THE WHOLE FRAGMENT

I spoke recently with Montreal-based cartographer Sébastien Caquard whose work focuses on the intersection between cinema and cartography.  I’ve been interested in the meeting between films and maps as well in the context of thinking about how cinema might deal with ‘data’.

“The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to that confronted by the other [for example, the “problem” of narrative, or the “problem” of how to represent reality].” – Gilles Deleuze

Filmmakers and cartographers deal with a similar question: How can we represent information in a meaningful and engaging way? While filmmakers and mapmakers have traditionally created distinctly different visual products, films and maps have long been caught in an intriguing crossover. It is possible to find cinematic elements and strategies in maps,  as well as cartographic elements and strategies in cinema.  See the books Cartographic Cinema, The Atlas of Emotion, and The Sovereign Map.

For example, films set in particular cities might be read as guided ‘maps’ of those cities at different moments in history, and from various points of view. The film spring wind will bring life again can be seen as a kind of ‘map’ of contemporary Beijing. The first part of the film focuses on the world at large and the economic and political relationship between the U.S. and China, the second reveals the city itself – focusing on everyday categories like traffic, crowds, restaurants, grocery stores, bars, tv, etc.. The final section tells the story of a woman who, like hundreds of thousands of others, was displaced from the center of the city (to a new suburb) when her home was torn down in the effort by the government to modernize Beijing and present it for the 2008 Olympics. In essence, the film proceeds as a zoom from the global, to the city, to the individual.

Both maps and films are increasingly made and presented digitally, creating new possibilities for overlap between the two, yet there has been little explicit exploration of how the two forms may begin to merge more significantly. For instance, digital technology has the potential to help maps become more cinematic through multimedia (sound, video, photo, etc.), narrative, and emotion.  Some hybrid map/multimedia forms are being explored – documented in the excellent book Else/Where Mapping – but, for the most part, these practices remain on the fringes of cartography.

Sébastien and I are planning to write a paper together for a special issue on Art and Cartography of the Cartographic Journal, investigating, in part, whether there are digital products that can be read as both  ‘maps’ and ‘films’, and what these might look like.

Question:

Could these film-map hybrids better or newly represent global/corporate/collaborative/data-filled life today?

“In his book The Image of the City, writer Kevin Lynch shows how the ability to map, from memory, the spaces in which we live corresponds directly to our feelings of either belonging or alienation, and by extension, our sense of political engagement and empowerment. But the ability to map our world has grown increasingly complex with the rise of tremendously powerful transnational corporations, unbridled competition and the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest. How do you ‘map’ a global economy, a vast military industrial complex, or the convergence of gigantic corporations? How do you chart multinational banking and stock exchanges, or the increasingly powerful web of bureaucratic control?” (New Digital Cinema, p. 74-75).