The 'Carte du pays de Tendre' is a seventeenth-century French confection, an allegorical and topographical lover's guide. It acquired cinematic currency in the late '50s when it served as backdrop to the credits for Louis Malle's Les Amants, and carto-theoretical currency more recently when Malle's use of it was analysed by map readers Giuliana Bruno and Tom Conley (see here). In Tire au flanc 62, a New Wave comedy about the life of conscripts, the protagonist is in love with the Colonel's daughter, and in his dreams reconfigures the assault course (which he had failed to negotiate earlier that day) into a Carte du pays de Tendre, with obstacles labelled in the manner of the seventeenth-century map: (He eventually wins through to the end of the course and finds true love, as you can see here.)
0 Comments
On his way to the idyllic resort from which he plans to steal a diamond, the thief stops at P617, a filling station, and consults his map. The cover of the map is of the familiar, Michelin-type, but the terrain we are shown once it is unfolded is more strange.
In Paul Grimault's satire of the arms trade, the dealer is alerted to the breakout of war by a signal on his map, so travels in turn to each of two warring countries (his journey is traced for us on the map), selling to each the means of destroying its neighbour. (The particular WMD in question is a violin.)
Given that the map is imaginary, no specific country can be identified, but the trader does travel from left to right on the map, implicating the West. 'I drew this map from memory', explains Silbad - a mise-en-abîme of the real planet Perdide, as drawn by Moebius from imagination, and also from memories (Tanguy? Hitchcock? ...):
‘God first appears on screen as a disembodied head chasing the movie's titular thieves down a hallway in a British home, demanding that the gang return a stolen map. The time bandits, essentially subcontractors to whom God had assigned the work of designing trees and shrubs, had incurred God's wrath by designing the pink bungadoo, a bright-red 600-foot tree that smelled terrible. As a disciplinary measure, God transferred the bandits to the repair department. Because the creation of the world was a rushed job, crammed into seven days, the fabric of the universe contained a number of holes. Instead of repairing these holes, however, the time bandits stole God's map charting the locations of the holes and traveled through the holes to try to get rich through larceny.’
Christopher Heard, ‘God’, in Eric Mazur (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion and Film (Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 2011), p.198. ‘In Lindsay Anderson's 1973 O Lucky Man!, starring Malcolm McDowell, British imperialists meet with a Third World dictator for a presentation about foreign investment and labor conditions in the fictionalized African nation of Zinagara. British actor Arthur Lowe, in blackface, plays African strongman Dr. Munda. His economist narrates an audiovisual account of Zingara's free export zone, offering foreign investors excellent labor conditions: peon wages, the illegality of strikes, no income tax. Sir James Burgess (Ralph Richardson) asks if there's the “threat of insurrection?” Germanic Colonel Steiger shows another film, about a counterinsurgency campaign against rebels. The essence of the transaction is that Dr. Munda and Colonel Steiger want to grant Burgess the rights to construct resorts along Zinagara's coasts, in exchange for napalm which the African dictator will deploy against insurgents.’
Ed Rampell, Progressive Hollywood: a People’s Film History of the United States (New York: The Disinformation Company, 2005), p.105. The credits open by panning up the map, showing firstly only the Lake of Indifference but revealing the word 'dangereuse' as the name of Jeanne Moreau appears: This map is a reference point for occasional map-reader Giuliana Bruno: ‘She inscribed a journey on her map of home, using a form of cartographic representation that goes all the way back to Madeleine de Scudery's Carte du pays de Tendre (1654), a map that visualized, in the form of landscape, a world of affects. An emotional journey is drawn in these maps of lived space. They show the motion of emotions that reside in-house. In this affective mapping drawn by women home can indeed turn into a voyage.’ Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), p.165. Bruno reads the use of this map in Les Amants in Atlas of Emotions, p. 241. See also Tom Conley, 'Michelin Tendre', in Cartographic Cinema, pp. 127ff, and T. Jefferson Kline, 'Cinema and/as Mapping', in Unravelling French Cinema, pp. 89ff. The other map in Les Amants is a map of France. The Scudéry map also appears in Givray and Truffaut's Tire au flanc '62 (1960). ‘Like Moby- Dick, whose ribbed brow mirrored Ahab's, King Kong is an image both of the Other (specifically — depending on the sensibility of the perceiver — gorilla, ape-man, black male) and of the Self (our generic self as Hominid). Carl Denham in many ways resembles Ahab, moreover, when Denham finally "spill[s] it" about the nature and destination of the secret voyage, he says of Kong's Island, "you won't find that island on any chart.” Like Queequeg's home, "true places never are" on any map. But this one must be just off the map, at the edge of what is known, where there be dragons. Seelye assumes that the dinosaurs are the only dragons here as Kong ironically becomes the chivalrous knight defending the damsel Ann Darrow from the dragon tyrannosaurus. Noël Carroll, on the other hand, dismisses the dragon completely from the mythical architecture of the film: he claims that "Kong is not even peripherally a dragon story. The reason is simple; dinosaurs do not belong to the same symbolic species as dragons". Dinosaurs, he claims, are not "fusion figures" as dragons are. Once we realize that King Kong is a retelling of the Andromeda myth we see how both these readers are wrong. Kong is a dragon become an ape.’
Joseph Andriano, Immortal Monster: the Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p.46. |
|