Animated maps to illustrate a point are common in documentaries (hence their use in the 'News on the March' section of Citizen Kane), and Super Size Me has three striking instances. Spurlock also, however, 'animates' a map profilmically by progressively sticking flags and then photographs onto a map of Manhattan:
‘Whereas visual space is almost exclusively solid or opaque, aural space is transparent. Interestingly, were we to reverse ideas of this relationship in terms of the visual and the aural in the cinema, we could even view film as a transparent map for its sound. Maps represent, and endeavour to embody the physical. They are successful if they become transparent; no longer objects themselves, rather they are the canvas on which the representation finds form.’
Greme Harper & Jonathan Rayner, ‘Introduction’, in Cinema and Landscape (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), p.19. 'A friend tells me: ''It's unhealthy to think of the past as real or true. The human being, he says, undergoes a complete transformation every seven years.'' Still, events remain, even if the Hotel has disappeared or the Hospital was nothing but a make- believe-Hospital everything has occurred for eternity in the imagination which unfolds its map of yesterday, its American Map, in the ill-defined vicinity of my today-reality. There are hundreds of important changes you need to know about today tells yesterday, but in the meantime today is already yesterday. New York has changed a lot. New York never changes. New York is a in perpetual state of a-changing. “Every day, road construction crews, State and Federal transportation authorities and local developers are working to make your maps and atlases out of date,'' American Map states. Only in American could you make such an apocalyptic statement.'
Hélène Cixous, ‘I Will Not Write This Book’, in Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), pp.49-50. See also: (e)space & fiction |
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