The two Flint films are full of maps. Some of these I have posted before under other headings, but here is the full complement.
Unfortunately, when I first found the images I didn't sort them according to which film they were from, so if you want to separate them out you'll have to watch the - very entertaining - films. - 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:
Last mystery island (answers tomorrow). A clue: 'KK'.
Answer: King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933) Second day of a brief (3-day) quiz, where the Cine-Tourist invites you to try to guess the film in which a map of an island appears. A clue: 'silex'.
Answer: Our Man Flint (Daniel Mann 1966) a brief (3-day) quiz, where the Cine-Tourist invites you to try to guess the films in which maps of islands appear. A clue: 'CC'.
Answer: Dead Men Tell (Harry Lachman 1941) - a Charle Chan mystery. ‘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. 'A friend tells me: ''It's unhealthy to think of the past as real or true. The human being, he says, undergoes a complete transformation every seven years.'' Still, events remain, even if the Hotel has disappeared or the Hospital was nothing but a make- believe-Hospital everything has occurred for eternity in the imagination which unfolds its map of yesterday, its American Map, in the ill-defined vicinity of my today-reality. There are hundreds of important changes you need to know about today tells yesterday, but in the meantime today is already yesterday. New York has changed a lot. New York never changes. New York is a in perpetual state of a-changing. “Every day, road construction crews, State and Federal transportation authorities and local developers are working to make your maps and atlases out of date,'' American Map states. Only in American could you make such an apocalyptic statement.'
Hélène Cixous, ‘I Will Not Write This Book’, in Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), pp.49-50. See also: (e)space & fiction 'Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific space - mapping it - is not the conclusion of geographical work; it's the beginning. After which begins in fact the most challenging part of the whole enterprise: one looks at the map, and thinks. You look at a specific configuration - those roads that run towards Toledo and Sevilla; those mountains, such a long way from London ; those men and women that live on opposite banks of the Seine - you look at these patterns, and try to understand how it is that ail this gives rise to a story, a plot.'
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998) 'In thus projecting Australia as an unsettled “dark continent,” the map exposes a contradiction on which colonial discourse is predicated, which it is typically at pains to conceal. The map erases any signs of aboriginal habitation and signifies "Australia" as an open, unmarked, unoccupied territory, standing in presumed readiness to be colonized, but it also reveals that the boundaries of the colonial enterprise are not timelessfrontiers that have always really been there, waiting to be fulfilled by the manifest destinies of dominion and the progressive ideals of history itself. Rather, they are revealed as constructed territories, lines on a map, to be drawn by the violent interventions of colonial power.
Unlike the map of Casablanca, the map of Under Capricorn foregrounds its status as a "sign." It is quite obviously a page in a book, as evidenced by an unhidden wrinkle running through it and a printed page-border enclosing it. By contrast to the pristine graphic emblem of Casablanca, that of Under Capricorn presents itself not as an incorporeal symbol, free of material, worldly influences, but as a mundane object, rife with them; and the insistent artifice of the first shots of Australia realizes the anti-illusionist impulse of the presentation of the map.' James Morrison, 'Hitchcock's Ireland: the performance of Irish identity in Juno and the Paycock and Under Capricorn', in Richard Allen & Sam Ishii-Gonzalez (eds), Hitchcock Past and Future (London: Routledge, 2004), p.201. 'And this was Brecht's notion of dialectic: to hold fast to the contradictions in all things, which make them change and evolve in time. But in Hegel, Contradiction then passes over into its Ground, into what I would call the situation itself, the aerial view or the map of the totality in which things happen and History takes place.'
Fredric Jameson, 'Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue', in Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p.76. |
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