'In thus projecting Australia as an unsettled “dark continent,” the map exposes a contradiction on which colonial discourse is predicated, which it is typically at pains to conceal. The map erases any signs of aboriginal habitation and signifies "Australia" as an open, unmarked, unoccupied territory, standing in presumed readiness to be colonized, but it also reveals that the boundaries of the colonial enterprise are not timelessfrontiers that have always really been there, waiting to be fulfilled by the manifest destinies of dominion and the progressive ideals of history itself. Rather, they are revealed as constructed territories, lines on a map, to be drawn by the violent interventions of colonial power.
Unlike the map of Casablanca, the map of Under Capricorn foregrounds its status as a "sign." It is quite obviously a page in a book, as evidenced by an unhidden wrinkle running through it and a printed page-border enclosing it. By contrast to the pristine graphic emblem of Casablanca, that of Under Capricorn presents itself not as an incorporeal symbol, free of material, worldly influences, but as a mundane object, rife with them; and the insistent artifice of the first shots of Australia realizes the anti-illusionist impulse of the presentation of the map.' James Morrison, 'Hitchcock's Ireland: the performance of Irish identity in Juno and the Paycock and Under Capricorn', in Richard Allen & Sam Ishii-Gonzalez (eds), Hitchcock Past and Future (London: Routledge, 2004), p.201. ‘In nearly every interior he painted, there is either a map, a sheet of music, a letter, a chart, or a picture whose subject-matter functions like an ideogram.’
John Berger (writer of Jonas qui aura 25 ans...), 'The Painter in his studio: Vermeer', in The Moment of Cubism and other essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p.77. |
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