Introduction

An important strain of French film theory is implicitly built on cartographic principles of cinema. André Bazin, a founder of postwar film theory in France and a father of New Wave cinema, suggests that part of the ontology of film is built upon geographical and geological foundations. The title of his book of essays is telling. What Is Cinema? (Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?). To ask what it is may be equivalent to wondering where it is. In his appeal to a concept of the evolution of cinema Bazin sketches a historical stratigraphy, a geological map that inheres at once in his notion of the fortunes of film language and film genres and in his predilection for deep-focus photography. His metaphors are taken from a tradition of geography that reaches back to the pedagogy of maps and mapping in French schools and the tradition of Paul Vidal de la Blache.⁹ A cursory reading of Bazin’s writings uncovers the signature of a Christian existentialist and casual philosopher, to be sure, but also of a heightened awareness of the way that cineastes portray—and in portraying, situating, and locating—humans and animals in their ambient world.

In the preface to the four slim tomes of What Is Cinema? Bazin noted, “These books will not... claim to offer an exhaustive geography and geology of cinema, but merely to draw the reader into a succession of soundings, explorations, and overviews practiced when films are put forward for the critic’s daily reflection.” He proposes fieldwork, survey, and the drawing of incomplete maps in the place of a finished work or cinematic atlas. In “Cinematographic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation” (an article first appearing in Esprit, January 1948) the words that “situate” cinemas of the postwar directors are couched in the same terms. “After having attempted to demarcate the geography of this cinema, so penetrating in social description, so meticulous and so perspicacious in the choice of true and significant detail, there remains the task of understanding its aesthetic geology” (1999 [1975], 7, 273).

At the center of “The Evolution of Film Language,” the most telling essay in his oeuvre in which he builds a typology and film based on the overlapping regimes of silent and sound traditions that exploit the long take and deep-focus photography, Bazin argues that directors who had been trained in filmmaking prior to the advent of sound made use of its spatial virtues (the absence of voice and hence a manifest hieroglyphic language or a pictogrammar in the field of view in a shot) in the era that would seem to have consigned them to obsolescence. He asserts,

In 1939 the talkie had reached what geographers call the profile of equilibrium of a river. In other words, this ideal mathematical curve that results from sufficient erosion: having reached its profile of equilibrium, the river flows effortlessly from its source to its mouth and now no longer hollows out its basin. But if there intervenes some geological movement that raises the peneplain, modifying the altitude of the source: the water continues to exert force, penetrating the subjacent terrain, sinking into it, hollowing and rounding it out. Sometimes, if there are layers of limestone, a new relief is suddenly drawn on the plateau in almost invisible concavities, but it is complex and tortuous for as far and as long as we follow the path of the water. (1999 [1975], 71)

The reader wonders if cinema is drawn into an extended geographical conceit. Sound film, argues Bazin, was at such a profile, but with the work of deep-focus directors in the line of William Wyler, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and Jean Renoir (indeed a director who films rivers and the chemin de l’eau of the water that Bazin describes) a geological “event” takes place. The style of these directors refuses to shatter the filmic event into a mosaic of montage. Bazin’s celebrated hypotheses about a rupture or revolution—rather than an evolution—in the language of cinema exploit the lexicon of geography to mark “a vast geological displacement of the foundation of cinema” (76).

The critic does not write of geography and geology in a solely decorative sense. The clear refusal to compare his writings to that of a surveyor attests to its geographical “peneplain.” The recurrence of the figure betrays a sensibility that ties the perception (and even what Gilles Deleuze, a close reader of Bazin, calls the prehension) of cinematic space to the order of a philosophical event.¹⁰ Bazin’s penchant for deep focus and the long take are allied with that sensibility. Time and again he ties the event to the ways that the long shot in deep focus transforms the film into a dynamic field of tensions that moves from side to side and forward and backward throughout the visual field. When used artfully, as he says of the works of Orson Welles and William Wyler, deep-focus photography conveys a cinematic event by bearing on the “intellectual relations of the spectator with the image” (75). The event of Citizen Kane is that of its insertion into a total movement, “a vast geological displacement of the ground of cinema” (76). For Bazin the world itself becomes part and parcel of the cinematic event that in itself is defined by its “spatial unity” (59). The latter finds ultimate expression in the Western, a genre inseparable “from its geographic frame,” especially in the work of Budd Boetticher, the director who knows well “how to make prodigious use of the landscape, of the varied matter of the earth, of grainy textures and the form of rocks” (218, 246).

It is the regime of the “image-fact” (image-fait) where Bazin makes clear his implicit cartography. Redefining the “shot” [plan] in Rossellini’s Paisan—a substantive he puts between inverted commas as if to call attention to its meaning as “map”—he notes that its received meaning as “an abstract point of view on reality that is analyzed” is transformed into a “fragment of brute reality, in itself multiple and equivocal, whose meaning is disengaged only a posteriori, by virtue of other ‘facts’ among which the mind establishes relations” (281). For Bazin the fact can be understood as a landscape comprising a paradoxically lacunary totality of elements, such as the marshes near the mouth of the River Po where, in the last sequence, German soldiers murder a group of Italian partisans. Each “image-fact” stands in a paratactic relation with others, as might the fragments of a topography. Bazin is close in spirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy’s Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.¹¹ In this way, by accumulation and not by logical concatenation, an array of image-facts produces on the surface of the frame “an equal concrete density” (282), in other words, a loose or even unbound network of tensions of the same charge that are distributed all over the image-field. No one place or site has privilege over another.

The image-fact requires the shot to be read as might a map or, if a map or an image of smaller proportion is held within the field of view, as a detail, a detail read not as a privileged zone but as a locus of organic force equal to everything else in the frame. At the outset of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps), the second panel of a diptych presenting a taxonomy of film, Gilles Deleuze invokes Bazin’s concept to inaugurate a moment and style that introduce a “new, apparently dispersive, elliptical, errant, or dancing form of reality, operating by blocks, with deliberately weak linkages or floating events” (1985a, 7). A reader informed by the history of cartography immediately discerns a shift in emphasis from topography, whose partial view is autonomous and whose pieces cohere, to a greater degree of isolation where stress is placed on “événements flottants,”or floating events. Events become singularities or, it can be inferred, unlinked “islands” of an archipelago without beginning or end. The image-fact exists because of its “isolation” in respect to others of the same kind, to shapes and situations whose tradition of spatial arrangement reaches back to images of the world seen as an open whole of islands or aggregates punctuated by “dead time and empty spaces” (15).¹² The geographic and cartographic underpinning of Bazin’s writing is invoked at a turning point in his taxonomic history of film cinema. It emerges as a foundation for Deleuze’s more extensive spatial and cartographic theory of cinema.

With the concept of the image-fact and its implicit geography of singularity, still following Bazin, Deleuze draws a line of demarcation between an “old” world of classical cinema and its “newer” counterpart.¹³ Cinema of the years prior to the Second World War, in whose immediate aftermath Bazin wrote most of the essays of What Is Cinema?, was marked by an aesthetics of action and movement. With the advent of montage it realized its own potentiality and became the complete and total—the seventh—art of its name. After the war a cinema of time, argues Deleuze, tends to replace that of movement. Films that had riveted spectators to their seats give way to features encouraging reflection on the relation of the medium to what it cannot represent. A regnum of duration intercedes and supplants that of action. The impact of the war, which indeed was the context in which the image-fact was conceived by way of Bazin’s study of Rossellini, is strongly felt in Deleuze’s schematic treatment of film. The weakening of the “movement-image” in favor of the “time-image” is marked by the fact that film could “no longer transcribe completed events but had to attain events in the process of their creation,” in other words, become consonant with the “event as it was happening.” The new cinema brought forward the site of what he calls an “open totality” (Deleuze 1983, 277–78). Space enters the field of view, isolating certain events in certain areas of the frame and allowing others to take place, simultaneously, in others.

Six symptoms come forward. Deleuze speculates that as an implicit result of world history the cinematic image can no longer refer to a “globalizing or synthetic situation”—as a mappamundi would offer an enclosed view of earthly space—but to scenes of dispersion or disruption. They have no apparent cause and are in no way “unanimistic” as they had been in the past with public cinema in the style of King Vidor or Renoir in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.¹⁴ The “line or fiber of the universe” that tied events together gets frayed, and as a result events become indifferent to themselves. Instead of captivating the spectator’s gaze, the camera begins to travel on its own, autonomously, without respect to the point of view of the stories of the lives of the characters it recounts. It wanders and walks through the “rundown fabric of the city, in opposition to action that took place most often in the delimited space-times of the former realism” (280). Clichés overtake plotlines and the exploration of both space and psychology.¹⁵ Finally, cinema no longer sustains “an organization that would refer to a distinct milieu, as in the film noir of American realism, to attributable actions by which criminals would make themselves known.... No longer is there a magic center from which hypnotic actions could be broadcast as they had in the first two ‘Mabuse’ films by Fritz Lang” (282–83). In a realm where good and evil are mixed, the spatial and visual opposition of law and order against crime no longer holds sway. An era of suspicion, one in which conspiracy is felt and denounced, takes over.

Thus begins the regime of the time-image that generally pertains to postwar cinema for the reason that, with the filming of the concentration camps, it became evident that any filmic image was in deficit in respect to what it was showing. The time-image would be that of a moment when, “nonetheless,” despite the death of the former power of images, despite their frailty and facticity, images are resurrected and redeployed.¹⁶ The “image-fact” that had embodied the contradiction of being a totality and a fragment stands at the fulcrum of the balance. A close reading of Cinema 2: The Time-Image reveals that the movement-image inheres indeed in the time-image, and vice-versa, and that inasmuch as the author disclaims history—“[t]his study is not a history of cinema,” he asserts in the first sentence of the first volume (1983, 7)—history sustains what he calls a taxonomic project. Without working through the contradictions or elucidating the finer points of Deleuze’s classifications, a reader quickly observes that they are based on “locational” or spatial logic, if not indeed on a typology that reaches back to the hemispheres of “old” and “new” worlds as they had been depicted in atlases.¹⁷ One of the virtues of the taxonomy is analytical. Insofar as time-images and movement-images seem to belong to two different regimes, they are nonetheless inseparable. The distinction, however, helps to show how perception, action, and affect are expressed by and evinced in cinema in different ways at different moments. It engages interpretation based on a dialectics that lacks a synthetic term. At stake is a mode of “mapping” film by way of plot points of time and movement in space.¹⁸

Deleuze’s work as a philosopher and critical writer resembles that of a cinematic auteur. It needs to be read in its totality; from the linkages and ruptures of its details and from its isolated fragments productive itineraries and connections can be made.¹⁹ In two chapters of Foucault (one titled “Un nouveau cartographe [A New Cartographer]”) the author of Cinéma 1 and Cinéma 2 makes distinctions, on the one hand, between “discursive” and “visible” formations” and, on the other, between archival maps and diagrams. For Foucault a discursive formation meant the array of modes of speaking and communicating in which a human subject is born and that determine much of what he or she can say. The subject tends more to be spoken by prevailing modes of discourse than to speak them in his or her own name. The same holds for visible formations. Many inherited and often inert images circulate in the midst of a public to determine how it will ascertain and collect, and even see the shapes and contours of the world at large.

At given moments visibility changes, and so do ways of speaking. From overlapping “manners of speaking and ways of seeing” a map a sense of modern history can be conceived. Strata and layers of space and time are shown through examination of pertinent differences (Deleuze 1985b, 56). Knowledge, which Foucault equates with power, becomes a practical implementation, a “mechanism” or a “machine,” as it were, of utterances and visibilities. The creative individual is he or she who can “break open words, sentences or propositions in order to extract their statements” (59) and who can shatter “things” in the same way. The task of the archeologist, he says, is to “crack open words, sentences and propositions, to crack open qualities, things, and objects. When what is seen and what is spoken are shown not to be of the same order an archeology is engaged.” Deleuze notes that “Foucault is singularly close to contemporary cinema” (72), no doubt for the reason that the differences of the soundtrack and the image-track can be read and plotted along both diverging and criss-crossing lines. It is in the regime of these differences where the real “map,” the strategic operation of the cinema as well as its invention or its unconscious is most likely to be discovered.²⁰ Real artists happen to be those who turn discursive forms in the direction of visibility and, conversely, invest visible shapes and the tactility of things into language. They are, like Foucault’s Raymond Roussel, those who can speak and make objects visible in the same movement and gesture. They could also be filmmakers of the order of auteurs, the artists whom Deleuze admires, “great auteurs of cinema... who can be compared not only to painters, architects, musicians, but also to thinkers. Auteurs think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts” (1983, 7–8).

Those who study cinema account for the rifts and overlappings of things seen and things said. In these areas a general cartography of film becomes manifest, especially where maps, themselves intermediate objects that combine visible and discursive formations on the same surface, bring forward the gaps and contradictions of the “tracks” of film. In Foucault Deleuze’s remarks fall under his rubric of “Topology: ‘Thinking Otherwise.’” As if in a lap-dissolve, they blend with some crucial reflections that end the section of the book, titled “From the Archive to the Diagram,” which is capped by “A New Cartographer,” the name given to a close reading of Surveiller et punir (Discipline and punish) (1975). He argues that the author draws and then superimposes multifarious maps in order to explain the rifts and shifts of power that take place in the passage from a monarchic order in France prior to 1789 to the onset of its industrial revolution. He plots the fate of law, taken not to be a set of sacrosanct rules, but a management of “illegalisms,” of illegal practices that are required to be sustained in the management of law. Law “is no more a state of peace than the result of war that is won: it is war itself, and the strategy of this war in action, just as power is not a property acquired by the dominant class, but an on-going exercise of its strategy” (Deleuze 1985b, 37, 38).

Into this configuration Deleuze plugs the latent cinematic concept of discursive and visible formations. The discursive embodiment of the law would be found in the former, in codes and in juridical practice while the latter, the prison, would be its visible counterpart of a shape and form that are not necessarily congruent with the statutes that would determine it. The commentator inserts the concepts of “form of content” and “form of expression” to show that a difference is at stake between “the form of the visible” and the “form of the utterable” (1985b, 40). When the two are juxtaposed there results a “diagram,” what Deleuze glosses as

no longer the auditive or visual archive, but the map, the cartography co-extensive with the entire social field. It is an abstract machine. Defined by functions and unshaped matter, it makes no formal distinction between a content and an expression, between a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation. It is an almost mute and blind machine even though it is what makes seeing and speaking possible. (1985b, 42)

Here the diagram could qualify as a film. A film sets forward the stakes and laws of its form and proceeds to work with and against them. It overtly proposes certain modes of conduct in some areas and others in different strata, covertly, through its own illegalisms. It obeys the laws that censors apply but simultaneously perverts them, by quoting and bending them to make new and different shapes.²¹ Certain laws that would be made clear on the image-track are foiled or “cracked open” by the flagrant contradictions of utterances in and out of frame on the soundtrack. As a diagram, too, given its “spatio-temporal multiplicity” (Deleuze 1985b, 42), a film would be an exposition of relations of force, not just in what is seen on screen but also in the greater space of its projection or emission. The diagram is especially cinematographic in the way that on a collective scale it can plot behavior or even, it can be argued, perception:

[T]he diagram is profoundly unstable and in flux, endlessly mixing material and functions so as to constitute mutations. Finally, every diagram is intersocial and in a condition of becoming. It never functions in order to represent a pre-existing world, it produces a new type of reality, a new model of truth. It is not a subject of history, nor what overlooks history. It makes history in undoing preceding realities and meanings, constituting as many points of emergence or of creativity, of unexpected conjunctions, of improbable continuums. It doubles history with a becoming. (1985b, 43)

The beauty of the cinematic diagram resides in the way its own causes at once stand coextensive with and even “program” the reality that would be a sum of its effects. What Deleuze describes through the action of doubling can be taken at once as mirroring and, as might accelerate a car on a highway, an action of passing or moving ahead.

The diagram goes beyond “history” because it is designed to make history happen, that is, to cause its events to be enveloped in its own past or archive. What “will have happened” will have happened by virtue of a programmatic mechanism.²² At the end of the chapter the reader returns to the issue of doubling. “The history of forms, an archive, is doubled by a becoming of forces, a diagram” (1985b, 51). In the place of the subject there could be placed “the history of cinema” in such a way that the predicate—doubler in French—inflects the substantive to mean that cinema has already plotted its own history or has produced the visible and discursive formations that characterize the manuals, chronicles, introductions, and encyclopedias through which we are given to know how film has “become what it is.” In view of this model the historian of cinema would be the exegete or archivist who ventriloquizes the forms and norms of an inherited cinematic diagram.

But the same historian can work in the context of what Deleuze calls a cartography of becoming: “A diagram is a map, or rather [a set of] maps superimposed upon one another. And, from one diagram to the other, new maps are drawn [tirées]. Thus no diagram fails to bear, next to the points it connects, other points, relatively free or unbound, points of creativity, of mutation, of resistance; and we move from them in order to comprehend the totality” (1985b, 51). With archival material the historian can fashion other and new—creative, mutating, resisting—shapes of interpretation. If the lexicon of Michel de Certeau were plotted over these words, the new shapes would be the result of a cartographic tactics—a diagram—that operates in the midst of strategic designs. In this rich and dense passage of Foucault the reader witnesses an interrogation of inherited mappings and a politics advocating new and different uses of them. Such are the stakes of the study of maps, insofar as they can be taken as diagrams, within films, that in themselves are also diagrams with multifarious objectives.

Deleuze ends his reading by quoting an interview that Foucault had led in 1975 in which he called himself a cartographer for the reason that he felt his political commitments made themselves clear as a mode of practical and tactical writing. He called it a writing equivalent to a mapping. “To write is to struggle, in other words, to resist; to write is to become; to write is to make maps [écrire, c’est cartographier]. ‘I’m a cartographer’” (1985b, 51).²³ In the triple definition of writing that Deleuze extracts from Foucault, what goes in the name of the archive becomes a tactics because it resists any or all complacency that inheres in pregiven truth. In terms of a cinematic diagram it can be observed that where a map is seen in a film, or where a map shows how a film becomes a map, cartography can make visible the history of the strategies informing what a film is projecting.²⁴ Quite often maps in films are archival diagrams that tell of the history and strategy of the surrounding film. In Saskatchewan (1954), a feature that André Bazin praised for its fidelity to the classical order of the Western,²⁵ director Raoul Walsh tells the story of a quixotic member of the Canadian Mounties (Alan Ladd) and his Sancho-like companion (Leo Carillo) who are obliged to cross the Canadian Rockies to deliver a truant woman (Shelley Winters) to authorities in Montana. The two cronies, one in his fire-engine-red uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the other wearing animal skins, report to a British captain who is clearly out of place in the barracks of a makeshift fort at a limitrophe region of the Canadian wilderness. Trained to go by the book of classical military conduct, the captain indicates to the two men how they must cross the border. The film cuts to a close-up of a map of the Saskatchewan territory. With the tip of a pencil a hand indicates an itinerary that will go from “here” (in Saskatchewan, a site given in the credits of the film and doubled in the map seen in the close-up) to “there” on the other side of an artificial line of division, to a site that he calls “Fort Walsh.” Fort... da: the itinerary is effectively that of many films for which Raoul Walsh was known. On the map is drawn the trajectory of an auteur, of a director (Saskatchewan figured then as the 109th film in his career as a director) who mythifies himself and the “form of the content” of his oeuvre in the map-sequence in the film.²⁶

The episode pertains to the narrative and the itinerary of a director. So also does the map that appears in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000). We see it after Maximus (Russell Crowe) has won the day in bloody combat against the Goths at the upper reaches of the Roman Empire. Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) has brought the captain into his tent in order to bestow upon him the leadership of the kingdom. He asks his centurion to “look at this map.” What we see for an instant is a projection of Italy and the northern provinces, the peninsula itself as it had been known in manuscript and printed editions of Ptolemy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The flagrant disrespect for authenticity reveals a history of greater facture: the viewer immediately recalls that in Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) a similar sequence portrayed Marcus Aurelius (Alec Guinness) leading Maximus (Christopher Plummer) by an easel to look at one of its sheet maps on display. The cutway shot of Ptolemy’s Italia in Scott’s epic makes clear the facticity of the map and the liberties taken with historical reconstruction, on the one hand, while it also indicates, like a footnote,²⁷ not only one of the principal sources of the film’s conception but also a dialogue between two different directorial stakes and styles, that of Scott in 2002 and Anthony Mann in the heyday of the Cold War in 1963. Both instances indicate that the sight of a map in a film often makes visible the history of the form producing the film, in other words, the archive held within and generating the tactics of the diagram.

At the crossroads of theory and cinema in the work of Deleuze and Foucault, it is often difficult to see if and where a spectator may be. Is the diagram on or off the horizon of the viewer? If cinema is a machine or a map of forces of its construction the spectator may be, as Walter Benjamin noted about the study of the fine arts, an element unworthy of consideration.²⁸ Even more than Benjamin might have believed, the film can show the viewer that, perhaps with the exception of the projectionist, he or she is outside of its operation. The effect that Benjamin (and elsewhere Foucault) locates as a regime “outside” of a field of meaning bears on the effect of exclusion that maps often convey to their readers. The effect of reading on a map under a plexiglas panel, “You are here,” a statement printed adjacent to an arrow on a map of a quarter near the entrance or exit of any of the major subway stations in cities around the world, bears witness to the same sense of exclusion. We are no more on the map than we may be in the space indicated by its geographic signs. Viewers of maps who seek to arrive at a destination often discover that, once their states of agitation and expectation are accounted for, they are in different places at once. Memories and fears of being lost—often associated with thoughts of being scattered in different places— interfere with cognition required to read the chart and to arrive at a destination.

In “The Uncanny,” in a memorable cartography of anxiety, Freud recounts an event in which he discovered how it felt to be lost.

As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back at the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. (1955, 17:237)

A promenade turns into a nightmare. The author is ambulating in a town whose name and place are unknown to him. He gets lost, happens upon a sight that frightens him, he recoils, sets off again, and finds himself in the same unsettling place. By way of automatic pilot (without asking an Italian pedestrian about how to get to the unnamed site from where he had begun his voyage) he regains his bearings. He settles as soon as he marshals the concept of the uncanny to explain the fear evinced at the sight of the “painted women,” the women in the window or figures who could be vamps on a screen who would stand forward (pro-situated) and cause him to turn away and take the same detour twice, a zigzagged itinerary, to and from a site that in the very text is foreign to the original place: the piazza. The point of departure and return is not a Platz as it would be in the familiar German idiom. It is a piazza, the site where the “uncanny” is found, where one language resides in another, and where an effect of doubling is inscribed in the twice-marked letter, the “z-z,” that traces the author’s venture ahead, his retreat, and his return.

If Freud’s account can be read in the manner of a spatial story or even a film, the autobiographical narrative that leads him to and from the painted women would be the movie and the piazza the map within it.²⁹ The word not only traces the line of his itinerary; it also doubles it as it stands at the origin and end of the narration. As the author had said about his own physical relation with the concept, the word translates itself into a spatial and graphic sign of the Uncanny.³⁰ He marks the very topic of the essay, the sense of being without location, in the doubly inflected site. Freud further emphasizes the point by recalling how much the uncanny is reminiscent in a comic way of the “wild exaggeration” in Mark Twain, another map-like name that in the textual carpet that stands at once as an anthroponym and a toponym of doubling. The pseudonym is of two words, the Christian name an act or fact of inscription, the surname containing a letter, a w, a double u, that is an inversion of the incipient m of the forename, the former distinguished from the latter by the difference between upper and lower case.

Freud’s narrative of a brief and frightening experience of Wanderlust tells much about cartographic exclusion and doubling in the realm of cinema. Freud is obliged to imagine himself in a place where he had felt himself—had he ever been there in the first place—twice displaced. In order to feel the uncanny, he had to transport or translate himself from one site to another.³¹ His miniature essay in self-mapping describes some of the cartographic effects that we often feel when we are in movie theaters. We “translate” ourselves into the imagination of another time and space. We suspend disbelief only insofar as our disbelief is threatened by our suspicion that identification with the film is based on not being there. We gather that the film begins to work on the ways that the very crux of our being and subjectivity are tested through spatial displacement.

The anxiety of displacement experienced in a movie theater is felt to the quick in Roland Barthes’s description of the sensations he experiences (in the third person) when he exits. Barthes’s spectator passes by the front doors in the evening and, as might a somnambulist, walks limp, in silence, in the direction of a café, “somewhat numb, feeling cramped, sensitive to the cold, in a word, asleep: he’s drowsy, that’s what he thinks; his body has become something sopitive, soft, serene: limp as a dormant cat, he feels something inarticulate, or even (since, for the ends of a moral organization repose is required): irresponsibility. In short, it’s clear, he is leaving a kind of hypnosis” (1975, 104). Barthes’s spectator wants to leave an amorphous and floating state as he is searching both for an exit (in a psychoanalytical register) and a cure. Barthes’s account of the spectator’s entry into the movie theater makes the connections of a geography of displacement to hypnosis even clearer. The spectator who would not be on a cultural quest

goes to the movie theater on basis of an idleness, of free time, of vacancy. Everything happens as if, even before going inside the theater, all the classical symptoms of hypnosis were manifest: emptiness, unconstrained time, there being nothing better to do: it is not in front of the film and through the film that we dream: we dream, unbeknownst to ourselves, before we become the spectator. There exists a “situation of cinema,” and this situation is pre-hypnotic. Following a true metonymy, the darkness of the room is prefigured by the “crepuscular reverie” (a precondition to hypnosis in the words of Breuer-Freud) that precedes this darkness and conduces the subject, from street to street, from poster to poster, finally to get lost in an obscure, anonymous, indifferent cube in which takes place this festival of affects called a film. (104)

Barthes’s spectator depicted here is idle, aimless, seeking to find something where he will lose all bearings. A flâneur of celluloid, he finds passing geographical markers in streets (possibly their names) and posters (that may be those of films). He is in a privileged affective zone because he is conscious of not being where he is. His affect is charged because the space of the movie theater invites a greater erotic availability, a sort of post-Gidean disponsibilité, than the act of cruising, which for the cruiser would imply the presence of prey to be stalked in the street. But in the cinema, “in this urban darkness” is where “the freedom of the body is laboring; this invisible labor of virtual affectivity results from what is a veritable cinematic cocoon” (105).

The erotic state of being that makes viewing possible becomes a function of the spectator’s displacement into an unmoored, self-detached position with respect to the geography in which he or she is situated. For this reason Barthes underscores that as a viewer he must “also be elsewhere” (106). If the film itself is a lure (indeed a fiction of locational imaging), it is shown in order to capture and captivate us into misrecognizing who and where we are. He suggests that the experience of displacement owes to a visual and even retinal “detachment” in which the spectator indulges in and breaks away from a fascination with filmed images. Thus the spectator can watch the film twice in the same blow: first through the image that gets attached to the narcissistic body and then through the perverse body that fetishizes not the image but that which exceeds it. It could be the granular texture of voice on the soundtrack, the space of the movie theater, the darkness, “the obscure mass of other bodies, the shafts of light, the entry, the exit” (106).

Barthes notes that in the two viewings affected by way of detachment an initial “relation” gets complicated when it becomes a “situation,” that is, a sense of site that plots the space and time of a relation. Implied here is the intervention of cartography, of the mapping of the spatial traits of the experience of subjectivity. They take place within and at the margins of the movie theater. The critic’s ideal spectator is he (for Barthes the shifter tends to be masculine) who is fascinated by his own awareness of displacement. The spectator is hypnotized by the distance he takes in respect to the image or the film within the frame of its captive power. Barthes calls it an amorous and not an intellectual distance, a blissful distance of discretion insofar as discretion is understood, he implies, in its etymological sense as separation. For the purpose of the arguments in these pages it should be added that, within the movie theater and within the film the spectator is watching, the map becomes the agent of the discretion and erotic distancing at the crux of visual pleasure.

The spectator who takes cognizance of being unmoored in the theater becomes conscious of at least two geographies. The one, affective, that Barthes describes with meticulous precision, is mobile. It appears to the spectator in the liminal areas of applied distraction, of free attention, of erotic reverie, of being errant but available to fix upon and discern different mental and physical sites. These sites are where an affective situation develops from a relation that the inner folds and musings of the self hold with the spaces seen on the screen in a public theater. The other, no less mobile, is cued through a mental geography the viewer or subject constructs with positions taken in respect to those being mapped and plotted in the cinema.

This geography might be related to what has been called cognitive and mental mapping. For Christian Jacob mental mapping is constituted through the spatial representation we make in our minds of the acts and actions taken in our everyday lives. In our imagination we plot our activities with reference to “a mental projection and even to a mental world map,” a psychic surface that “[i]n a complex way . . . mixes the individual and intimate traits with all forms of knowledge and with images that circulate in a given society and culture” (1992, 453–54; 2006, 359–60). The mental map belongs to the individual and cannot be translated into general terms even though its substance is made from a mixture of personal and collective impressions. It might be formed by the experience of certain films at given times, and it might also be a set of variants selected, consciously and unconsciously, from masses of images with which we construct the geographical illusions that are vital to our lives.³²

Mental mapping resembles cognitive mapping insofar as the latter describes how individuals negotiate their lives in the places in which they move. It is a practice based on spatial choices, on going here or there in one way or mode of conveyance or another, and of tying one’s actions in a particular place to the idea that they might, in the best of all utopian scenarios, bear on the world at large. For Fredric Jameson the spectator is he or she, when listening to the fantasies that a film elicits, who seeks to find at deeper levels the gnawing and unsettling thoughts about the workings of political machineries determining the act of viewing. In the context of film the cognitive map accounts both for what cinema represents and in its modes of production and global circulation. Cognitive mapping of movies entails seeing how interpretation on a local scale might tap into a praxis or a politics. For Jameson the individual viewer would be a “topographer” who tries to link the contradictions found in a particular place—a sequence in a film, or the decision to study a film that belongs to a time and space entirely foreign to the context in which it is chosen to be seen—to a greater “geography” or a world map, in which an assessment of the cartography of the overall (and generally sorry) condition of our planet is tendered.³³

The tenor of these concepts is resonant in critical work on cinema that builds on speech-acts, subject-positions, and enunciation. The spectator of a film frequently wonders—especially when speech is heard voice-off—who is speaking and from where. Unlike living dialogue, voice in cinema cannot be plotted according to the places held by speakers and listeners or utterers and their utterances. Synchrony of sound and image remains an illusion. Quite often films, like those of Robert Bresson, make clear that illusion by showing how enunciation belongs to their own “inner geography,” a spatial construction that a map in a movie tends to crystallize.³⁴ The map seen in the film attests to what Christian Metz calls a “mobile topography,” in his other words, “the changing geography” underscored when speech or gesture are discerned in the context of camera angles, intertitles, voice-in and voice-off, film-in-the-film, and other techniques that underscore how much “filmic enunciation is impersonal, textual, meta-discursive,” and how much it “inflects or reflects its own statement” (1991b, 210). The late theorist offers the metaphor of a cinematic topography in terms of “folds” and “creasings” that bear witness to the very form of film. Such is, too, what a map, when seen in a film, often makes clear.

In the parabola of film theory drawn above, which turns from André Bazin to Gilles Deleuze and from Roland Barthes to Christian Metz, variations on a mapping impulse are clear. For the author of What Is Cinema? an ontology of the photographic and cinematic image brings forward a relation of surface to spatiality. The long shot, the plan-séquence (or long take) and deep-focus photography make the very existence of the world an event of perception. For Bazin the cinematic image is endowed with simultaneously visible, tactile, and material qualities. It is in dialogue with the players and objects that move within it, and for that reason an image—at least an image worthy of its name—is not a representation but the world itself. It is a map to the degree it is at once a geography, a totality, and a form liable to contain topographies or places in the image that can be called localities with specific characters and historical traits. His descriptions often show that cinema and mapping converge in decisive areas or moments on which he bestows the names of facts and events. They produce space through the action of perception, especially perception that both perceives and perceives its ways of perceiving. The event has a haptic quality felt when the eyes scan and move about the image as they might the surface of a relief map, where they seem to touch and to travel up and down and about the lands and waters being shown. As a general rule the haptic quality of the event bears much in common with the way that maps offer themselves to the spectator: they can be seen from any angle and studied without a prescribed track as might a printed sentence or a narrative that calls attention to its peripatetic thread. When seen in a movie a map often brings forward these elements of the image in which it is found.

Bazin’s coinage of the image-fact draws attention to the paratactic aspect of elements seen in an image or a sequence of a film. Whatever linkages a spectator makes are those inspired by geographies generally determined by webbings of iconic signs in the field of view and the artifice of editing. The image-fact informs Metz’s idea of a “mobile geography” of cinema because it tears asunder all illusion of a necessary cause that might make what is perceived in one area of the image or heard on the soundtrack a result of an intrinsic coherence of things. When a map appears in a movie it often turns an otherwise coded and controlled image into a lacunary or isolated “fact.” Now and again (as it will be seen in Renoir’s cinema) the sight of the map triggers a heightened sense of perception and thus becomes a site where the event of the film itself takes place.

If these typologies and taxonomies are kept in mind, the perception of a map both in and as the film begs consideration of the rapport of the image to movement and to time. The film moves insofar as the map offers a spatial picture of a shape and duration other than those of the image in which it is found. Quite often the map locates the history of the film within itself. It has affinities with a mise-en-abyme, but while it may duplicate or mirror the surrounding film, the map can reveal why and how it is made and how its ideology is operating. As an “archive,” a film sums up a history of its production through contextual citation. As a “diagram” or a model that maps perception and comportment through the image-field, the map is in flux where it shows how the archival aspect of the film might also be its diagram. The fluid and shifting spaces of the film and its cognition become terrae incognitae that the viewer explores in different directions and from various angles.

At the outset of his work on cinema Gilles Deleuze asserted that the “great authors” of cinema could be compared to painters, architects, and philosophers. Often destroyed, silenced, or left to decay, their lives and creations bear witness to the force and fragility that mark the great works of art and thought in general. Notwithstanding the global production and circulation of cinematic rubbish, these authors have invented “irreplaceable autonomous forms” (1983, 7–8) that, we can add, mark the lives of all of us who live with them. The concept of the auteur is broadened to mean that the films of certain directors invent new and other types of time and space. What is made of their work, like poetry, cannot be controlled as might a planet under the aegis of global positioning systems and satellite surveillance. The auteur in this broad sense can also be understood to be a cartographer.

The plan of the chapters that follow is guided by the idea that the great auteurs make maps of their movies. They plot and chart their films in unforeseen and often unconscious ways; they also engage, singly and collectively, extensive dialogue with cartography and its history. If these filmmakers conceive and execute their films as mapped forms, it stands to reason that their works require close and detailed analysis. “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail [The grace of God is in the detail],” Gustave Flaubert reputedly said of the art of reading and writing. The proverb has never been lost upon the cartographer and, it is hoped, the student of cinema. Some of the descriptions of sequences in which maps may appear fastidious: where detail is keynote, it appears that the detail of overly close reading is preferable to the incontinence of thematic and narrative summary.

The work will build from René Clair, a cineast whose first film, Paris qui dort (1924) appears to be a theory of cinema, assumed to be a strategic control of perception, tied to mapping. The study will move contrastively to Jean Renoir, whose cartographic sense of the medium in the years 1932–39 is varied and sustained. A chapter on Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945), a film that tends to resist analysis, will be treated through the presence of the theatrum mundi in its narrative space. Attention will turn to concurrent cinemas of “desperate journeys,” films in which evasion and escape provide a ground for mapping. In these pages the model of the classical director—Clair, Renoir, Rossellini—of the earlier chapters will be tested against those who figure—Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, Steven Spielberg—in the domain of industrial cinema. Attention will then turn to the juvenile geographies of auteur cinema in the postwar years, specifically in François Truffaut’s first two films, Les Mistons (1957) and Les 400 coups (1959). Between the one and the other, for reason of chronology and comparison, a study of affective geography will be taken up in a reading of Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1958). The last section of the study will be given to three films, Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), a feature of post–New Wave vintage, and two others, both aimed to reach an international public, Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1992) and Gladiator (2000). Different films and directors could have been chosen. Fate and design have led to work on these features that serve as models for other studies.