• home
  • index of films
    • index of films featuring maps
    • index of films featuring photography
    • bibliography
  • blogs
    • maps in films
    • choses vues - things seen
    • l'Escalographe
    • the BlowUp moment
  • how to map a film
    • the first maps >
      • Some Maps in Gance's Napoléon
  • Paris
    • 1890s-1909 >
      • firemen in Paris, 1896
      • La Villette c.1896-97
      • Hatot-Breteau 1897
      • Place de l'Opéra
      • Paris 1900
      • French Cancan >
        • the real Paquerette >
          • Paquerettes
      • Alice Guy - Paris locations >
        • Alice Guy in the brothel ...
      • a dangerous street corner
      • Capellani in Paris
      • La Fille du faux-monnayeur
    • 1910-1929 >
      • a gateway out of Paris c.1910
      • L'Enfant de Paris (narrative of an identification)
      • Fantomas Over Paris: episode 1 >
        • Fantomas Over Paris: episode 2 >
          • Fantomas Over Paris: episode 3 >
            • Fantomas Over Paris: episode 4 >
              • Fantomas Over Belgium
      • One Place, Three Films: Fantomas and the French New Wave
      • a staircase in Belleville
      • Vampires Over Paris >
        • Les Vampires 1
        • Les Vampires 2
        • Les Vampires 3
        • Les Vampires 4
        • Les Vampires 5
        • Les Vampires 6
        • Les Vampires, 7
        • Les Vampires 8
        • Les Vampires 9
        • Les Vampires 10
      • Irma Vep posts a letter
      • Inside-Outside: space and light in Judex
      • L'Affaire Barsac
      • neon Paris c.1913
      • electric nights in Paris (and Berlin)
    • 1930-1959 >
      • Quai des Orfèvres
      • Olivia - Audry - 1951
      • Paris Noir: Becker, Dassin, Melville
      • the persistence of graffiti: Paris c.1952
      • Du rififi chez les hommes - reading topotropically >
        • Du rififi chez les hommes - locations identified
      • Het Parijs van Le Ballon rouge
    • the New Wave and after >
      • New Wave places >
        • New Wave Paris >
          • New Wave Newness: architecture in Paris
          • Eric Rohmer in the rue de la Huchette, c.1956
          • Les 400 coups: Paris locations >
            • Baisers volés
          • 'New York Herald Tribune' - Parrish and Godard on the rue de Berri >
            • A bout de souffle (narrative of an identification)
          • the Grisbi connection: Chabrol and Becker
          • Les Bonnes Femmes: sequence by sequence
          • Une femme est une femme: the places documented
          • the boulevard des Italiens
          • Jules et Jim: Paris configured
          • the place of cinema: cinema as location in Vivre sa vie
          • Godard and Melville: the view from the rue Jenner >
            • Melville: more views from the rue Jenner
          • the New Wave in Pigalle c.1963
          • La Peau douce - displaced places
          • Le Bonheur 1965
          • Paris vu par
          • Masculin Féminin
          • The Topography of La Guerre est finie
        • France
      • Le Samourai: places and maps >
        • Un flic: art and artifice
      • Bresson in Paris - Pickpocket
      • Bresson 69-71
      • Every Revolution
      • statues in Godard and Duras
      • Holy Motors >
        • Holy Motors - notes
    • banlieues >
      • Le Canal de Ourcq
      • Ville d'Avray en 1903
      • Three filmmakers in Romainville
      • filmmaking in the Fontainebleau forest
      • Feuillade's lonely villas
      • anarchists in the suburbs c.1912
      • One Church Two Cemeteries: Clouzot and Chabrol at Montfort L'Amaury
      • Feuilladian Franju - Les Yeux sans visage
      • country houses and suburban villas
      • banlieue locations in L'Amour existe
      • the Landru Villa
      • 1 place 2 filmmakers: Rivette & Chabrol in Ermenonville
      • Céline et Julie: what's the address of that house?
      • cinemas in La Petite Voleuse
    • The Stairs: Paris
  • London
    • 1890s-1920s >
      • Lumiere London >
        • Lumière London, bis
      • Robert Paul in London: tour guide and film maker
      • Ultus in Isleworth
      • Cocaine 1922
      • Fu Manchu 1923
    • London Locations >
      • Piccadilly Circus >
        • Piccadilly Circus in films
        • Piccadilly Circus in art
        • Piccadilly Circus in postcards
        • Piccadilly Circus photographed
        • Piccadilly Circus: invisible things
      • Muswell Hill
      • the Arsenal Stadium mysteries
      • Brentford streets on screen
    • the locality of London studios >
      • Early Ealing
      • straight out of Whetstone
      • Walthamstow's studios
    • Sherlock Holmes >
      • some Baker Street irregularities
      • an American Sherlock in London
    • Sojourners + Cosmopolitans >
      • London in French Film >
        • Rififi in London
        • London in London River
      • maps in krimis
      • Kriminal (1966)
      • Kaurismaki's London c. 1989
    • places in Face
  • Geneva
    • Swiss New Wave - shared-world practice
    • Geneva in Swiss New Wave films >
      • SNW Geneva: collective housing
      • SNW Geneva: villas
      • SNW Geneva: bowlings + piscines
    • The Chronology of Le Petit Soldat
    • La Lune avec les dents (Michel Soutter 1966)
    • L'Inconnu de Shandigor (J.-L. Roy 1967)
  • signage, etc.
  • studios, etc.
    • Eclair
    • Eclipse
    • Gaumont >
      • Cité Elgé locations
    • Lumière
    • Lux
    • Pathé >
      • Where's Max >
        • when Harry met Max, and where
        • Max takes the train
      • Bébé victime d'une erreur...
      • Montreuil in Pathe films
      • Pathé police stations
      • Pathé filmmaking in Nice c. 1908
    • studios & the local >
      • Ealing >
        • Kind Hearts and Coronets: suburbia and other places
        • the view from Ealing
  • my local filmmaker
    • The Unfortunate Policeman >
      • Buy Your Own Cherries >
        • The Medium Exposed >
          • The ? Motorist >
            • The Fatal Hand >
              • A Little Bit of Cloth
              • Blind Man's Bluff >
                • Bill Sikes Up-To-Date
    • Walter Booth in Muswell Hill
  • my local cinemas
  • favourites
    • Agnès Varda >
      • Cleo 5-7 - Time
      • Sans toit ni loi >
        • Sans toit ni loi - the 12 tracking shots
        • Mona's postcard collection
    • Alice Guy >
      • Alice Guy + JLG
    • Chris Marker
    • Jacques Rivette >
      • a map of Out 1
      • Le Pont du Nord: locations identified >
        • topographical telescoping in Le Pont du Nord
        • Le Pont du Nord (narrative of an identification)
    • J.-L. Godard >
      • Godardiana
      • A bout de souffle: footnotes to the film >
        • A bout de souffle - the cast list
        • A bout de souffle in colour
      • photographs in Le Petit Soldat
      • Bande à part
      • Paintings in Pierrot le fou
      • sculptures in Made in USA
      • Les Fins de Godard
      • Week End - time, place and cars
      • Bukowski in Sauve qui peut (la vie)
      • Life magazine + Hdc
    • J.-P. Melville
    • Louis Feuillade
    • Max Linder
    • Robert Paul
  • cine-tourists
    • a German tourist in Paris: Le Silence de la mer
    • an American tourist in Paris
    • History Lessons in Rome
  • Nouvelle Vague
    • New Wave Christmas
    • the New Wave and modern art >
      • New Wave Braque
      • New Wave Chagall
      • New Wave Klee
      • New Wave Manet
      • New Wave Miro
      • New Wave Modigliani
      • New Wave Picasso
      • Pierre Alechinsky in Le Joli Mai (1963)
    • New Wave cameos
    • Attal et Zardi
    • Le Signe du Lion: six small things
    • New Wave films in New Wave films
    • Cahiers du Cinéma on screen
  • other things
    • assorted stamps
    • Maps in Books
    • the topographies of La Fille aux yeux d'or
    • place-time in Thérèse Raquin
    • photography >
      • 10 photographs by Brassaï in 3 Paris dancehalls >
        • painters in the rue Blomet
      • Gisèle Freund in Paris >
        • Gisèle Freund in Histoire(s) du cinéma
      • Godard's Histoire(s): photographs of women
      • the photographer as photographer: André Dino with Tati, Truffaut and Chabrol
      • some Simenon book covers
      • films playing at the Moulin Rouge
    • building sites >
      • a building site and some buildings, c.1961 >
        • Jean Ginsberg
      • 93 - Seine Saint Denis: HLM, cités, grands ensembles >
        • 93 - Seine Saint Denis: Aubervilliers to Bondy
        • 93 - Seine Saint Denis: Drancy to l'île Saint Denis
        • 93 - Seine Saint Denis: La Courneuve to Saint Ouen
        • 93 - Seine Saint Denis: Sevran to Villepinte
      • Chateau Gaillard
      • Euston Station
    • investigations >
      • A Remarkable Journey in Zigoto's New Motor-Car - 1912
      • the Hotel Bristol enigma
    • news >
      • French news
      • news from England
      • news from the U.S.
    • a picture of great significance
    • A Girl and a Gun >
      • Griffith, Shadowland, May 1922
  • efc - places
  • contact details
    • directories
    • address books
    • hotel registers
    • envelopes and postcards
    • telegrams
  • family, locality
    • a Succession of Edwards
    • Henri Grieshaber - architecte chaudefonnier
  • about this site
  • Publications
The Cine-Tourist

101/ Espoir (André Malraux 1939): all the maps

17/7/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
The only maps in Espoir are in an operational headquarters. An early sequence, three minutes in, establishes the interpretation of maps as a key to military strategy.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Later, a local who has specific knowwlege of an enemy base, but no knowledge of maps, isn't able to point to the place on a map. 
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
As a consequence, he has to go with the bomber crew so that he can point to it in reality. Viewing his world from the air for the first time, the terrain is as unfamiliar and unreadable as the map, and it seems the mission will have to be aborted. But finally, in a moment of apotheosis, he is able to say: ‘it is there’, and the mission can be accomplished.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

97/ Orphée (Jean Cocteau 1950)

13/7/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
The ‘Paris’ sequence of Orphée invents an unreal city by linking unconnected but familiar parts of Paris (the rue Vilin, the square Bolivar, the place des Vosges and the covered market at Billancourt). Here are these apparently contiguous places on a map:
Picture
There is only one map in Orphée, on the wall of the office of the Chief Inspector of Police, who has summoned Orphée to meet him. Try as  I might, I cannot tell of what this is a map (it is not Paris). The line of the river is distinctive, but I don't recognise it.
Picture
Perhaps the map is upside down.
Picture
0 Comments

93/ L'Argent (Marcel L'Herbier 1928): all the maps

9/7/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Of the five spaces in which maps figure in L'Argent, the first is the most spectacular. We follow an agent of the banker Gundermann as he is led by a butler into an antechamber decorated  to represent the reach of the banker's power. In combination with the cinematography, this mise-en-scène also displays the distorting, disorienting force of money.

The second space is more conventional: in their modest apartment. the naive adventurer hero Hamelin and his wife Line examine a map of the Americas, though it becomes a mere backdrop to the expression of their love for each other.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Later, in the same space, Hamelin explains his plans to the banker Saccard, with a view of a more detailed map of the region that Hamelin proposes to exploit for oil. We first see the scene diffusely,  in a mirror, before passing to  two readable mapshots.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Next, in a room at the airport from which Hamelin will take off on a solo flight across the Atlantic, Line looks on in terror at the thought of the danger he will face. He enters, first seen as a shadow cast over a map of Europe and North Africa, which then becomes the backdrop to their passionate embrace on parting. 
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
The most often shown space in the film is the banker Saccard's office, dominated by a map of the world. Against this  backdrop we see Saccard manipulate markets on a global scale, we see him attempt to seduce Line, and finally we see him arrested for fraud.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Prior to Saccard's arrest we see Hamelin in Guyana (here with Antonin Artaud as Saccard's secretary). A map on the wall serves as establishing decor, but it cannot compete with the cartographic spectacles on display back in Paris.
Picture
Hamelin returns to France and we see two policemen waiting to arrest him in the same room at the airport where he had kissed Line farewell. This time we see more of the cartographic decor, including the west coast of France:
Picture
The film's denouement involves Line approaching  Gundermann, and we see again, in more detail, his spectacular antechamber:
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
The decor of L'Argent is one of Lazare Meerson's finest achievements, especially in the cartographic configurations of this last, framing space.
0 Comments

92/ Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick 1975): all the maps

8/7/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
When, in 2011, I first posted about the maps in this film I said they appeared in only one scene. Seeing the film again this afternoon at the ICA, in a beautiful print, I spotted my mistake in not spotting the very large globe, above.

Many thanks to The Badlands Collective for organising the screening, on the film's 40th birthday.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Maps appear in Barry Lyndon in only one scene, but they cover the known world, from Asia through Africa and Europe to the Americas. And there is a globe on the table in front of the first map.
0 Comments

91/ The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma 2006): Los Angeles

7/7/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
These two mapshots, from the end of the credit sequence, are all we see of maps in The Black Dahlia. As with Blow Out, De Palma seems relatively uninterested in displaying maps in an investigation-centred film (though he is very interested, as with Blow Out, in showing photographers and photographs). Such indifference to maps is perhaps only unusual because they are central to journalistic investigations into the real-life 'Black Dahlia' murder: 
Picture
William T. Rasmussen, Corroborating Evidence (Santa Fe: Sunstone, 2004), p.77.
0 Comments

90/ Blow Out (Brian de Palma 1981): Philadelphia

6/7/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
‘The least that can be said for Blow Out is that it ceaselessly reaches out to involve us in its attempt to divine the difference between art and paranoia and reality. And one of its attractions is that, while it comes to no conclusions about where the boundaries between those qualities finally are drawn, it insists upon the importance of creating some maps. In the end, Blow Out is about a world in which such distinctions have collapsed (or been exploded), about what it means for the game to be rigged against common decency.’
Al Clark & James Park (eds), The Film Year Book 1983 (New York: Grove, 1983), p. 90.
0 Comments

69/ Les Chansons ont leur destin (anonymous Gaumont production 1908): France

15/6/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
The schoolroom is one of the two settings in which a map in a film is most likely to be found, and this is the earliest  example I know. Below are some later illustrations from French cinema.
Picture
Max au couvent (1914)
Picture
Les Deux Gamines (Louis Feuillade 1920): image from David Bordwell's Figures Traced in Light
Picture
Merlusse (Marcel Pagnol 1938)
Picture
Les Diaboliques (Georeges-Henri Clouzot 1955)
Picture
Les Espions (Georges-Henri Clouzot 1958)
Picture
Les 400 coups (François Truffaut 1959)
Picture
L'Amérique insolite (François Reichenbach 1960)
Picture
Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol 1970)
Picture
Notre histoire (Bertrand Blier 1984)
Picture
La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille (Etienne Chatiliez 1987)
Picture
Le Péril jeune (Cédric Klapisch 1994)
Picture
Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda 1991)
0 Comments

62/ Joyeux Noël (Christian Carion 2005)

8/6/2011

1 Comment

 
Picture
Picture
Picture
‘After a credit sequence showing belle époque photographs three “nationalist” recitations are juxtaposed, before a map presents insistently the gaping wound that is Alsace Lorraine: the lies of propaganda, the desire for revenge,  and then there is war.’
 Corinne Françoise-Denève, ‘Retour de flamme: Grande Guerre et cinéma français dans le nouveau siècle’, in Carola Hähnel-Mesnard, Marie Liénard-Yeterian, Cristina Marinas (eds), Culture et mémoire: représentations contemporaines de la mémoire dans les espaces mémoriels, les arts du visuel, la littérature et le théâtre (Palaiseau: Les Editions de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 2008) p. 186.
Picture
1 Comment

52/ Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier 1937): Algiers

29/5/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
['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.
0 Comments

41/ Dr No (Terence Young 1962)

18/5/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
‘In Dr. No, when Bond visits M, the set includes a large map on the wall of Moneypenny's office and a prominently featured globe in M's office. The meaning of the maps is reinforced by the films' internationalism and transnational consciousness. In the Bond films, Honey Ryder, the daughter of a scientist, has lived all over the world; Dr. No is the child of a German missionary and a Chinese mother. The organization he represents, SPECTRE, which is an invention of the film series, is an international organization that transcends the East-West divisions of the Cold War. In fact, SPECTRE, which stands for Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion has no headquarters and in that way mimics the film industry itself.’
  Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French: Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p.194.

Three other maps in the film: here, here and here.
0 Comments

31/ Pour vos beaux yeux (Henri Storck 1929): Asia

8/5/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
‘What does “looking at a map” mean? Map users do not ask this question as long as they get from the map the information they need, as long as the map does not challenge their map literacy. A map is transparent to its meaning, to the information it delivers. Opacity occurs only when this semiotic power fails: then, the map holds the gaze of the viewer upon itself, as a set of signs. Looking at the map as an opaque device should be the way historians look at maps: that is, looking at maps for themselves, as artifacts, as constructions, as a complex language, rooted in a society's visual culture. The rules of this language should be understood for their own sake, in the interaction and the hierarchy of their components, from subliminal details to the most general structural features. Looking at maps as complex systems of signs implies breaking the logic of reference that links a representation to what it represents: a systematic approach of the map's visual language is the only way to center research on the map not as an object but as a medium of communication, which implies at the same time an attempt to encode values and meanings and the various strategies of reception on the part of the user.’
  Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: theoretical approaches in cartography throughout history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp.xiv-xv.
0 Comments

7/ Mon oncle d'Amérique (Alain Resnais 1980): France, the World

14/4/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
'The diagram in Resnais is a superimposition of maps that defines an ensemble of transformations from layer to layer, with the redistribution of functions and the fragmentation of objects: the superimposed periods of Auschwitz. Mon oncle d’Amérique is a large-scale attempt at diagrammatic mental cartography, where maps are superimposed and transformed, in a single character and from one character to the next.'
Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: l'image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p.160.


0 Comments

3/ High Sierra (Raoul Walsh 1941): Southern California

10/4/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
'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.

0 Comments

2/ Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (Alain Tanner 1976): Africa, Asia, Australia

9/4/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
‘In nearly every interior he painted, there is either a map, a sheet of music, a letter, a chart, or a picture whose subject-matter functions like an ideogram.’ 
John Berger (writer of Jonas qui aura 25 ans...), 'The Painter in his studio: Vermeer', in The Moment of Cubism and other essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p.77.


0 Comments
Forward>>
    Follow @CineTourist
    ​  

    Categories

    All
    Africa
    Algeria
    Algiers
    All The Maps
    Alsace-Lorraine
    Americas
    Animation
    Antwerp
    Arctic
    Argentina
    Arizona
    Arsenal
    Asia
    Atlantic
    Australia
    Austria
    Avignon
    Baltic
    Baltimore
    Barcelona
    Belgium
    Berlin
    Black Sea
    Bordeaux
    Bradford
    Britain
    Bruges
    Bulgaria
    Burgundy
    California
    Canada
    Caribbean
    Celestial Map
    Chicago
    Cinemap
    Cine-tourism
    Colombia
    Congo
    Crete
    Cuba
    Cyprus
    Czechoslovakia
    Djibouti
    Documentary
    Egypt
    England
    Europe
    Face
    Fictional Map
    Finland
    Foldaway Map
    France
    Geneva
    Germany
    Globe
    Greenland
    Haifa
    Haiti
    Hamburg
    Hand Drawn
    Heist
    Helsinki
    Holland
    Hong Kong
    Hungary
    Iceland
    Imaginary Place
    India
    Iran
    Iraq
    Ireland
    Island
    Isle Of Man
    Israel
    Italy
    Japan
    Kentucky
    Leningrad
    Local
    Logo
    London
    Los Angeles
    Louisiana
    Luxembourg
    Lyon
    Malaysia
    Mali
    Manchester
    Manhattan
    Map As Décor
    Map Room
    Marking The Map
    Marseille
    Marshovia
    Mediterranean
    Mexico
    Milan
    Montreal
    Morocco
    Moscow
    Munich
    Naples
    New Mexico
    New Orleans
    Newspaper
    New York
    Nice
    Nigeria
    Okinawa
    Oklahoma
    Oz
    Pacific
    Palestine
    Panama
    Papua New Guinea
    Paris
    Paris. Metro
    Petersburg
    Philadelphia
    Philippines
    Pointing
    Poland
    Police
    Poster
    Railway
    River
    Road Map
    Rome
    Rumania
    Russia
    San Francisco
    Schoolroom
    Scotland
    Screen
    Seattle
    Singapore
    Solar System
    Solomon Islands
    South Africa
    South America
    South Korea
    Spain
    Street
    Subway
    Sweden
    Switzerland
    Tanzania
    Television
    Texas
    Thames
    Tokyo
    Underground
    United States
    Vanuatu
    Venice
    Vienna
    Vintage Map
    Wall Map
    War
    World
    Zenda

    Today's Country Map I.D.
    (mouseover map to identify)
    Country Maps ID