- Where do we go now? - Well, perhaps l can best answer your question by first telling you that l think l've discovered the buried tomb of Genghis Khan. - What? This can't be so! - Frankly, Barton, l don't believe it. You always dreamt of this dead raider. - Carnarvon made his dream come true. Think of what he found in Egypt. - l don't care what it is. l go with you. Where do we go? - l'll show you. We move secretly. So it's a toil over these mountains into this valley here. Then up again and over this range of hills, and right here, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, that's where we camp. Now, l want you to understand the truth. From the moment we start, we're in great danger. There's a fanatic in the East, Dr. Fu Manchu. -And we have to beat him. - A Chinaman beat me? He couldn't do it. 
 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.
 ‘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.  An image from a lost film by R.W. Paul. Here is the description from his 1907 catalogue:  |
