The only maps in Espoir are in an operational headquarters. An early sequence, three minutes in, establishes the interpretation of maps as a key to military strategy. Later, a local who has specific knowwlege of an enemy base, but no knowledge of maps, isn't able to point to the place on a map. As a consequence, he has to go with the bomber crew so that he can point to it in reality. Viewing his world from the air for the first time, the terrain is as unfamiliar and unreadable as the map, and it seems the mission will have to be aborted. But finally, in a moment of apotheosis, he is able to say: ‘it is there’, and the mission can be accomplished.
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The ‘Paris’ sequence of Orphée invents an unreal city by linking unconnected but familiar parts of Paris (the rue Vilin, the square Bolivar, the place des Vosges and the covered market at Billancourt). Here are these apparently contiguous places on a map: There is only one map in Orphée, on the wall of the office of the Chief Inspector of Police, who has summoned Orphée to meet him. Try as I might, I cannot tell of what this is a map (it is not Paris). The line of the river is distinctive, but I don't recognise it. Perhaps the map is upside down.
Of the five spaces in which maps figure in L'Argent, the first is the most spectacular. We follow an agent of the banker Gundermann as he is led by a butler into an antechamber decorated to represent the reach of the banker's power. In combination with the cinematography, this mise-en-scène also displays the distorting, disorienting force of money. The second space is more conventional: in their modest apartment. the naive adventurer hero Hamelin and his wife Line examine a map of the Americas, though it becomes a mere backdrop to the expression of their love for each other. Later, in the same space, Hamelin explains his plans to the banker Saccard, with a view of a more detailed map of the region that Hamelin proposes to exploit for oil. We first see the scene diffusely, in a mirror, before passing to two readable mapshots. Next, in a room at the airport from which Hamelin will take off on a solo flight across the Atlantic, Line looks on in terror at the thought of the danger he will face. He enters, first seen as a shadow cast over a map of Europe and North Africa, which then becomes the backdrop to their passionate embrace on parting. The most often shown space in the film is the banker Saccard's office, dominated by a map of the world. Against this backdrop we see Saccard manipulate markets on a global scale, we see him attempt to seduce Line, and finally we see him arrested for fraud. Prior to Saccard's arrest we see Hamelin in Guyana (here with Antonin Artaud as Saccard's secretary). A map on the wall serves as establishing decor, but it cannot compete with the cartographic spectacles on display back in Paris. Hamelin returns to France and we see two policemen waiting to arrest him in the same room at the airport where he had kissed Line farewell. This time we see more of the cartographic decor, including the west coast of France: The film's denouement involves Line approaching Gundermann, and we see again, in more detail, his spectacular antechamber: The decor of L'Argent is one of Lazare Meerson's finest achievements, especially in the cartographic configurations of this last, framing space.
When, in 2011, I first posted about the maps in this film I said they appeared in only one scene. Seeing the film again this afternoon at the ICA, in a beautiful print, I spotted my mistake in not spotting the very large globe, above. Many thanks to The Badlands Collective for organising the screening, on the film's 40th birthday. Maps appear in Barry Lyndon in only one scene, but they cover the known world, from Asia through Africa and Europe to the Americas. And there is a globe on the table in front of the first map.
These two mapshots, from the end of the credit sequence, are all we see of maps in The Black Dahlia. As with Blow Out, De Palma seems relatively uninterested in displaying maps in an investigation-centred film (though he is very interested, as with Blow Out, in showing photographers and photographs). Such indifference to maps is perhaps only unusual because they are central to journalistic investigations into the real-life 'Black Dahlia' murder:
‘The least that can be said for Blow Out is that it ceaselessly reaches out to involve us in its attempt to divine the difference between art and paranoia and reality. And one of its attractions is that, while it comes to no conclusions about where the boundaries between those qualities finally are drawn, it insists upon the importance of creating some maps. In the end, Blow Out is about a world in which such distinctions have collapsed (or been exploded), about what it means for the game to be rigged against common decency.’
Al Clark & James Park (eds), The Film Year Book 1983 (New York: Grove, 1983), p. 90. The schoolroom is one of the two settings in which a map in a film is most likely to be found, and this is the earliest example I know. Below are some later illustrations from French cinema.
‘After a credit sequence showing belle époque photographs three “nationalist” recitations are juxtaposed, before a map presents insistently the gaping wound that is Alsace Lorraine: the lies of propaganda, the desire for revenge, and then there is war.’
Corinne Françoise-Denève, ‘Retour de flamme: Grande Guerre et cinéma français dans le nouveau siècle’, in Carola Hähnel-Mesnard, Marie Liénard-Yeterian, Cristina Marinas (eds), Culture et mémoire: représentations contemporaines de la mémoire dans les espaces mémoriels, les arts du visuel, la littérature et le théâtre (Palaiseau: Les Editions de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 2008) p. 186. ['The image of the map in Pépé le Moko promises to locate the viewer in a position of mastery.']
‘If, as de Certeau proposes, a "space" is defined by a hero's "direction of existence," then the opening of Pépé le Moko suggests a situation in which this hero is none other than the film’s viewer. That is, the movement from the neoclassical "place" of the police station to the primordial "space" of the Casbah is also a movement away from classicism's stable distance between beholder and spectacle and toward an indeterminacy in which scientific distance alternates with a kind of tactile convergence.’ Charles O’Brien, ‘The “Cinéma colonial” of 1930s France: Film Narration as Spatial Practice’, in Matthew Bernstein & Gaylyn Studlar (eds), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p.210. ‘In Dr. No, when Bond visits M, the set includes a large map on the wall of Moneypenny's office and a prominently featured globe in M's office. The meaning of the maps is reinforced by the films' internationalism and transnational consciousness. In the Bond films, Honey Ryder, the daughter of a scientist, has lived all over the world; Dr. No is the child of a German missionary and a Chinese mother. The organization he represents, SPECTRE, which is an invention of the film series, is an international organization that transcends the East-West divisions of the Cold War. In fact, SPECTRE, which stands for Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion has no headquarters and in that way mimics the film industry itself.’
Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French: Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p.194. Three other maps in the film: here, here and here. ‘What does “looking at a map” mean? Map users do not ask this question as long as they get from the map the information they need, as long as the map does not challenge their map literacy. A map is transparent to its meaning, to the information it delivers. Opacity occurs only when this semiotic power fails: then, the map holds the gaze of the viewer upon itself, as a set of signs. Looking at the map as an opaque device should be the way historians look at maps: that is, looking at maps for themselves, as artifacts, as constructions, as a complex language, rooted in a society's visual culture. The rules of this language should be understood for their own sake, in the interaction and the hierarchy of their components, from subliminal details to the most general structural features. Looking at maps as complex systems of signs implies breaking the logic of reference that links a representation to what it represents: a systematic approach of the map's visual language is the only way to center research on the map not as an object but as a medium of communication, which implies at the same time an attempt to encode values and meanings and the various strategies of reception on the part of the user.’
Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: theoretical approaches in cartography throughout history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp.xiv-xv. 'The diagram in Resnais is a superimposition of maps that defines an ensemble of transformations from layer to layer, with the redistribution of functions and the fragmentation of objects: the superimposed periods of Auschwitz. Mon oncle d’Amérique is a large-scale attempt at diagrammatic mental cartography, where maps are superimposed and transformed, in a single character and from one character to the next.'
Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: l'image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p.160. 'The film cuts to a close-up of the map where thumbtacks are set adjacent to dots by place names."Independence" is north of "Manazar", below which a hand pushes another tack while an iris closes on the space and the shot of a car on the road replaces the rest of the map.'
Tom Conley, 'A Map in a Montage', in Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp.86-87. ‘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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