Conclusion

This project began from the impression that films often display maps in their visual field. From there it has been hypothesized that cartography and cinema share many of the same traits. A map, it was shown, requires complex modes of decipherment quite similar to those required for close and exacting making and study of cinema. Reading and seeing, that since the Renaissance have been assumed to be two different modes of intellection, are co-extensive in cinema and cartography. Printed language, topographic representation, relief, perspectival tension, depth of field, and decorative framing of the kind seen on manuscript and printed maps are found in movies. Building on masterworks that tell us what a map is and what is required to read it, I have sought to see what happens when we discern a map in a moving image.¹

To lay a groundwork for applied analysis of a sampling of films’ appeal has been made to what appears to be a “cartographic impulse” inspiring a good deal of film theory. A point of departure is found in the writings of André Bazin in which philosophy and criticism inform questions concerning the nature of filmic space. The question, “What is cinema?” has as its corollary “What is the event that we call cinema?” If an event is what causes us to perceive the conditions and actions of perception in what we are seeing and perceiving (and often, we discover, what sees and perceives us), it follows that the maps we discern in a movie often heighten our awareness about perception and subjectivity. A map in a movie prompts us to sense the “quiddity” (or, in the philosophical idiom of Gilles Deleuze, the “haeccity”) of the medium. The visual textures, indeed the tactility of the image, give rise to sensations of a kind common to the physical and intellectual pleasures we experience in deciphering a map. The theory examined in the introduction confirms a point that as viewers we often feel displaced whenever we watch a film in a movie theater. The film uses any number of means to foster the illusion that “it is where it is.” As soon as we become aware that the representation is only on the screen we tend—often on a psychogenetic plane that may or may not be related to what we are viewing—to harbor doubts about where and why we are looking at the moving image, or why, perhaps in order to let ourselves nestle into a state of passive pleasure, we want to suspend disbelief. These doubts bring forward issues of bilocation and multilocation: we need to feel ourselves in different places at once and, for our own health, not always to be where we are told we are. Broadly then, when a map appears in a movie a swarm of nagging questions arises about being, identity, space, and location. As a general rule a map in a movie can unsettle or displace the inferred contracts tendered at the beginning of every film about the conditions of viewing that follow.

The map can bring forward issues that cause it to become a point of departure for an interpretive itinerary. When a cartographic shape—be it a projection, a globe, an icon of the world, an atlas, a diagram, a bird’s-eye view of a landscape, a city-view—is taken as a point of departure, it becomes a model, a patron, or even a road map from which transverse readings can be plotted. It lifts the viewer from the grip of the moving image and thus allows our gaze to mobilize its faculties. At times it looks into what might be assumed to be the unconscious register of cinema, a domain that, as we have seen through the attention Jacques Rancière brings to the areas of the image that the camera records passively, remains unbeknownst to the artist or technician who imposes an action or conscious control upon it. These spaces transmute into a “mobile geography” of cinema. In it voices and visual signs, moving about, tend not to be where they are always thought to be. Maps give shape to other forms that unsettle or make canny things uncanny; they even open onto dimensions of which the film, in the words of Melville’s Bartleby, often “would prefer not to” speak.

The films made by the pioneers of cinema, directors who may belong to the regime of the “movement-image” and who realize the potentialities of the medium, are often cartographers. As auteurs they produce a vision of the world through the sum of their films. Yet their cartographic sense is so stirring that they are continually plotting their work when they fold maps into their images and narratives. Sometimes these directors construct itineraries of their own creation, while at others they use maps to inquire of and comment on the state of the world being shown. They insert cartographic material into their work in order, it appears, to build archives and diagrams that exert critical force upon the collective experience of both the films made and their viewers. The films made by the inheritors of cinema, perhaps directors or independent cineasts who live in the regime of the “time-image,” establish more precarious and moving cartographies, Gilles Deleuze (1985b) and others have argued, in which their maps are shown in deficit or excess in respect to the spaces and situations plotted and represented. But no matter whether a director belongs to one regime, to the other, or to both, he or she destabilizes the field of their images.

In the early chapters it has been suggested that certain genres have exceptional affinity for cartography. They would include the Western, in which space is the object and modus vivendi of narratives that tell of the founding of new political orders or claims staked to new lands; those of the war movie, in which maps are the precondition to the representation and execution of battle; the road movie, where narrative is written as a line drawn upon an ephemeral map; mysteries or thrillers in which secret places are encountered in the struggle between forces of order and disorder, in worlds where maps have strategic virtue for the proponents of both good and evil. They include, as we have seen by way of Truffaut and Kassovitz, the Bildungscinema in which tales of children and youth experiencing the world find themselves amid controlling maps that they cannot read or understand. And, in a less likely way, we have found that maps can also inhabit sentimental films where psychological and affective journeys take place, making of themselves what Giuliana Bruno (2002) calls an “atlas of emotion.” They can include film noir, in which maps underscore how much everyone is lost and adrift in a world where neither ethical nor geographical bearings can be found in the chaos of war and confusion. Blockbuster films, too, often include maps in order to emphasize the enormity of control they wish to hold on national and frequently global scales.

The films studied in the chapters above, it is hoped, confirm and complicate the hypotheses tendered in the introduction. René Clair’s Paris qui dort, a film about modern times and modern cinema, touches on areas of strategic control that would make cinema a medium patterning and channeling collective perception. Seen from a distance, Paris qui dort is a “diagram” that charms—but locates and fixes—the spectator in a world, at the threshold of the talkie, under its control. Its shape as a map anticipates the “global positioning” potential of cinema of which today we are abundantly aware. Comparative treatment of Jean Renoir’s films from 1932 to 1939 disengages aesthetic issues that become increasingly politicized. The maps that form an innocuously casual background to Boudu sauvé des eaux cause the film to compress and dilate so visibly that it calls immediate attention to what will be the theme of atmospheric surface and depth prevailing in much of French cinema of the 1930s.² In Le Crime de Monsieur Lange a map of North America tells the viewer that we are not in a Western where space would expand and that, as a consequence, the social utopia that the characters in the film seek to inaugurate is impossible. The map in fact makes clear that the revolution engaged in the film belongs almost exclusively to the camera. Cued by the map, the circles that the lens describes run in a direction that might be contrary to the collective will on the part of a group that would invent a unaministic world in the miniature space in which it lives. In La Grande Illusion a military map summons the technology of military progress. The same film introduces a mosaic map that is likened to an imaginary museum of art that fuels the illusion vital to the lives of a community of prisoners of war. The stone spheres on the terrace of the Château de Solognes on which take place events crucial to the narrative of La Règle du jeu are at once globes and cannonballs on the verge of explosion. The globes elicit and refuse an allegory that would foretell the advent of the Second World War. In a different register the maps in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta belong to the struggle of forces that would either terrorize or unify the city and country in its darkest hours in modern times. Ostensibly decorative material, the same projections are found in the living and working spaces of both the “good” and “evil” forces, thus dashing the lines of divide in battles engaged in a milieu marked by the world-theater and a theater of cruelty.

In the name of the “desperate journey,” what would be a genre or a convention, the relation of cartography to camouflage is discerned in the ways that maps foster illusions of displacement. The resilience of the genre is made manifest when, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, director Steven Spielberg cites earlier films in his construction of a seamless and utterly smooth treatment of adventure. Along the way the film makes clear its own power to be an archive and, too, a controlling diagram for a cinema of aura. By contrast, Casablanca, a classic map-film, figures in the tradition of the desperate journey where its maps are related to the immobility of a historical condition in which the narrative is begun. Important avatars of the desperate journey include two of Raoul Walsh’s many films that follow the model. High Sierra folds maps of fate—of mythic destiny—assigned to characters caught within its webbing. Desperate Journey, by contrast, makes clear the illusion on which the authority of guiding maps is based. In its place is glimpsed an art of camouflage that becomes the very object and objective of the film.

Mapping is a pertinent trait of French New Wave cinemas. It is deployed to establish a national geography, indeed a layered landscape, conceived with and against the film theory of André Bazin as well as from classical cinemas of various origin. The New Wave writes obliquely of its relation with the Second World War, directly of its own inventive form, and immediately, too, of its dialogue with director-auteurs whom its adepts take to be the masters of the seventh art. Maps in New Wave films tell of that relation. We have seen that in Les Mistons appeal is made to topographic images of historical depth that reach back both to the history of Gallia in early Christian times and to classical cinema. In Les 400 coups, a map of a boy’s life in Paris is placed over those of French history—including those locating the origins of French literature—in a classroom. Different events pock the road of Antoine Doinel’s progress while others make manifest, as if he sees them through a glass darkly, an art of citation that verges on creative plagiarism. In a fashion not dissimilar to what is seen in the maps of subjectivity in Truffaut’s cinema, Louis Malle, in Les Amants, tells a woman’s tale of a dangerous departure toward unknown places. She and her lover take leave of a Burgundian landscape associated with Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Carte du Tendre of the middle years of the seventeenth century. The film crafts its sumptuous images of the milieu through the filter of an allegorical creation. If books and literary citations are part of the composite shape of French New Wave cinemas, so also, it can be concluded, are maps and mapping.

The final chapters constitute an essay on cartographies of what might be called post–New Wave films. In La Haine the maps that are seen remain in the heritage of the French directors of the postwar years. We have noted that the maps in La Haine pertain to an adolescent (but no less vital) cosmology or even a metaphysics. As an icon inserted to spur reflection on the state of the world, a satellite image of the planet Earth figures in a grid of cinematic sources and variants embedded, like iron rods in the reinforced concrete of low-cost housing in the Parisian suburbs, within the scope of the film. Bearing strong resemblance to Les 400 coups, La Haine tells of a subjectivity going in reverse.

In Thelma and Louise and Gladiator maps, belonging to an international and industrial mold, show that the features are conceived and plotted for broad distribution. The infrequent but decisive presence of maps in Ridley Scott’s two features unlocks their stories and opens the films to broader speculation on how contemporary cinema crafts formulaic narratives that move across national borders. The effects of the maps show why. They also open perception onto deeper histories in which the films are meshed. The baroque maps found in the roadside motel in Thelma and Louise point to a neo-baroque articulation of what might seem to be a fairly traditional road movie. The quasi-Ptolemaic map seen at the outset of Gladiator indicates what the film is copying, much in the way that sequences in Les Mistons and Les 400 coups were a mix of citations: when we see the map we also discover a principal source of the film. Marcus Aurelius’s words, “look at this map” directed at once to Maximus and ourselves, can be seen as an imperative to “look at another film in this film.” It affords not only a diacritical reading with The Fall of the Roman Empire, first of all, but then, too, of the “peplum” genre that includes Spartacus, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Ben-Hur, and other films. The map shows that a critical perspective inheres in the otherwise strategic design.

Gladiator, it is well known, makes much of computer-generated images and digital process. Some of its shots refer to global positioning or to what in contemporary cartography goes by the name of locational imaging. Its special effects in respect to icarian perspectives are related to what we see in other media. Made manifest where great arenas are in question, the architectural shots of Gladiator remind us that other films theorized or even “invented” their power by linking cinematic form to mapping. One of them was Les Mistons, in which the empty coliseum of Nîmes is a stage for a battle between children and the couple whom they adulate and demonize. In the struggle the winner is cinema, for within the architectural frame extensive reflection on the history and power of the medium comes forward. Others films include Paris qui dort, Les 400 coups, and La Haine, in which the Eiffel Tower is a site seen as an originary plot of cinema. It is used to mark the distance gained or lost between its time of construction, given to be of Cartesian facture, and a world without a past, from which a new utopia becomes the harbinger of a dystopia, one in which cinema will be the medium marshaled to manage perception. The films studied in the final chapter return to the relation that cartography and cinema share in the design of what one critic long ago (Jameson 1982) called “strategies of containment.”

Since the films address the delicate and perplexing issue of perception, their mapping impulse can be associated with the relations of writing to space. The force of the former engenders perception (or even the creation) of the latter and, as cinema shows us, the latter tends to fissure the meaning of the former (Ropars-Wuilleumier 2003). The cinemas turn their places—themes or commonplaces, non-places, any-places-whatsoever, or the locations in which they are shot—into critical spaces. If indeed, as it was argued in the introduction, the perception of space, what can be qualified in the philosophical sense as an event, calls being into question. In this way reflection on perception also questions that of the perceiver who, in the instance of these pages, is taken to be an ordinary viewer of cinema. When a map unsettles the image in which it appears, it also conduces the spectator to wonder about his own or her own sense of location. When map in a film coyly asserts, “you are here,” the spectator may respond interrogatively, murmuring, “Where am I?” If the concept of a “subject-position” in speechact theory can be turned into a “viewer-position” in cinema studies, a map in a movie can prompt us to ask where we are in view of the film, and how and where our imagination negotiates different positions and places in the area between the cartography of the film, as it is seen, and the imagination as it moves about and deciphers the film. Thus fears about how the controlling and strategic agencies of cinema are deployed can be displaced by alternate uses of the cartographies the medium mantles to establish its hold on perception. The readings of the films studied in the chapters above, it is hoped, have led critical labors in this direction.

Other films and other maps might be grist for continued inquiry along similar axes. Where are all the maps in Fritz Lang’s cinema, from M (1931) to Moonfleet (1955)? Why do we find a glaring absence of a map in the same director’s claustrophobic Western, Rancho Notorious (1952)? Why not study Bonaparte’s vision of a map of Italy on the face of Joséphine in the pyrotechnic finale of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927)? What about the map of Hiroshima at the flashback at the beginning of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959)? What has it to do with the map of the Ganges at the end of Duras’s India-Song (1975)? Why has nothing been said about the projection of North and South America on whose surface Cameron Diaz traces an itinerary with her finger in Gangs of New York? What does the harbor seen at the end of Mystic River have to do with its several maps of Massachusetts seen in the precincts of the city? Study of a map in a movie resembles an endless itinerary in an archipelago of films where we enjoy gaining and losing our bearings.