A Desperate Journey: From Casablanca to Indiana Jones

“Roy, I’m givin’ it to you straight. You’re just stickin’ your neck out. You may catch lead at any minute.... What you need is a fast-steppin’ young filly you can keep up with. Remember what Johnny Dillinger said about guys like you and him? He said you were just rushin’ toward death, yeah, that’s it, rushin’ toward death.”¹ Thus, in High Sierra, spoke old “Doc” Banton (Henry Hull), to his aging bandit friend Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) in a process shot in which the two men face the windshield and drive forward. The film documents his rush to death from the beginning where, as a inmate for life in the Mossmoor Prison, he receives a “pardon” from an unnamed authority in the office of the governor of an unnamed state.² As soon as he is released, incarcerated in the world at large, Earle begins a desperate journey.

The geography of the film meshes with its cartography. The credits scroll upward and over three views, each dissolving into the other, of the face of Mount Whitney. A first shot aims skyward toward the summit and ridge bathed in clouds; they soon obscure the peak and give way to a mesa below before the film dissolves into a new view of the crest in a deeper field of view. The film dissolves to a shot of a cleft and valley between two peaks after the names of the players, scrolling upward, have dissolved into the sky. Destiny is shown in the gap between the vast space of the mountain range under the name and credits of “High Sierra” and the shots taken of the prison. The open space in the credits is contrasted to the closed milieu of the penitentiary that incarcerates both the guards and the population of inmates. Within seconds the credits and initial montage have anticipated and summed up the spatial play of the film. The film is construed to be a field of illusory depth and a “map” or webbing of figures, signs, letters, and forms of a framed composition that can be read spatially and syntactically.³ The tragedy is affiliated with its cartography of destiny.

Classical films tend to become maps of themselves when the images and words in the credit-sequences recur in the narrative. The latter “responds” to the former in both spatial and discursive ways, as if a contractual obligation were requiring the narrative to defend and illustrate, or to explicate and make clear the enigma of the title (Derrida 1982, 5–22). High Sierra is no exception. When Earle drives from the Midwest en route to the first meeting point in the Sierras he realizes the dream, of every motorized American tourist of the 1930s, to cross the United States by car. In the film, however, he returns to the space of the credits seen only minutes before.

The landscapes that had appeared to lie beneath or behind the title and scrolled words now emerge in an effectively natural state. They seem to belong as much to the inner geography of the film as the topography and geology of Southern California. There comes into view what the screenplay (Gomery 1979) describes as a long shot of the mountain, “[a]n overwhelming giant with pointed rocky turrets for a summit. Lordly and mighty it rises over the surrounding mountains” (shot 27, 48–49). Beyond the escarpment is a clear sky, pocked with clouds, that causes the atmosphere to be literally breathtaking. In the credits the same view had been static; now, however, the camera slowly pans right to record the jagged outline of the peaks below the sky before it stops and ever so slightly tilts down to draw attention to a dirt road at the bottom of the frame that leads toward the camera’s point of view. A team of riders on horseback is discernible before the camera continues its career to the right and then tilts down again to the road on which (from the right) Earle enters in his car in medium view. A sublime landscape is seen, and so also is the entry of a strange and ill-fitting element—Earle at the wheel of his Buick coupe—along the road.

The mobility of the camera is shown to be greater than that of the riders or the driver. It anticipates what will become the expression of its ocular power through a haptic sensuality. The lens caresses the relief of the landscape at the same time it discovers a space riddled with contradiction. The car belongs to one age and the team of horses to another. Earle stops to look at what the viewer has just seen (what would be shot 34 in the screenplay). Dazzled by the light, he peers out of the window in which we see him incarcerated. Two economies pass by each other, one the gangster and his getaway car, and the other the cowboy and his horse. In the flash of an instant extensive reflection is afforded about the displacement of one style of itinerary, that of the urban hoodlum on a desperate journey into a world he knows only in the movies in which he figures, into another, that of the western trail where time slows down and where history blends with cinematic myth.⁴ The shot might be likened to a cartouche in a greater cartography of destiny that the film will bring to a tragic finale.

Much of the narrative is constructed around the preparation for a holdup of a hotel in Palm Springs. A secondary thread follows the hero from his puppy love for a club-footed sweetheart to the strong-willed woman who swears to stand by him. The holdup is botched, and in the getaway Earle and Marie (Ida Lupino) witness the grisly crash in which their hapless companions are burned alive. After Earle’s murder of Jack Kranmer (Barton MacLane), a crooked fence, his discovery that he has been enamored of the “bad” good girl, and his realization that a dragnet is closing in upon him, Earle takes to the road.

His desperate journey begins. He puts Marie on a bus and drives off in search of cash en route to meeting her on the other side of the mountains where they will begin a new life together. Excised from the screenplay, an insert (shot 236, 163) of a road map shows Earle’s finger tracing the route he will take to Cajon Pass (far to the south of Mount Whitney, suggesting that a broad topography of southeastern California is being filmed). Earle robs a general store and pistolwhips a customer while making his getaway.⁵ After his departure a uniformed trooper inspects the scene and learns of the identity of the criminal who has just left the scene. “If it’s Earle he’s headed back over the pass,” announces the officer. Grabbing a telephone receiver, he barks, “Operator, give me 420.”⁶

A Vorkapich montage pulls the narrative from the scene of the drugstore to the chase that will lead the prey and his hunters up the side of the mountain. In it are inserted maps that combine geographies of reality and of tragedy. At a police station a report tells of the car being seen at High Bridge Road. A pan follows a policeman in a leather jacket (in a medium shot) running to a large topographic map hanging on the wall (“Good! We’ll have him bottled up in about an hour!”) next to another, of smaller size and scale of the state of California. 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. The shot dissolves to a detailed view of “Olancha” to the south of “Cartago” and “Monanch” (adjacent to “Owens Lake”) while a hand puts a tack on a road that heads west to the mountain range. In the dissolve some headlamps of the cars blend with the dots and tacks on the map before an iris closes the scene and gives way to a parade of the vehicles driving forward. A direct relation is established with the tack and dot that locate the victim on the map and the pairs of headlights aimed to “look for” their quarry.

In the montage, a tour de force of locational imaging, the film dissolves again to the greater wall map, seen in three-quarter profile, as a hand continues to push pins into new spots while the iris gives way to a squadron of cars and motorcycles. The last and crowning map image is of “Lone Pine.” Five tacks are placed on all roads and junctions, except for one that leads toward the mountain range. Superimposed on the map is a moving image of the police climbing on their motorcycles; the action recedes from view while, in a third layer of the same dissolve, the car driving down the road—the shot that had inaugurated the montage—comes forward. The camera trucks in on the toponym of Lone Pine while the image dissolves to a shot of Earle’s car driving down the main street of the town named by the map.

Both the map and its territory are seen in the single and same image. So also are the totally arbitrary qualities and geographic reality of the toponyms and, now and again, their allegorical resonance. Earle has been seeking to find “Independence” after completing his heist, facing every kind of obstacle, and eluding authorities of both the law and its underside. His car now drives through “Lone Pine,” a place that signals to what degree he is alone, an isolated and solitary hero enclosed in his car and sealed by fate. In the sequence that follows the blare and wail of sirens seem to be confused with a personified landscape. Present in the sublime beauty of the area that humans are sullying are the laments of the goddesses of Nature and Fortune who “pine” for the soul caught in the skein of history and destiny. “Lone Pine” crystallizes and locates the elegiac moment in the life of a victim of the gods, police, and gangsters who control him. The map on the wall is affiliated with the force of fate.⁷

The landscape quickly takes precedence over the humans within it. The narrative comes to an orphic conclusion when the hero turns back. Earle exits from his lair where he makes himself visible enough for a sharpshooter on a ridge far above to shoot him in the back. At the sight of the falling body Marie shrieks in anguish. The episode mythifies the location by bringing Orpheus and Eurydice into a composite shape in which landscape, pathos, and filmic consciousness are drawn together.⁸ The end seems crafted to blend the freedom of journey with the closure of fate. Marie accedes to the vision of “being free.” As she realizes that Earle has crashed out, or is “free,” the right hand of an officer grasps her shoulder and holds her captive. The camera follows her gaze, which looks blindly and aimlessly upward while the genital area of the policeman’s body figures in the background. The final tracking shot recedes as she advances, her arms cuddling the dog, toward the camera before she exits right as the face of Mount Whitney comes into view, now serving as a threshold for the end-credits that literally scroll up the side of the mountain with the accompaniment of background music that shifts from tones of pathos to lighter fare. To be free, it is implied, is to leave the theater at the conclusion of the film. High Sierra, like the series of maps seen in the Vorkapich montage sequence, becomes a territory of itself. And the maps are part of the language of the cruel gods who turn a touristic site into one of geographically and historically grounded tragedy.

In High Sierra the landscape and its cartographic depiction become synonymous with the powers of fate and of cinema. In the passage of over sixty years since its production, the film has become a familiar name in every gazetteer of cinema. Billed as the feature in which Humphrey Bogart has his first lead role— film historians tirelessly belabor the point—the film uses maps to situate and enclose the tragic hero. It posits a “diagram” of the greater idiolect of Warner Brothers and, too, a geography that belongs both to the director’s work and a cinematic production of space. It suffices to look at Desperate Journey (1942), a feature of the same studio and same director that is also driven by a cartographic impulse.

Completed in 1942 to lend impetus to the effort of the Allies against what then was an indomitable Axis that had only recently lost the air war over Great Britain, Desperate Journey is a wish but also a piece in the signature of its director-auteur. A group of men is selected to perform a dangerous mission. They travel to their objective and execute their task with impeccable success, but then face the cruel task of having to return home, across hostile territories, by any and every possible means. Most are lost along the way. The storyline varies on the form of a “toponymic tale,” a pilgrimage of sorts, whose itinerary moves from one episode to another in a series of close encounters at given places that situate and often mythify the events.⁹

Desperate Journey begins when anti-German resistance fighters blow up a railway near Schneidemühl, a town (now Szcecin) said to be located near the border of Poland and the northern coast of Germany. Before a Nazi guard kills him, one of the fighters rushes from the scene of his sabotage (he has dynamited the railway) to an aviary from where he releases a carrier pigeon that flies off and across Europe and the Channel to bring news of the success of the raid to the British command post. The pigeon flies to its destination and is welcomed by a soldier who removes the information from a capsule attached to its leg. Officers at headquarters study the material and determine that one more intersection needs to be bombed in order to cripple the Nazis.

A group of soldiers, which includes veterans and a greenhorn, as well as Americans, an Englishman, and an Australian—all seasoned Warner Brothers actors— is chosen to fly a B-17 over the North Sea to finish the destruction of the site and to return. They take off, find their altitude, meet cloud cover, do battle with a Messerschmitt, and get rocked by flak before they fly low, drop the payload, and crash into a thick forest. Two soldiers are immolated when the captain is required to set the wreckage afire. The five remaining are captured and then interrogated by a Nazi captain (Raymond Massey). When one of them (Ronald Reagan) is called into the captain’s office, through a side window he sights the movement of a convoy of strange planes. He tricks his interrogator and brings his companions into the room where they knock the officer silly. They jump out of the window and succeed, against all odds, in evading the guards. They slog their way through swamps, reach a bridge, and kill the Nazi sentinels who are on patrol. They exchange uniforms. In travesty as German soldiers, they board a train traveling west where they occupy a car reserved for Hermann Goering. An officer (Sig Ruman, known synchronously for his role as “Concentration Camp Charlie” in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be) discovers them and throws them off the train before Massey can apprehend them at the Berlin Bahnhof. The men hole up in an unoccupied building, knock sentries down, and decide to indulge “in a spot of sabotage” by blowing up a nearby chemical factory that manufactures incendiary bombs. The youngest of the group of survivors is severely wounded.

They encounter a woman who leads them to a doctor who cannot mend their comrade. Overhearing them speaking English, a patient tips off the secret police, whom the group outwits and kills. The men head east, by Braunschweig and Wolfenbüttel en route to Munster where some of the woman’s relatives reside. But the men are tricked. They find themselves in the home of a warm and welcoming elderly couple who are in fact Nazis dissimulating the roles of Allied partisans. A narrow escape ensues. Kirk (Alan Hale), the comic character of the group, is shot and felled when the men must leap over a rooftop.¹⁰ There follows a breakneck race of the three survivors in a car pursued by Massey and his posse in of a squadron of motorcycles. They drive across the flatlands of Holland before they reach a Nazi cache near the shores of the North Sea. They discover a plane hidden under a fluttering tissue of camouflage bearing British insignia that the Nazis are preparing for a bombing mission over the British Isles. They storm the craft, engage combat with the German soldiers, and manage to fly off and away, back to safety. As the film ends the pilot (Errol Flynn) turns to his crew (and to the viewer), smiling, “Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs.”

Desperate Journey is rife with maps. At the beginning the Warner Brothers shield dissolves into a relief map of Germany, western Poland, and southern Denmark, a map resembling the accomplished depictions of Europe in the 1940s, often drawn in bird’s-eye depiction and from an uncharacteristic point of view.¹¹ The camera closes in, moving north and east, as the shadows of three, and then five, flying aircraft are cast over the map. The view is slightly occluded when the names of the two leads, Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan, dissolve into the mapped image. They disappear when “Desperate Journey” covers the map. The camera continues its approach as if the scene were being viewed from the belly of the cockpit of one of the bombers when its shadow is cast upon the projection below. The credits continue and disappear after the name of the director gives way to the city-view on the map near the mouth of the River Oder. The map, the simulation of the city and country, becomes the stage on which the first dramatic event takes place. An iris-wipe opens from the city-view in close-up, and all of a sudden a gridded construction, illuminated in the shadows, emerges into view. A German guard walks across the platform, his boots in close-up as the camera tilts down slightly to catch the face of a civilian covered with a network of crisscrossed lines of shadows cast by leaves and branches. He inches backward and down as the camera reverses the course it followed as the man moved into view.

The entire narrative is anticipated and duplicated in the first images and their montage that encapsulates and indeed “plots” much of the film. The civilian saboteur escapes to a shed from which he extracts a box. He opens its lid, removes a pigeon (as if taking a rabbit out of a hat), attaches a capsule with a message, and goes to an open window where he is shot by a German sentry. The bird flutters off, evading a final rifle shot. A fade to an ocean view shows the bird fighting the winds on its way (right to left) westward, where it will soon land at a bird coop at which a soldier, looking skyward, awaits its landing. The shot tracks left (the camera in relentless movement in the film) as the soldier enters the building and then tracks right before closing in on the man behind a grid of chicken wire.

The mesh screen becomes a first sign of camouflage. A see-through fabric of metal wire, indeed a moiré or translucent curtain, the hexagonal chicken wire becomes synonymous with the motif of maps and mapping in Desperate Journey. Through the mesh we see the soldier grasp the bird and attend to the capsule attached to its leg. A Vorkapich montage sequence begins with the camera closing in on an opaque glass wall on which is written “Intelligence Room/Decoding Section.” The words cede to a hand writing a report on a desk on front of which are two inkwells. The camera pulls back to reveal a man passing a note to his messenger. They stand in front of a topographic wall map of contours and surfaces—clearly a product of aerial “intelligence” before the camera moves in on the briefcase in which the note is inserted. It then dissolves into another closeup of photographs and a contour map that, as the camera pulls back, are seen being studied by two men and an assistant at a telephone who is adjacent to a frame wall map in the background. As they compare the map and photography (in medium close-up) the finger of the one crisscrosses the pencil held by the other.

The sequence seems to be uttering, “Objective: Schneidemühl.”¹² The examination and presentation of the maps comprise two successive stages revealing and masking the making of the war movie. Images are gathered and studied, and then they are brought forward to their audience. The film about the war screens the war it purports to represent. Yet the conclusion (a sequence that will be reworked in Indiana Jones) shows how the cartography and the logistics of the war movie are alloyed. The survivors of the mission have crossed Western Europe and reached a point near the western border of Holland. The car comes to a halt and the men descend. At a loss about how to proceed, the trio soon wanders about and happens upon what first seems to be a painting or a moiré sculpture fashioned from patches of silken fabric hanging from a mesh network of wires extending across the top of a gigantic trellis. “What’s that?” whispers Flynn. We and the three men behold three images, if not three surfaces, that appear superimposed over each other. One is the airplane, aiming forward in the camouflage of the protective setting, while another is the entire abstraction that seems to be a pure work of art. The third is the composite figure of the aircraft and the design itself that turn the scene into a “map” that complements the many abstractions that were given at the beginning: the relief map in the credits, the crisscrossed beams of the railroad bridge, the lines of branches on the Polish resistor’s face, the mesh of chicken wire through which the carrier pigeon was first glimpsed, and the aerial views of Schneidemühl and Northern Europe projected on the screen in the briefing room. The camera cuts into a medium shot of Germans beneath and within the camouflage—what seems to be an optical painting—loading a bomb into the belly of the craft that Reagan, voice-in, notes as being “one of ours.”¹³ In the midst of a narrative, unfolding at a breakneck pace, a grand illusion—a cartographic construction and a strange object—is placed before eyes of both the spectator and the protagonists.

The artifice within the film draws attention to the scene being made; it shows that the film itself, in all of its extraordinarily backlit and angled decors, is its own amplification and work of artful dissimulation,¹⁴ which, in a spatial register, is accomplished in the last and celebrated line that Flynn utters after a cutaway shot displays the sight of the coasts of Dover through the forward cockpit: “Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs.” The remark refers to Flynn’s own country of birth (Hobart, Tasmania), to his famous predilection for the female sex, and to a theater of operations on another hemisphere. The displacement that goes from the sight of Dover to the idea of Australia affirms that, although propaganda, in its spatial and cartographic dimensions the film is also a prayer. Shot at the threshold of America’s involvement in the Second World War, Desperate Journey identifies cinema as camouflage, as a theory and practice of the application of a “masked law,” that is, of the relation it establishes between itself—as a cartographic diagram and as a document of contemporary history and fiction— and the fictitious events it creates and the real ones that it wishes it would bring about.¹⁵

Like Desperate Journey of the same vintage, Casablanca is a network of mappings that move between dissimulation and prayer. The maps that move from the front credits to the first matte shot of the city are set in a montage that tells the story of thousands of desperate journeys taken by displaced persons and refugees from the Pacific rim westward through Europe and across the Mediterranean and North Africa to Casablanca. In the credits that bleed into the background of the narrative a variety of maps are configured as emblems or, roughly, as moving combinations of textual and graphic matter. The shield in which is enclosed the WB of Warner Brothers is surrounded by a circular banderole on which the name of the studio is spelled out in uppercase letters in relief. The name of Jack L. Warner, the executive producer, is held in the lower corner of the spherical triangle. The logo dissolves into and is momentarily confused with a map of Africa.

As the logo recedes, the map (from an equipollent projection, striated with lines of latitude and longitude, which bears a decorative wind rose in the lowerright corner) emerges into view. The northern coast of Algeria and the Cape of Good Hope are cropped away, no doubt in order to offer the aspect of a continent-as-triangle, with three masses pointing in as many directions—French West Africa, Egypt and Arabia, and the southern peninsula—over which the names of the three leading players, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid, are respectively placed. They quickly dissolve into the map and the title that is vectored along the angle of an ecliptic band. Before it serves as the background on which the remaining names of the cast and crew dissolve in and out of the image, the map of Africa is confused with the romantic triangle given in the relation of the three protagonists. By the time (exactly one minute) “Music by Max Steiner” is placed in the credits the first bars of the “Marseillaise,” a sound cue for an absent map of France, intervene with the name of director Michael Curtiz.

In the fade the sight of the map displaces the spectator. Where are we? The loss of grounding precedes a fade-in to a turning globe that sits somewhat uncharacteristically on a bed of cumulous clouds, and not in an eternity of outer space. Beginning with a view of what is designated to be the North Pacific Ocean, the globe is drawn in relief and in the style and from a perspective reminiscent of Richard Edes Harrison’s spherical world maps.¹⁶ At the outset the globe bears only one place-name, that of the Hawaiian Islands, which stands in subtle contrast to all other unnamed continental masses and islands, including Australia, Borneo, and the coasts of China. A newscaster’s pebbly voice intones, “With the coming of the Second World War ...” It is suggested that the history of the film begins in the minuscule setting of Hawaii and Pearl Harbor.

Confusion emerges from the relation of the voice-off to the turning globe. The broadcaster continues, “many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately,” as the camera closes in on the turning globe that shows Indonesia, Burma, China, and India. Some place-names are faintly inscribed into the lands they designate, but by and large the earth is what turns and not “eyes in imprisoned Europe.” The camera continues to close in, now to India, the Middle East, and Eastern Africa, while the voice utters, “toward the freedom of the Americas.” The voice mentions, “Lisbon became the great embarkation point,” without the globe turning toward Portugal. “But, not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up.” The globe revolves and the camera centers on France before the image dissolves to a topographic view of Paris marked by a large circle enclosing a five-sided star set upon a spot to the left of the confluence of the Rivers Seine and Marne.

A “route-enhancing” map begins to move. A broad line grows out of the bottom of the circle. Then begins a superimposition of maps and newsreel shots of the gripping historical montage. The line continues its path southward, toward Troyes, while the voice utters, “from Paris to Marseilles,” and a stock shot—an extreme long shot of a port, a dock, and an industrial landscape behind—of lines of people who seem to await departure. The map has not reached the areas the voice is designating. Suddenly the view pulls back to a standard view of France as the ribbon designating the route of refugees winds down the Rhône valley en route to Marseilles. A medium shot shows women and men carrying their children and belongings melds into the map, and another a line of refugees amassed beside horse-drawn carts. The line drawn on the map approaches the southern port and continues, now dashed, into the dark area of the sea placed over an image of a ship sailing on calm waters. The voice continues, “across the Mediterranean to Oran,” while three more shots of moving ships are placed in the maritime areas of the map before the dashed line reaches the city-name, just mentioned, that is on the map.

The next segment of the montage is devoted to overland travel. “Then, by train, or auto, or by foot across the rim of Africa,” intones the voice, while the camera closes in on the coast of Morocco stretching from the place-names of Malitta to Tetuan and down to Rabat north and east of Casablanca, over a montage of four stock shots of refugees carrying their valises on foot, being carried on wagons and, finally, in a line of people, cars, and bicycles that figures under a view of the line reaching Casablanca.¹⁷ The camera finally closes in on the circle and the name of the city that the voice-off identifies as the sentence ends, “to Casablanca... in French Morocco.” When the close-up on the map occludes the image, the voice begins again, “Here, the fortunate ones, through money ...” The map dissolves into a city-view to the right where a muezzin looks out from the upper terrace of a North African tower.

The style, tone, tenor, and story of the film are determined by what might be called its “map-dissolves,” by a cavalcade of maps dissolving in and out of stock footage that conveys in seconds the burden of a relentless voyage across the world. It begins from a blank space in the Pacific where an origin of the history behind the film is concealed in the toponym of the Hawaiian Islands and leads to a non-place, to Casablanca, that stands in for the original site.¹⁸ The desperate journey recounted in the sequence of a duration of 83 seconds uses maps and newsreel footage to elide history and a fiction based on previous cinema.¹⁹ The dark voice of destiny carries the narrative from the world at large to a site of anxious transience, of uncertainty and closure, that may indeed have been the ambiance of movie theaters in the early years of the Second World War.

The most memorable and melodramatic sequence of Casablanca may be the five-minute flashback in which, in close-up and chiaroscuro, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) recalls his romantic idyll in Paris. At about one-third of the way into the film (in the thirty-ninth of 140 minutes), the flashback is inspired by notes of music after Rick makes implicit reference to the globe seen after the credits. “Sam,” he mutters, staring blankly toward the spectators and over a glass of whiskey, “if it’s December 1941 in Casablanca what time is it in New York?” The camera cuts to a close-up of the pianist, his black face barely visible in the dark, “Um, aah, my watch stopped.” Cut back to Rick: “I bet they’re asleep in New York. I bet they’re asleep all over America.” The time of the film is synchronized with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the first site that was allusively named on the globe in the beginning. All of a sudden “As time goes by . . . ,” the song of 1931 resurrected to be the catalyst of affective memory in this film, is heard in conjunction with the first image of the continuous revolution of the world.

The film indicates it is taking place far from the history in which it enters. In an almost unconscious register Rick’s flashback to his days in Paris in June 1940 is elicited as much by the pressure of history marked on the initial map as it is by unrequited love. The allusion to December 1941 also refers both to the very first visual cue and to a world of spectators, like the film itself, at a sleepy remove from its historical cause. When Rick mopes, “in all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” the arrival of the memory is confused with the fall into a new time, that of the American declaration of war on Japan and Germany.

The style of the montage in the flashback makes clear the relation of the first cartographic images to the romance. A long dolly-in to Rick’s despondent face, his eyes bathed with light reflecting from a swell of tears on his pupils and his face clouded by cigarette smoke, dissolves into a three-quarter view of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées in winter or in early spring (the trees along the avenue are pruned and without leaves). The shot dissolves to a medium close-up of Rick at the wheel of a convertible where, to his left, sits Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). Their hair wafts in the breeze as they drive away from the monument that recedes into soft focus before the background turns into a country road winding through woodlands. True to the elegiac tradition of pastoral poetry, they get lost in the landscape before the film dissolves back to the couple at the stern of a boat on the Seine, not far from the Pont Mirabeau in the immediate background where, in the distance, a section of the Eiffel Tower is visible.

The longstanding technique that collapses heterogeneous space and time inflects the geography of the “desperate journey” brought forward at the very end of the film. The journey recounted on the map at the beginning, arrested in the middle and mobilized in a backward motion in the sequence in Paris, recurs at the end. Rick has obtained and given the letters of transit required for Victor (Paul Henreid) and Ilsa’s passage to Lisbon. At the end the screenplay taps into the tradition of the spatial story, in which place-names are tied to emotive “sites” that define subjectivity. The toponyms negotiate further the contradiction of the atopia of cinema and the histories, real and imaginary, that Casablanca both creates and evades. In the last gazes they share Rick tells Ilsa that they will “always have Paris,” in other words, that they (and we) will always have a flashback whose affective charge will be driven by mellifluous song and sumptuous lap-dissolves. They will have their own atlas of emotion that, if good fortune holds in 1942, will be eternized a future library of film memories. Hence the paradox in the appeal to historical time and space that sets adrift the specificity of the moment. Surely in the final shots the close-ups of airplane engines revving and spinning their propellers cannot fail to allegorize the “motor of history”—the film that keeps its viewers “occupied”—that will promise the victory that the aptly named freedom fighter (Victor) assures will be theirs. The misty décor of the final shot in which Captain Raynaud (Claude Rains) and Rick share the pleasure of contemplating a new chapter in the history of the friendship refers back to the cloudy surround of the globe at the beginning. The world, in the balance of things, has become one of many points of light, of astral dots, of unnamed placenames that fade into black just before the end-credit returns to the map of Africa that had been seen in the front credits. The map calls into question the fluffy cosmogony in which the film would dissolve, and so also do the bars of the “Marseillaise,” the anthem that earlier had been a call to action over and against the German occupiers of Casablanca.

Something strange takes place on the map at the terminus of Casablanca. In the front-credits a dot on the western coast of Morocco is not accompanied by a name to indicate the place it designates. In the end-credits “Casablanca” appears adjacent to the spot, near the upper-left corner of the frame. The film has become the agent that has “named” the city and finally put it on the map when, earlier, it had merely hovered over it. No other city on the continent is indicated, the inference being that Casablanca is a synecdoche for all of Africa. It would not be an interpretive leap, because the geographical signs would have to be supplied by the viewers having lived through the years 1940–42, to esteem that the space of North Africa in prominence to the right of the toponym also refers to the vast area where the Anglo-American African campaign had just won over Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The sense of a desperate historical journey from a fiction of the past to real events in contemporary time figures implicitly in the map.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a cartographical film par excellence. The narrative leads to a map room, to a site of secrets, before it ends in an archive, another map room in guise of a vault in which is concealed all the memory of the movies of the world. To a significant degree it is about the mapping of cinema in the wake of the classical treatments of adventure and of desperate journeys, the genres it takes care to cite and to exploit. Two sequences are crucial for a comparative treatment of the maps in the movie. One, that is said to take place in Cairo, draws immediately on the memory of Casablanca while another, the episode of an attempt to steal an enemy plane, seems to refer directly to the pyrotechnic finish of Desperate Journey.

In a crisp appreciation that followed the French premiere of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, Olivier Assayas remarked how Steven Spielberg constructed his films to appeal to a public weaned on television and comic books.²⁰ He sought, argued the critic writing for Cahiers du cinéma, to make the most of a gold mine instead of sifting the stones of a riverbed in search of a nugget. George Lucas, he added, caught a “wave” on which he could ride with popular taste and be carried away with it. It was not quite a nouvelle vague but one that brought the producer to realize that he could turn the industry of cinema into a seamless art. It may have been a wave that had rolled forward in the wake of the new French cinema of the later 1950s and early 1960s in which a tactics of filmic citation became part of a diagram or a new mode of cinematic mapping. New films had to be mosaic forms in which reflections and refractions of earlier and other films shot through their images.

The adventure film was a privileged landscape to be redrawn. It could be easily industrialized on the basis of nostalgia, the form having “been stabilized for well over thirty years.” As a result, adds Assayas, Raiders refers “not to an adventure as such, nor to the dreams of a generation for which the explorer or the archeologist were modern heroes, but rather to the warehouse of accessories of its cinematographic tradition” (2001, 141). Neither an adventure nor a desperate journey, Raiders appealed less to the hero’s voyage and its perils than to the rules of navigation and the historical cartography that made possible its special—or, Assayas might say, specious—effects.²¹ When the adventure film had been a possibility, perhaps in the era of what Deleuze called the movement-image, the freedom it gave to the imagination made it attractive for “the greatest cineasts who used it as a vehicle for their own preoccupations. In that way they were auteurs” (142). When the reproduction of the genre becomes the aim of the film, little place is left either for the signature or a style (une écriture). The action film becomes a hyperaction film, and the journey an itinerary where peril is constructed not to inspire reflection about time, space, and destiny. Today it can be said that Raiders establishes paradigms for the ways that cartographic effects, like journalists in recent battlefields that are the testing grounds of new media reporting, have become embedded in the narratives they serve.

The film, a product of Paramount Studios, begins in the very aura of the composite mountain of its logo, a mix of a Mount Whitney, a Zermatt, a Grand Teton, and an Everest. The mountain of the celebrated logo fades into a great black peak, the blue skies on which cirrus clouds blow across turn into the storm and mist over a rain forest, and the arc of stars and words—the “A” at the apex of the peak denoting “A Paramount Picture” over “A Gulf + Western Company”—fade away. The year, indicated by the first intertitle tipped into the image, is 1936. The future hero of the film walks in the shadow of the emblem: thus begins a narrative born not from a departure but a logo.²² The Paramount peak gives way to its silhouette in the first shot of the narrative. The phrase, “Paramount Pictures Present,” stretches across the screen that fades into black when a silhouette of a person walks in front of the camera.²³ The background becomes that of a masked intertitle on which “A Lucasfilm Ltd. Production” is scripted. The silhouette of the man in front of the camera moves into the landscape, occluding the mountain whose shape his body resembles. Over it is written “A Steven Spielberg Film” that identifies the character, who does not yet bear the name either of Indiana Jones or Harrison Ford, with the director.

The front-credits are superimposed on shots that convey the impression of an adventure in a jungle, of a film in the mold of Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941) or the 1950s television series, Ramar of the Jungle. They are rolled into the action of desperate pursuit in a rainforest before the hero, now recognizably Harrison Ford, emerges into view in close-up. He faces the camera, which records a cascade and a river pool in the depth of field behind his back. He enters a cave (not that of Plato’s Republic, but possibly that of an originary movie theater) in which a broad arc of light is projected from a circular aperture in the earth above. He finds a golden statue resting on a plinth in the middle of an atrium overgrown with hanging vines. It clearly resembles both votive object and an Oscar. He fails to rescue (or pilfer) it and, after several harrowing encounters and pursuit by a tribe of bloodthirsty natives armed with blowguns and poison-tipped arrows, he reaches the open cockpit of a seaplane that carries him off.

The film cuts to a university setting and a classroom where, dressed in tweed, he glosses “Neo ... lithic” on a blackboard behind a desk. Between the shots of Jones (now a meek and bespectacled young professor) at the blackboard and the lecture hall (bevies of pupils at their desks follow him with their eyes to make known the collective crush they bear upon him) is a globe, a venerable icon of the “classroom” known since Zero for Conduct and The 400 Blows.²⁴ It displays Africa when a colleague enters the room, stops to listen to the professor, and proceeds to speak with him. In countershot, from Jones’s point of view—for some inexplicable reason—the same globe also displays Africa and Europe. Has the earth made a revolution in the gap between shot and the countershot? Does the globe turn while the characters exchange words? No matter what the reason may be, the aquamarine tint of the globe’s oceans and the burnt-beige surface of its steppes of Asia recall the map that had served as the background to the trailers and memorabilia advertising the film.

Behind the teacher, in three-quarter view, is a topographic map and on the adjacent blackboard is an ichnography of an ancient site. In its second sequence the film presents a visual recitation of its own historical geography. Archaeologist Indiana Jones is forever on the track of secret objects and signs he can bring back to a civilized world. He learns that Germans are also in the hunt for magical antiquities. In light of what archaeologists of cinema know of Fritz Lang and Joseph Goebbels, these objects can only be the powers of the medium. The “staff” on which the magic statue had been placed, the professor (standing next to several scrolled maps) soon tells two servants of the Allies, is to be found in a map room. The arc from the Ark is, he adds, “fire, lighting, the power of God, or something.” And Jones’s colleague adds, the “army that carries the arc before it is invincible,” thus echoing the theory that war is waged with cinema and the media before real combat takes place (Virilio 1982, 36–37). Jones takes “Marcus,” an aptly named colleague, to his home where another globe sits on his desk in the background. Upon learning that they will be paid to seek the Ark (or that the studio has approved the budget of their film), they toast to future success. The moment, Jones utters, itching with archive fever, “definitely represents everything we got into archaeology for in the first place.” The first overtly mapped form of the film is the background on which a red line is drawn under the image of a Pan American overseas cruiser that soars toward the depressed arc of the Golden Gate Bridge. The stripe of the itinerary is drawn over the lines of latitude and longitude of a Mercator projection as the plane emerges from clouds blending into the image of the Pacific Ocean. The map-effect is slick and smooth, the images pellucid and without blur or fuzz. The film will implicitly engage a historical cartography of the images that have been the stock and stuff of adventure since the era of the silent film and comic books in the tradition of Milton Caniff.²⁵

Indiana Jones taps into a tradition of antiquated adventure films with which it establishes an implicit dialogue. One of its chapters (twenty-two) in the recently minted DVD edition is titled “The Flying Wing.” In this episode Jones and his lady friend Marion (Karen Allen) attempt to wrest the Ark from the Nazis and steal away by getting away in a strange aircraft that seems to be a composite mix of a Messerschmitt 262, an American “flying wing” of the 1950s, and a stealth bomber. The nacelles of its two propeller-driven engines are aimed backwards and its cockpit, at the origin of the dihedral of the wing, points directly forward. A ball-turret equipped with a machine gun is atop on the rear of the fuselage. The sequence begins when the hero pushes a gigantic perpend from the wall of a squat tower piercing a hillock in the desert. From a window opened onto what seems to be the studio set of the film, Jones peers onto scene before he and Marion climb over the threshold and descend a slope en route to the aircraft. Jones overcomes a couple of guards and engages an Aryan behemoth. Marion removes the chocks from under the wheels of the landing gear and uses them as a blunt instrument to knock one of the soldiers on the head. She climbs into the cockpit and quickly retreats to the turret where she opens fire on oncoming squadrons of troops. Because the plane is unmoored and its twin engines are idling, Marion finds herself turning about a 360-degree axis. Riddled with stray bullets, barrels of gasoline spurt their contents all over the area. As the plane turns about, the Aryan strong man, on the verge of overwhelming Jones, backs into the turning propeller where (implied by two cutaway shots displaying blood spattering all over the stabilizer and windshield), he is cut to shreds. The gasoline explodes as Jones and Marion make their getaway to hide in a tent where a native informant tells them that the Ark has been loaded on a truck. A new chapter follows.

The model for the sequence is found in the crowning episode in Desperate Journey. The cartographic implications of the sequence both in Walsh’s film and others of the same ilk in the Warner Brothers studio show by a strange turn of paradox that the allusion to Desperate Journey summons the ideological contours of Spielberg’s production of 1981. We have seen that in Walsh’s film, attention was drawn to the way that both the film and its maps were agents, on the one hand, of dissimulation while, on the other, they held forth the promise and the prayer for a rewriting of history. The film was a “diagram” anticipating and programming change in the course of the Second World War. And, too, High Sierra was a toponymical tale showing that its mythic frame was light-years away from the events of its own time. In Indiana Jones the same “classical” films become the “archive” for the “arc” and “ark” or archway of the production. The film seamlessly cites the spatial rhetoric of the earlier films to the point where the montageimages of the Warner Brothers’ features are turned into the smooth substance of an adventure without lapse, lull, or the slightest modulation. The film is an adventure and a journey that, as it were, digitalizes the cartographies of classical cinema. Various paradigms of displacement are found in High Sierra, Desperate Journey, Casablanca, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The adventure film and the romantic epic on which they are based belong not only to an antique cinema but also to cognitive maps and diagrams of wishes and dreams. They appeal to the vitality of a child’s imagination of the world and its conflicts. If only for comparative reasons it may now be productive to see how adolescence, romance, and cartography are configured in postwar cinema on the other side of the Atlantic.