                F for Fake is playing tonight, Friday November 4, in the Screen Shadows Fakery season (Bethnal Green). See here for details.            ‘Embodying the dynamics of journey, cinema maps a heterotopic photography.’ In ‘Mapping the subject’ (1995), required reading for anyone interested in the relation of topography to representation, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift were perhaps the first to quote a since much read page from Giuliana Bruno’s 1993 book Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, though by accident the word ‘photography’ was substituted for Bruno’s ‘topography’. Heterotopic photography is a concept yet to be fully explored. Bruno’s original text reads as follows: Cinematic pleasure belongs to the range of erotic pleasures of the nomadic gaze first known to the traveler and the flaneur and then embodied, by way of panoramic spatio-visuality, in the modes of inhabiting space of transitorial architectures. Suggesting these historic aspects of the fascination of the apparatus, and highlighting its fantasmatic connection to travel and landscaping. One looks back not only to early cinema but also 'back to the future'. This view offers numerous avenues for future studies. One can place the art of " unconscious optics" in the context of contemporary forms of intercultural traveling and sites of spatio-temporal tourism, of which airplane cinema is the ultimate metonymy. For if "the unconscious is housed," it is also “moving”. Embodying the dynamics of journey, cinema maps a heterotopic topography. Its heterotopic fascination is to be understood as the attraction to, and habitation of, a site without a geography, a space capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several possibly incompatible sites as well as times, a site whose system of opening and closing both isolates it and makes it penetrable, as it forms a type of elsewhere/nowhere, where "we calmly and adventurously go travelling". Thus, we female spectators, in the midst of the "far-flung ruins and debris" of our old enclosed prison world, may go traveling. As we move through filmic architectures, as in "streetwalking" through the meter-polis, our mother-city, we reclaim forbidden pleasures – wandering through erotic geographies. Giuliana Bruno, ‘Streetwalking around Plato’s Cave’, in Streetwalking on a ruined map: cultural theory and the city films of Elvira Notari (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.57. See also: Steve Pile & Nigel Thrift, ‘Mapping the subject’, in Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995), p.22.         ‘Published on 23 September 1958, the book had a distinctive blue cover with “EXODUS” in type that evoked Hebrew lettering. A freedom fighter stretched the complete length of the book jacket, his rifle barrel casually pointing upward to the author's name. Maps are used for the endpapers and to introduce each of the five books of the novel (an intentional parallel with the five books of Moses that make up the Torah). A biblical quotation accompanies each of the maps that introduce an individual section. Additionally, a map of the Middle East emphasizing the minuscule region of Israel appears inside the front cover. The rear map is a close-up of the country , the verso the northern part of the land, the recto the southern. Uris clearly felt the need to situate the reader geographically throughout his 626 pages.’
Ira B. Nadel, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), p.108. Preminger’s film features several maps, but none of them works to situate the viewer geographically throughout its 119 minutes.  ‘Pushing pins onto a spread of countries marked by borders has its uses. In high school all of us pored over successive shapes of world power: the Greeks, the Romans, various barbarian kingdoms, Islam's arms reaching through Africa and girdling Europe. What would a map of cinematic power show?’
Dudley Andrew, 'An Atlas of World Cinema', in Stephanie Dennison & Song Hwee Lim, Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower, 2006), p.20. |
