Alexandre Tylski, Roman Polanski (Rome: Greemese, 2006), p.57.
Here is the other map in The Tenant:
‘It is Munch’s painting Night in Saint Cloud (1890) , showing a solitary individual by a window in the half-light, that seems to be, with The Scream (1893), the closing image of The Tenant, one of the most powerful pictorial influences on the film, along with perhaps Fritz Lang’s M, notably the image of the police inspector and the map of the city behind him.’
Alexandre Tylski, Roman Polanski (Rome: Greemese, 2006), p.57. Here is the other map in The Tenant:
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‘“It’s only the first time that interests me”, says Alex in Boy Meets Girl. Under a Chinese image of a nursery rhyme, he has hung a mythical map of Paris, marked with his first theft, first encounter, first kiss, first night, first murder. The hallucinatory shock, like being wakened by the telephone ringing, is precisely the loss of certainty, the impression of déjà vu, “like a memory of the present”.’
Youssef Ishaghpour, Cinéma contemporain: de ce côté du miroir (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1986), p.249-50. ‘The term "cinema of process" might also be applied to Jeff's bandaging of his wounded arm and the celebrated chase through the Paris métro with Jeff being picked up and lost by a succession of plainclothes police figures while the inspector follows the chase, Mabuse-like, on a giant illuminated map of the métro system.
Melville's work, to the chagrin of many critics and on his own recurrent insistence, is hermetically sealed, has no direct purchase on the "real" world, is ultimately (in its conscious dimensions at any rate) about cinema rather than "reality".’ Colin McArthur , ‘Mise-en-scène degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, in Susan Hayward & Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 2000), p.198. For a fuller discussion of maps and places in Le Samourai, see here. ‘This self-proclaimed 'cat expert' takes Chloe to a nearby street map. This map, of a kind found throughout Paris for the use of visitors and tourists unfamiliar with the geography of the city, becomes something quite different as Madame Clavo personalises and transforms its one-dimensional representation of space, describing who liveswhere and explaining how they can help in the search for Gris-Gris. This move from map to lived experience typifies the film's treatment of the area in which it is set. Rather than use the location as a mere backdrop for the narrative (a means of 'mapping' more important themes and characters) Klapisch sets out to show the quartier in all its complex, mobile reality (it is perhaps the film's most important theme ands character.)’
Luzy Mazdon, ‘Space, Place and Community in Chacun cherche son chat’, in Lucy Mazdon (ed.), France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2001), p.101. ‘In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, to use the phrase of Mr Alexander Trocchi, as a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.’
Willam S. Burroughs, ‘Censorship’, The Transatlantic Review, 11 (1962), p.6. ‘We make a kind of map of the world for ourselves, a 'hodological' map, charting out the paths by which we have to reach our various goals, and in the light of this map we see the world before us as if it were an artefact of our own. But there are blocks and difficulties as well as routes, and when the obstacles become too great, we pretend that we can get what we need by magic instead of by the proper, natural, means. Now this effort to change the world by magical means, although it is essentially goal-directed, is not actually something upon which, at the time, we are in a position to reflect. It is not an object of consciousness.’
Mary Warnock, preface to Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (London: Routledge, 2002), p.xiii. Another map in the film: France. ‘The film opens with a spinning globe and a zoom-in shot towards Western Europe and France. The map fades into a larger-scale map of Europe centred on Paris, from which a bold line is drawn toward the South through Marseille, the Mediterranean Sea, Oran and finally Casablanca, the setting for the film. At this point, the map dissolves into a view from a high roof in the city, followed by a vertical panoramic (tilt shot) that takes the audience down to the busy streets of Casablanca. In 1 min, we have crossed multiple scales from the entire globe to the street level.
This journey predates several of the zooming capabilities developed more than 60 years later in virtual globes. First, it integrates the combination of the spinning globe with a zoom effect on a specific point. Second, it uses a similar ‘jump’ effect as the one currently available in Google Earth to move from one place to another. In this case, the journey from Paris to Casablanca starts with a zoom in on Paris, followed by a zoom out moving toward Southern Europe, then a zoom in to Morocco and finally Casablanca. The jump effect is very compelling as it simultaneously follows the journey from Paris to Casablanca being traced on the map. Third, the perspective changes from 90 degree view of the cartographic representation of the world, to an oblique perspective of the streets of Casablanca and resonates with the recent development of street views functionalities in applications such as Google Map.’ Sébastien Caquard, Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography: A Historical Review of Cinematic Maps in Films’, The Cartographic Journal 46.1 (2009) A different map in the film. 'Down below, in the dark quiet courtyard of the Prefecture, there are two vans full of policemen ready to dash out in serious emergencies. In sixty police stations, other vans are waiting, as well as policemen with bicycles. Another light. “Attempted suicide by barbiturate poisoning, in a block of flats in the Rue Blanche”, Daniel echoed. All day and all night the dramatic life of the capital is thus reflected in little lights on a wall; whenever a van or a patrol goes out from a police station the reason for its movement is reported to the central office.' Georges Simenon, 'Maigret and the Unlucky Inspector' [1946], in Maigret’s Christmas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p.102. Here is the same locale in a Simenon adaptation from the same year, Jean Delannoy's Maigret tend un piège:
'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) 'Film stories are something like tavel routes. A map is the most exciting thing in the world for me; when I see a map I immediately feel restless, especially when it is a map of a country or city where I have never been before. I look at all the different names and want to know what they refer to — the streets of a city, the cities of a country. When I look at a map it eventually turns into an allegory of life itself. I can only bear to look at maps if I try to chart a path and to follow it through the city or country. Stories do just that: they provide orientation in an unknown territory, where otherwise you would travel to a thousand different . places without ever getting anywhere.’
Wim Wenders, 'Impossible Stories', in The Logic of Images London: Faber, 1991). ‘The map of modern Paris resembles what Walter Benjamin's modernism saw as the mythic spaces of ancient Greece on which entrances to the underworld would be marked. “Our waking existence,” he continued with 1930s Paris in mind, “likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld — a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise.” The paradigmatic map of Paris pictures the city above ground, schematized by the winding network of its streets, with the famous monuments clearly indicated, among them the entrances to the catacombs and the various metro stations.’
David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: the World beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p.27. 'In the interstices the demon of absentmindedness reigns supreme.
Paris is not the only place where this holds true. All the cosmopolitan centres that are also sites of splendour are becoming more and more alike. Their differences are disappearing. Wide streets lead from the faubourgs into the splendour of the centre. But this is not the intended centre. The good fortune in store for the poverty further out is reached by radii other than the extant ones. Nevertheless, the streets that lead to the centre must be travelled, for its emptiness today is real.' Siegfried Kracauer, 'Analysis of a City Map' (1926), in The Mass Ornament (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 43-45. 'I scarcely know of anything but those two harbors at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain--which are at the Louvre and which juxtapose extremely dissimilar urban ambiances--that can rival in beauty the Paris metro maps. It will be understood that in speaking here of beauty I don't have in mind plastic beauty--the new beauty can only be beauty of situation--but simply the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a sum of possibilities.'
Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955) |
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