Category: Britain - The Cine-Tourist

702/ Sightseers + High-Rise (Ben Wheatley 2012 + 2015)

10/8/2016

Sightseers (2012)

High-Rise (2015)

Wheatley's films are more about Englishness than Britishness. These two maps of the British Isles relegate that larger context to the background. In the cartographic foreground is the credit sequence of Sightseers, marking out a highly localised itinerary, through Worcestershire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Cumbria:

The itinerary, with accompanying maps, can be glimpsed later in the film:

There are three more maps in Sightseers:

(I didn't find any maps in Down Terrace, Kill List or A Field In England.)

For insight into Wheatley's relation to place, see Kevin Flanagan's essay 'Green and Pleasant Land? Ben Wheatley's British Cinema Between Romanticism and Modernism'.

692/ The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (Gene Wilder 1975)

14/4/2016

686/ SOS Eisberg (Arnold Fanck 1933)

27/3/2016

The map of Greenland in close up serves as transition between two spaces, from office to home:

I don't understand why the map consulted by the aviatrix (Leni Riefenstahl) is back to front.

678/ The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest 1961)

2/3/2016

674/ Jéricho (Henri Calef 1946)

26/2/2016

651/ Java Head (Thorold Dickinson + J. Walter Ruben 1934)

20/2/2016

650/ Scrooge (Brian Desmond Hurst 1951)

19/2/2016

(Thanks to Tom Harper at the BL for this find.)

599/ The Night Has Eyes (Leslie Arliss 1942)

12/4/2015

579/ 36 Hours (George Seaton 1964)

11/4/2015

551/ The Balance (Paul Rotha 1947)

11/4/2015

532/ Locomotives (Humphrey Jennings 1934)

10/4/2015

530/ The Face of Britain (Paul Rotha 1935)

10/4/2015

485/ Diabolo menthe (Diane Kurys 1977)

25/12/2013

478/ The Liquidator (Jack Cardiff 1965)

24/12/2013

384/ On the Buses (Harry Booth 1971)

24/12/2012

216/ Words For Battle (Humphrey Jennings 1941)

9/11/2011

Jennings's film opens with pages from the 1607 edition of William Camden's Britannia. The accompanying spoken text is adapted from the 1610 English translation of Camden's original Latin:
'For the air is most temperate and wholesome, situated in the midst of the temperate zone. For water, it is walled and guarded with the Ocean, most commodious for traffic to all parts of the world. The earth fertile with all kinds of grain, manured with good husbandry, rich in mineral of coals, tin, lead, copper, not without gold and silver, abundant with pasture, replenished with cattle both tame and wild, plentifully wooded, beautified with many populous cities, fair boroughs, good towns, and well-built villages.'

It is striking that, in a film that foregrounds Britain's resistance to German bombing, the phrase 'provided with all complete provisions of war' was omitted by Jennings from Camden's text. Curious also is the choice of a map on which the North Sea is identified by its Latin name, 'Oceanus Germanicus', suggesting how close the enemy is, and how great the danger.

207/ Britannia (Joanna Quinn 1993)

31/10/2011

Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997 [2009]), p.233.

184/ Gorgo (Eugene Lourie 1961)

8/10/2011

- Nara Island has been destroyed. Reconnaissance aircraft have sighted the creature in this area here.
- Excuse me sir, but that looks as though the thing is heading for England.
- Quite...

After she has destroyed Nara, a fictitious island off the Irish coast, Gorgo's mother is tracked in her quest to retrieve her captured baby. This first map room is dominated by maps of the British Isles.

When she reaches London, we shift to a different map room with a more localised map:

Here it is confessed by the officer in charge that their mapping of her movements is not particularly effective: 'Piccadilly Circus? There's no way of telling where this thing will turn next...'.

In effect such mapping is as difficult a task for the cine-tourist, since the monster is shown in successive parts of London (Trafalgar Square, London Wall, St Paul's, Piccadilly Circus, Battersea Park) with little respect for the topography of the city. This does of course communicate the general confusion of the terrified population as the city is indiscriminately destroyed:

158/ Charlie Chan in London (Eugene Forde 1934)

12/9/2011

Very little other than the film's title situates Chan in London. (It is of course a Hollywood-made film.) Most of the action takes place in a country house in a fictional county ('Retfordshire'), and the few London scenes are all interiors, save for the view of the Houses of Parliament that serves as backdrop to the opening and closing credits, and an exterior view of a prison. A title tells us this is 'Pentonville Prison - London', and we also see fictional newspapers that bear the city's name ('The London Planet', 'London Daily Post', 'London Gazette').
Maps feature only once, in an office at a fictional airbase ('Farnwell'). The film is, effectively, 'Charlie Chan in England', with an accumulation of stereotypical signs (hunting, bobbies, class-inflected accents...) to ensure authenticity. A substantial assembly of authentic British actors (at least 16 of them, including Alan Mowbray, Mona Barrie and Ray Milland) also contributed to this impression.

(The casting of Elsa Buchanan as the maid is discussed in a much later English country house film, Altman's Gosford Park.)

62/ Joyeux Noël (Christian Carion 2005)

8/6/2011

‘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.

33/ It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo 1965)

10/5/2011

'In the opening sequence of It Happened Here Britain is shown joined seamlessly with continental Europe. The arrows of Nazi progress overrun everywhere. The film's ceaselessly chilling effect starts with an attack on the most familiar way the British defend the borders of their idea of nationhood: as an island.’
Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London: Routledge, 2000), p.17.

23/ The First of the Few (Leslie Howard 1942)

30/4/2011

'face = map' (D& G: see map 20 for details)