Bennet Schaber, ‘“Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long”: The road, the people’, in Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 1997), p.25.
watch Meet John Doe here
‘The road movie, then, takes as its specific project the aligning of event and meaning within the image of and as political geography. This is nowhere so powerfully signified as in the genre scene, prevalent in so many road films, of the cut between the map and its territory. Indeed, the road film forges an explicit connection between the map as political . representation (say, in the hands of the police as they track the progress of bodies in flight, or in the hands of hapless voyagers, trying to find, say, Pismo Beach) and place as the being of territory. In general, the two elude each other, usually to the benefit of the latter, but with widely differing results. Hence, we see in Ford the difference between the marking out of territory by the ubiquitous US 66 signs and the hands that grasp the dirt; or in Capra, between the flags on Edward Arnold's map which draws the nation into his fascist web of John Doe clubs and Cooper and Brennan fishing under a bridge, beneath the road and out of sight; or the unmappable position of the lost horizon, Shangri-la.’
Bennet Schaber, ‘“Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long”: The road, the people’, in Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 1997), p.25. watch Meet John Doe here
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(an occasional feature in which I post all of the maps visible in a particular film) Diva is en eminently mappable film, with its spread of locations across Paris and its recurrent journeys through the city (by métro, moped, car and on foot), but it is not a film interested in displaying maps of its territory. And that despite there being visible in this film a total of eleven different maps, if we include two limit cases: the linear diagram of a train line and the schematic terrain of an arcade game. The first of these, at the Gare Saint Lazare, features in a compositional contrast of horizontal and vertical, as the camera moves up an escalator towards the map stretching across the top of the screen, revealing more of the map as it advances: The other limit case is from the 1977 Sega game 'Heli-Shooter': 'enemy territory is visible below with airports, harbors and structures dotting the landscape' (as described in Sega's publicity material): Between these extremes the maps in the film are more conventional. Two (or perhaps the same map twice) are part of the establishing decor in a police station (for examples from other French police stations see here): Another type of map in the film is the plan of a building, shown here as establishing decor. This type is often displayed in films where a building's specific layout is foregrounded, as in heist films (see here for a different application of this type): Five of the maps in Diva are directly associated with the film's famous use of the métro as location. Three are seen on the platform in passing as a policeman chases the protagonist onto and off a train: These are maps of the métro and of the wider Parisian transport network (including overground trains and buses). Two maps are visible in the same shot in the métro station's ticket hall, one being the distinctive journey-planner map with electric lights indicating routes (see here and here for better views from other films), and the other is the map of the local area above ground: None of these maps is foregrounded, and it would be difficult to thematise from this recurring motif other than to highlight the film's visualisation of Paris as a succession of spectacular views, rather than as a topographical construct (compare with Rivette's Le Pont du nord, from the same year). The last map in Diva, symptomatically, is perhaps not a map at all. I am guessing that the rectangular thing pinned to the wall in this apartment is a map, but visually it is just a blank, an unreadable gap in a space otherwise loaded with readable signs: (See here for the two 'blowup' moments in Diva. See below for Paris as a succession of spectacular views) |
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