Movement from the film's first location (the penal colony in French Guyana) to its second location (Belleville, Paris) is effected by this simple cinemap, presented in silence (where otherwise Grémillon's film is strikingly experimental in its use of sound).
A pan across the Atlantic brings us from Europe to the habitat of the film's principal subject, desmodus rotundus or the Common Vampire Bat. The map has been modified by hand to emphasise details in the narration: Prior to this the film had referenced non-zoological manifestations of vampirism:
110/ Valparaiso Valparaiso (Pascal Aubier 1969) & Furia à Bahia pour OSS 117 (André Hunebelle 1965)26/7/2011 ‘England supports Chile's independence. Isabel II of Spain has the city bombarded. The final shudder of the thwarted coloniser. In its turn the ground opens up. Earthquakes, floods, fires, cyclones and looting. This was to be the fate of this peace-loving people. And it did not end there.
A cartoon satirising "Uncle Sam", driving a nail into Panama.. A mermaid watches over a ship. A bunch of seaweed, conjuring up streaming hair, floats in the troughs of the waves. Then different statues of mermaids. But when is there an end? The mermaids in the harbour have not ended their song. They are there, watching, listening, waiting.' Chris Marker, script for ... A Valparaiso, in Rosalind Delmar, Joris Ivens: 50 years of filmmaking (London: BFI, 1979), p.96. 'I seriously was interested in where things fell on the map. I thought psychogeography could be adapted quite conveniently to forge a franchise – which is what happened, more than I could have imagined. It took off. I think of it, I suppose, as a psychotic geography – stalking the city.'
The Verbals: Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2002), p.75 'Giuliana seeks a lover who is at home traveling the world. It is no wonder that she finds herself with him, staring at a map, in a hotel room that changes tones -- that is, whose color literally shifts with the emotion of her erotic perception.' Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002), p.97. 'Maps of Patagonia appear in several scenes in order to allude to the emerging international division of labour.' Matthew Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Antonioni's The Red Desert', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28: 2 (2003), p.221. |
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