The last we see of the map is when the villain throws a glass at the screen in frustration, damaging the area around Borough High Street:
Any close-up of a map of Battersea immediately brings to mind the brilliant Cinematic Geographers of Battersea, definitive cine-mappers of this district: The Battersea close-up shows one of the four locations where a murder will be committed. Another shows a location in Borough: The map as a whole is shown several times, projected onto a screen in the home of the man planning those murders: As the also brilliant sleuths at the Reel Streets website succinctly put it, the map 'cheats on all the locations': (Click on the above for the actual locations of this film, identified by Reel Streets.) The last we see of the map is when the villain throws a glass at the screen in frustration, damaging the area around Borough High Street: The film opens with a quite different kind of map, though it too appears on a screen: The 'world' of the television programme's title and logo is picked up in the ironic glimpse of a British Airways poster at the end of the film, when the murderous scheme is discovered to have been futile:
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'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). |
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