As part of the credit sequence of Col cuore in gola, Jean-Louis Trintignant is shown reading the map of the London tube system, scanning from West to East towards Holborn Station, into which he and Ewa Aulin will later be chased by gangsters. This linear tracking contrasts with the film's general topographic disorder, assembling fragments of London as a collage rather than as a journey through the city. Brass's film is mapped onto Blowup, but Antonioni's film offers no embedded map that might orient us, only this briefly seen and unreadable planisphere: Brass's next London film, Nerosubianco (1968), returns to Holborn station, showing again a graphically linear trajectory that contrasts with the film's graphic and topographic disorder:
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‘The map in Casino Royale places London in the Bond film, as a thematic concern, a theme located in the film’s topographical ironies. (Briefly put: Is the Swinging London of cinema a place on the map, or a figment of cinematic fancy?). When the map of London becomes readable in extreme close-up, the viewer’s cartological competence is ironized, since London is shown traversed by a north-to-south frontier separating England to the east from Scotland to the west: the borderline crosses the Thames via Vauxhall Bridge.’
‘London Circa Sixty Six: the Map of the Film’, in Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber (eds), London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), p.164. 71/ Cosa avete fatto a Solange? [What You Done To Solange] (Massimo Dallamano 1972): London17/6/2011 'In an essay on cinematic mapping, Tom Conley has suggested that the sight in a film of a geographical map, "which refers to the real world, complicates the imaginary space of the diegesis as well as the space in which spectatorial subjectivication takes place". What is a complication for the spectator positioned vis-à-vis the imaginary space of the narrative is, however, for the spectator who has already abandoned imaginary spaces for the real world of street names and postcodes, a spectacular sanction. He can, for example, enjoy the solecism when the detective in What Have You Done With Solange? points on a map to the positions for a stake out of, according to the narrative, Battersea Park, South London, but actually is pointing to Regent's Park, in the North. The space between these two parks is, for the map-reading ciné-tourist, the space of spectatorial subjectivication.'
[In the published version of this piece I had to my shame identified Regent's Park as Hampstead Heath: ‘London Circa Sixty Six: the Map of the Film’, in Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber (eds), London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), p.163.] ‘Memory, too, is a topos in its own right: it is a place we revisit, or to which we are transported; it is the road we travel along and also the destination of our memory-journey. To this extent, memory not only has a topography, it is a topography; and the site of production of place-memories is the lived body, the body which traces out the scenes of memory. Memory, in this view, is at once emplaced and embodied.’
Annette Kuhn, ‘The Scenes of Cinema Memory’, in An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), pp.16-17. ‘As indicated by the subtitle of the film, the Bunting house is situated in London. In the Avenger's range of action, the house is localized on the city map, by both the police and the lodger, in the area where Vauxhall Bridge Road becomes Bessborough Gardens, just before Vauxhall Bridge. As Gary Giblin has demonstrated, this location in Pimlico refutes the claim, repeated by several commentators and Hitchcock himself in a 1970 interview, that the cinematic Buntings lived in Bloomsbury.’
Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: the Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), p.68. 'The face is a map'. Deleuze & Guattari, 'Année zéro - visagéité', in Mille plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p.208. |
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