David Forgacs, ‘Space, Rhetoric and the Divided City in Roma Città Aperta, in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.113.
‘Surveillance - the controlling view of the city from above, as seen on a map, or from a distance, as through a camera lens – is the key to Bergmann's particular form of power, but also its limitation. As Peter Brunette has pointed out, his power of surveillance is a directfunction of his distance from the city at street level. He views it from above, he knows it through maps and photographs (cameras are like extensions of his eyes), through his agents and spies, like Ingrid, and through the collaboration of the Fascist police, who have local knowledge and intelligence networks of their own that he can tap into.'
David Forgacs, ‘Space, Rhetoric and the Divided City in Roma Città Aperta, in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.113.
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‘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: ‘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. ['The image of the map in Pépé le Moko promises to locate the viewer in a position of mastery.']
‘If, as de Certeau proposes, a "space" is defined by a hero's "direction of existence," then the opening of Pépé le Moko suggests a situation in which this hero is none other than the film’s viewer. That is, the movement from the neoclassical "place" of the police station to the primordial "space" of the Casbah is also a movement away from classicism's stable distance between beholder and spectacle and toward an indeterminacy in which scientific distance alternates with a kind of tactile convergence.’ Charles O’Brien, ‘The “Cinéma colonial” of 1930s France: Film Narration as Spatial Practice’, in Matthew Bernstein & Gaylyn Studlar (eds), Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p.210. ‘As indicated by the subtitle of the film, the Bunting house is situated in London. In the Avenger's range of action, the house is localized on the city map, by both the police and the lodger, in the area where Vauxhall Bridge Road becomes Bessborough Gardens, just before Vauxhall Bridge. As Gary Giblin has demonstrated, this location in Pimlico refutes the claim, repeated by several commentators and Hitchcock himself in a 1970 interview, that the cinematic Buntings lived in Bloomsbury.’
Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: the Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), p.68. '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:
'The face is a map'. Deleuze & Guattari, 'Année zéro - visagéité', in Mille plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p.208. 'Two shots angled have been used for this map, which refer to the two perspectives that have dominated cartography historically: (1) the oblique perspective – or “perspective militaire” – has been widely used by artists since the Middle Ages, to represent landscapes. (2) The vertical perspective or bird’s eye view characterizes the more modern and scientific representation of Earth. These two subsequents views of the same map capture the passage from a classic to a more modern perspective in cartography.'
Sébastien Caquard, 'Murder and Modern Mapping', (e)space & fiction 'The film cuts to a close-up of the map where thumbtacks are set adjacent to dots by place names."Independence" is north of "Manazar", below which a hand pushes another tack while an iris closes on the space and the shot of a car on the road replaces the rest of the map.'
Tom Conley, 'A Map in a Montage', in Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp.86-87. |
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