In this slavish imitation of Pépé le Moko (reproducing some sequences of Duvivier's film shot-for-shot and borrowing its actualité footage), the map of Algiers is very similar, and does the same sort of work, locating the viewer 'in a position of mastery' (Charles O'Brien, see here). There is also a brief scene with a hand-drawn map, to add to my collection (see here):
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['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. |
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