     (Thanks to Tom Harper at the BL for this find.)
  Anne and Georges consult a street atlas to find the place on the videotape they have received, Avenue Lénine in Romainville. In Romainville Georges goes into the shop at a petrol station. There is a map of the Paris region on the wall:  In their home they have a neatly shelved collection of green and yellow Michelin maps:  Their son has a world atlas on the table in his room:  Several maps appear in the television news reports that recur in the film:    There is a poster representing the Americas on the wall in the editing studio where Georges works:  Their bathroom décor appears to include maps, but at this point I may simply have gone map-blind, seeing them here, there and everywhere:     The map above, from the credits of a contemporary newsreel about the making of the film, allows for several possibilities as to the film's specific Pacific location. The Hawaiian island Kaua'i (hidden by the letter 'P') provided most of the exteriors for South Pacific, and is now a prime site of cine-tourism, with guided visits available to the shoot's locations. The narrative is set further West and South, with the maps in the film's principal map room pointing us to the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu (just below the letter 'T' in 'South'):    When the action builds towards a climax involving one specific island, a map of it is scrutinised:  A later scene shows the same map being looked at even more closely. Looking at it closely myself, I'd say this is the island called Pulau Siberut, off the west coast of Sumatra, opposite Padang. That would make no sense topographically, but at this point in the film the relevant detail is that it is an island, simply:  The action of various parties is shown as coordinated through their reference to related maps:      There is one more map in the film, an element in the décor of the Thanksgiving Show put on for the entertainment of servicemen:             Richard J. Lesowsky, ‘Cartoons Will Win the War: World War Two Propaganda Shorts’, in A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Learning from Mickey, Donald and Walt: Essays on Disney's Edutainment Films (Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co., 2011), pp.47-48.  Food Will Win The War (Disney 1942)  The New Spirit (Disney 1942)       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.
 An image from a lost film by R.W. Paul. Here is the description from his 1907 catalogue:   ‘The recurrent image of the spinning globe similarly entitles the scientist .to possess the world, since the globe, as the world's representation, allegorizes the relationship between creator and creation. Cinema's penchant for spinning-globe logos serves to celebrate the medium's kinetic possibilities as well as its global ubiquity, allowing spectators a cheap voyage while remaining in the metropolitan “centers”.’
Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) 27-29 |
