An explorer's map is the narrative pretext, but other than the cinemap of the journey across Africa, which the film returns to twice, the only map we see is this: ... and a glimpse of a globe:
0 Comments
There are maps in the film, on none of which is Pimlico featured.
A recurrent object is that terrible rival of the map, the scale model, representing a particular and significant (if not yet built) part of Pimlico: In the course of various unfeasible adventures, Monsieur de Crac finds himself comfortably installed in Mount Etna, smoking a pipe, when he is confronted by the Monster of the Volcano, who throws him down into the bowels of the earth and out into an ocean on the other side of the world: The maps are all just inconsequential things in the background, but I really like the first of these three moments. Happy New Year to all.
261/ L'Assassinat du Père Noël [The Murder of Santa Claus] (Christian-Jaque 1941): all the maps24/12/2011 'Some films, however — vague allegories of French indomitability — also could be interpreted as suggesting resistance to oppression. Perhaps the first such film was Christian-Jaque’s L’Assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Santa Claus 1941). Set in a snow-covered mountain village, it tells the story of a map-maker, Cornusse, who plays Santa Claus for the local children every year. On Christmas Eve, odd events occur: a sinister figure steals a saint’s relics from the church, and the village’s baron, returned from an enigmatic absence, courts Cornusse’s ethereal daughter. All ends well, with Cornusse’s visit miraculously curing a crippled boy. Cornusse tells him that a French sleeping beauty will someday be awakened by a Prince Charming. Although L’Assassinat du Père Noël was the first production by Continental, the German firm, its symbolic message was presumably apparent to many French filmgoers.' Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell, Film History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), p.274. The maps in the film point to a reading in terms of what is happening in the world beyond the village, i.e. France, as above, in the globe-maker's curious addition of modern war planes to the embellishments of his pre-modern depiction of the world. The part of the globe shown here is very much the other side of the world, but a connection with France is suggested because the globe shows Indo-China, a French possession. In the schoolroom, this map showing the Soviet Union, just as the German offensive on the Eastern Front was building momentum, would make a similar point about the world beyond France, but if there is a message relating to the situation of France it is in the proverb displayed above: 'Bien mal acquit ne profite jamais' (there is no profit in goods ill-acquired). We may conclude that the Germans will not profit from their acquisition of France, nor from their efforts to acquire Russia: A Vichyist context is all the more apparent in the subject of the children's lesson. The teacher has put a quotation from La Fontaine on the blackboard: 'Le Travail est un trésor' (work is a treasure). La Fontaine's phrase (from 'Le Laboureur et ses enfants') looks like an affirmation of Vichy values ('Travail Famille Patrie'), especially when framed with a map of France, but the fact that the phrase comes from a fable should invite the reader to read the film also as a fable: Later, in one of the film's more crudely allegorical moments, a stolen globe slips from a child's arms and rolls away to smash against a tree. Later still, and beyond allegory, the death of Harry Baur under torture by the Gestapo makes it difficult for us not to read the films he made under the Occupation as emblems of resistance to oppression. In an earlier post (here) I had speculated that a scene in Edward Scissorhands held the record for showing the most globes, but it is clearly beaten by Cornusse's shop in L'Assassinat du Père Noël.
An illuminated globe on a pachinko parlour in Kyoto is shot such that, if Japan is visible at all, it appears to be at the edge of the world. The film's other location - Luxembourg passing for Geneva - is not figured on this map at all.
A plot premise of House of Bamboo is the cooperation of Tokyo police and U.S. military in the investigation of a crime. The offices of each set of investigators are returned to regularly in the film, and each space has its own maps of the Tokyo area: Parallels are drawn with the criminals responsible, who are shown planning a robbery with military meticulousness and maps (the gang is made up of former U.S. servicemen): Later, the same criminals are ahown planning a further robbery in the Ginza district by means of this improvised map: This plan is transcribed by an undercover police agent, and his hand-drawn map is passed to the U.S. military investigators: The film's famous climax at a rooftop amusement park overlooking Tokyo features a turning globe as attraction, combining overt cartographic symbolism with intertextual echoes of The Third Man and White Heat ('Top of of the world, Ma'):
The globe turns slowly in this minor map moment from Half A Man, a highpoint of '60s art cinema by Vittorio de Seta (15.10.1923-28.11.201 - see here at the Daily Mubi).
Gance's anticipation of the world's destruction begins with a turning globe in close-up. The globe motif is troped upon soon after by this telescopic view of the approaching comet, as if the night sky were a distorting mirror in which the globe is reflected: Planispheric maps of the celestial spheres, in close-up, develop the motif: Maps of the world and the skies are both seen in the lecture room where the protagonist presents his findings on the impending catastrophe: But by the climax it is the world and its constituent parts that are focused on, as we are about to witness the destruction of these places each in turn, returning to extreme close-ups of the map in the film's final cartographic moments:
This remake of Ninotchka avoids replicating Lubitsch's famous Paris street map scene (see here), contenting itself cartographically with a solitary globe in the background.
After a written prologue the film opens with a map superimposed on an advancing train, the Orient Express, heading East. This movement across Europe suggests the general vicinity of Ruritania, without having to show the fictional country on the map: According to the panel on the train, Strelsau, the capital of Ruritania, is somewhere between Vienna and Bucharest: A globe serves as a real-world counterpoint to the fanciful place names that identify these protagonists - Antoinette de Mauban, Michael Duke of Strelsau and Rupert of Hentzau: The film's last map is entirely fictional, a plan of the castle of Zenda from which the King must be rescued:
Of the film's many attractions, all I can find of pertinence to this blog are these additions to collections posted earlier (see here, here and here). Fuller coverage of things the Cine-Tourist is interested in would have signalled: Nico as star (pre-Warhol, pre-Velvets, pre-Delon, pre-Garrel); Serge Gainsbourg as composer and pianist (with a theme sung by Juliette Greco - listen here); Big Joe Turner as himself; some nice places and things (views of Paris, bridges, stairs, neon signs, cars, cameras...); and a selection of Europe's finest striptease artistes (including Poupée La Rose, Cherry Liberty, Nadia Safari and Rafa Temporel)... (You can see more of Nico here.)
The idea of a map, one showing the separation of East and West Berlin, is central to the film, but the only map suggesting that idea is this, on which at one point the line separating East and West Germany can be seen. This map of Germany is in the room of a West Berliner whose seductions of women is the principal plot motive.
In the room of the film's heroine, a law student who recovers from being abandoned by the seducer to become a high court judge, there is a globe: Most of Opera is busy mocking classic opera scenes, but towards its close it turns into social satire, and represents the self-destruction of the world very neatly:
The lengthy scrutiny of this turning globe is just a preamble to the charmless seduction of a beautiful woman (Juliette Mayniel) by an ugly man (Gérard Hoffman): (See here to see more of the wonderful Juliette Mayniel.)
There are six maps in this spy spoof, all of them of the United States or parts thereof. What they lack in topographical breadth they make up for by varieties of form. At headquarters a set of sliding maps shows first California then a panel with Arizona and New Mexico: The film's US-centric cartography deprives its evil genius of the usual large-scale world map that would represent the scale of his ambition. True, he does have a globe, but what we see of it shows the Americas, and specifically the United States: A map of the US is shown as part of the ordinary décor of a gas station, but when the seemingly ordinary manager turns out to be an agent of the evil genius, the map reminds us that the danger is localised: The plot to detonate explosions is exactly mapped in a control room seen through cctv monitors, with a close up localising the danger spot (the local here means specific nuclear test sites): The finest map moment is this overhead view of the region concerned, followed by a close up in which the evil genius releases a red liquid to illustrate his plan: The climax is the thwarting of the plan by an attack on the control room (no longer viewed through cctv) and the adjustment of a missile's trajectory:
My apologies if you think you have seen too many globes in these posts. I was looking through The Big Sleep for the hidden camera scene (see here), and came across two rooms with globes that I had forgotten. I don't think it is possible to make anything thematic out of this motif in this film. I would guess that - as in a large number of other incidental globes (see here) - they are serving two basic purposes: 1/ to connote intellectual curiosity (like books); 2/ to modify subtly the composition by introducing soft round lines into angular spaces.
The most globes in close-up I have seen, and - given the cupboard-full on which these globes stand - the most globes seen in a single scene (please let me know if you know of any higher globe counts).
The two globes in this store are artfully positioned, not so much to signal black and white together - though that harmony is at the film's sentimental core - but rather to indicate the history of the blues, after the passage from Africa to the Americas. That history is the film's discursive core, and that the globe showing the Americas is black may be a riposte to any idea of Americanisation as a whitening. The quest in the film is to find a particular crossroads, and it might seem that its pursuit would require a map. Their guide, however, is not a map but a drawing:
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.)
In an earlier assemblage of cine-globes (here) I had omitted one of the best, this crumpled hemisphere with a rictus-like void where London should be.
Designed by Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard, the credit sequence of Sleepless In Seattle is very simple, the slow revelation from east to west of a map of the United States. The map combines the political and the physical, showing both states and mountains, and is shot from an angle rather than overhead. The curve of the horizon and the schematic arrangement of stars above the map suggest that this is a view of a planet (one on which the only distinguishing feature is the United States): In different colours, the map returns periodically in the film as the basis of a graphic representation of characters' movements across the country: At the very end of the film a map appears, revealed as the camera withdraws slowly from a Manhattan of lights. The lights look like stars in a black sky, and as it grows distant New York comes to resemble a galaxy. Eventually, the whole of the Unites States is outlined by points of light,and the country becomes a constellation: (I may have missed the point of joke being made, but to me this angled view of the United States makes the country look remarkably like a fish.) There are more conventional maps in the mise-en-scène. A protagonist discusses the geography of the United States with the aid of a wall map: Another protagonist has a map of the city in which she works (Baltimore) on the wall of the office in which she works: When she visits another city (Seattle), she consults a map of that city: She also finds herself in front of a peculiarly decorated, spinning globe in a shop-window display:
|
|