathèque Française Exposition « Metropolis » / Metropolis Exhibition

The Cinémathèque Française  in Paris presents a new exhibition from the 19th October 2011 to the 20th January 2012. It is dedicated to Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s master work. This  movie is famous for having influenced most of science-fiction films and has been considered as « the matrix of cities in the future ». Read also this post: …