This animated logo for a distribution company prefaced the 1946 film Martin Roumagnac. There are no maps actually in the film.
To the Cine-Tourist's regret, 'location' in the third frame up means rental, not the place in which the film was shot. The principal location of the film is Saint-Dizier, Haute-Marne, though an excursion is made to a studio-bound Paris: The only maps in The Birds are those you would expect to find in a schoolroom, alongside all the other usual accoutrements: For a map of the locations, go to cine-touristic websites such as this: Or see those provided by the 'Making of...' documentaries in dvd editions: The film itself provides no map of the area, but does enjoy a map-like birds' eye view of Bodega Bay: The change in the aspect of the logo from beginning to end may occur with every Universal film at the time, but it seems to correspond to the dark mood at the end of The Birds:
Two parallel boardroom scenes mark a shift in attitude for the female protagonist. In the first she is all powerful, and the initial staging whereby she is blocked by the standing man in the centre is ironic. The framing and staging of the rest of the sequence will establish clearly her dominion over the men in the boardroom. Her positioning in relation to the two maps contributes to that impression.
In the second sequence the initial staging indicates a diminution of power. Though this time she is immediately visible, she is off-centre in relation to the maps. In the course of the sequence there are framings that match those of the earlier sequence, and it is her change in dress and demeanour, rather, that underscore the what has changed in the cours of the narrative. The schoolroom is the one map scene in Imitation of Life. The arrival of Annie (Juanita Moore) reveals to the class her daughter's blackness, causing her to run from the room, the first of several such flights around which the mother-daughter story is organised. The lesson is about difference on an international scale (what Santa Claus is called in different countries), but the map of the United States is an invitation to read the personal melodrama in national terms.
For a full-scale reading of Imitation of Life in such terms, see Ryan DeRosa, 'Black Passing and White Pluralism: Imitation of Life in the Civil Rights Struggle', in Deborah Barker & Kathryn McKee (eds), American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), pp. 151-78. ‘A film is not its shots, but the way they have been joined. As a general once told me, a battle often occurs at the point where two maps touch.’
Robert Bresson, ‘Encountering Robert Bresson’, interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, republished in The Films of Robert Bresson: Casebook (London: Anthem, 2009), p. 96. Below are more maps from Bresson films. 'Keiller's suggestion that London's positioning on the map of the world and the axis of history can be seen in two contrasting ways - as the top of the world or as its bottom, as a place which is stuck in the past or ultra-modern - renders this city particularly conducive to a discourse on postmodernism, which emphasises relativism and circularity. London supports the postmodern claim that there is no social progress, or that progress is always relative: advancement in one area of social life can be accompanied by regression in another.'
Laura Rascaroli & Ewa Mazierska, Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp.62-63. ‘The recurrent image of the spinning globe similarly entitles the scientist .to possess the world, since the globe, as the world's representation, allegorizes the relationship between creator and creation. Cinema's penchant for spinning-globe logos serves to celebrate the medium's kinetic possibilities as well as its global ubiquity, allowing spectators a cheap voyage while remaining in the metropolitan “centers”.’
Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) 27-29 |
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