Contenu du sommaire : Géographie et cinéma

Geography and the Movies: Ways of Use Since the 2000s, geography and the movies has been the topic of many publications. Cinema is an issue for social sciences in the sense that it gives an access to collective representations and that some movies became major references of popular culture. It is of particular concern for Geography. Since its very beginning, cinema belongs to a visual culture, which has much in common with Geography. Indeed, the cinematic experience has by essence to do with displacement. Geography could identify four types of cinematic space : diegetic, scenographic, pictorial and spectatorial. Analyzing the complex interlinking between these is of major importance not only for understanding cinema but also for understanding the spatialities of societies where screens are everywhere. Geographers working on cinema often follow an approach much similar to film studies, considering the movies as immanent objects, and analyzing them in terms of imaginative geographies. A more comprehensive geography of cinema could also bring attention to the material conditions of the production and the consumption of the movies, showing how diverse audiences may provide different interpretations, and feel different sensations and emotions.

Space as an Actor and “Landscape Drama”: Michelangelo Antonioni's Cinema M. Antonioni, who was inspired by Italian neo-realism in the beginning of his career, became famous for his movies about feelings, neurosis, and communications difficulties between human beings, especially men and women as couples. Yet, far from being based on a talkative psychological approach, or on an abstract symbolic one, his movies are characterized by the effacement of dialogues, speech, and music, replaced by a broad use of spaces : geographical spaces (especially urban ones), organized systems of objects, effects of distance and nearness, of perspective, etc. Antonioni blends landscapes, objects, and characters (especially through their bodies' spatialities) in the same spatial substance, giving each of them the same tangible value of signs. He also uses long sequence shots during which characters give way to a spatial context concentrating all the tension of unfinished epilogues. Overall, Antonioni managed to express the unspeakable dimension of human relationships through the use of space and spatialities, thus creating an original film language.

Animated Geography: The Experience of the Elsewhere in Hayao Miyazaki's Work Animation gives large possibilities to directors, notably the liberty to project their own spatial imagination with accuracy. Hayao Miyazaki's work and its easily recognizable aesthetic are now internationally famous since the success of Spirited Away in 2001. It has largely contributed to demystifying Japanese animated movies which had a nefarious reputation. It also offers a geographic discourse as his work is about uprooting of heroes and their opening out to the world. Miyazaki uses animation as an instrument to systematically explore different modes of relationship to the elsewhere. However, this spatial dimension of Miyazaki's films has rarely been studied. This paper aims to better understand the structuring role of the experience of the elsewhere in his work, relying on a corpus of his ten full-length movies. This article demonstrates that Miyazaki's fiction deals with two main types of narrative (adventure movies and everyday life movies). Confronted with the elsewhere, Miyazaki's heroes develop two distinct strategies : either of connection or of integration, both implying specific spatial patterns.

Screening the Exotic. Josephine Baker and the French Film Industry This paper deals with the different roles played by J. Baker in her four French movies, shot between 1927 and 1940, and aims to analyze the imaginative geographies that she was performing, and her place in the film industry. Her first three movies tell the same story of a tropical Cinderella, who succeeds on stage but fails to integrate in French society. Baker's characters were staged as erotic uncivilized women. The issue of race was important but remained carefully implicit. Baker's exoticization took place within French colonial culture, reproducing its stereotypes and contradictions. Nevertheless, these movies were not uncritical of colonization. Her last movie eventually shows the successful integration of Baker in French society. J. Baker turns out to be a polysemic signifier, which may refer to different places and ideologies.

James Bond's World: Logics of Representation, Spatial Practices and Archetype The geographer can be particularly interested in two specificities of the 23 James Bond films : a globalization of their audience and a schematic or even caricatured representation of well-known sites (monuments, tourist attractions). What are these sites and what is the logic behind their representation ? More than a data listing, this text highlights the fact that James Bond films reveal not only a certain cultural globalization conveyed by Hollywood, but also spatial practices increasingly impacted by mobility.

Living-dead Geography. Undefined Spaces for Zombies Since the 1960s, the growing success of zombie movies shows their link with the concerns of US society, which is corroborated by Hollywood's appropriation of this initially independent genre. This article is based on a thorough analysis of six movies directed by George Romero, who created the genre. It shows that the zombie corresponds to a new form of otherness identified by American society within itself and threatening its cohesion. As a consequence, zombie movies rely on a logic of entrenchment of their characters, who get immunity to the Other by keeping them at bay. They also convey representations of a meaningless and desocialized space, exemplifying the collapse of the rule of law as well as an existential anxiety facing increasingly meaningless spaces.

Space and society in Zombie cinema The Zombie is a creature that originated within the colonial context of Haiti and, more specifically, the voodoo mysticism. Resulting from the syncretism between the culture of the African black slaves and the colonial Catholicism, he became a western myth throughout the second half of the XXth century. The basic change between the “original” Haitian Zombie and his western reinvention consists in the loss of his mystic-spiritual feature in favor of a more laic vision which makes the walking-corpse the victim of a virus rather than witchcraft or a spell. The creator of the western Zombie is the American film director G.A. Romero who lays the foundations of the Monster par excellence, with strong political and social connotation and a great importance given to space.The movies which have been analyzed (Romero's Tetralogy and 28 Days later by the English director Danny Boyle) clearly show how the powerful socio-political metaphor embodied by the Zombie may have evident spatial relevance. First of all, the anthropophagous monster is essentially an urban creature. The city, the metropolis, the great agglomerations are his favorite territory. Great attention to the characteristics of urban spaces, particularly the North-American ones, is constantly found in Romero's movies where the same relevance is given to both downtown and periurban spaces. The city often becomes the Zombie's favourite habitat whereas the survivors are compelled to move towards a safer place outside the city. The two other basic elements of space in the Zombie cinema are segregation and fragmentation. The Zombie becomes the new dominating creature of the planet and segregation is the price men have to pay for their survival. Be it a Mall, a country house, a bunker or a fortified citadel, the space rather recalls an Early Middle-Ages context, when the price of safety was often the loss of freedom. This opposition lies not only in a simple inside-outside, man/zombie dialectics ; if the Zombies are homogeneous and coherent like their life, Humans appear as continuously torn by conflicts, troubles for the leadership and social conflicts. Their spaces fully reflect this conflictual condition. The humans' space is fragmented and the opposition ends not only in man versus zombie but also and especially in man versus man. As a matter of fact, in all the movies which have been analyzed the Zombies are able to overcome the barrier because of the survivors' internal contrasts. If unity is strength, division means defeat. Urbaphobia, gated communities, fragmentation, segregation, limitation of public spaces, different kinds of conflicts, all of them are recurrent elements in the corpus. To sum up, we can claim that the socio-spatial problems of contemporary urban spaces are a basic interpretation of Zombie cinema.

Plasticity of Geographical Imagery: The Western City in Musical Sequences of Hindi Films This article aims to contribute to the discussion about globalization and cultural studies. In the continuation of Appadurai's works on global cultural processes, identity, social imagery and deterritorialization, we suggest that when Indian film makers travel to shoot in Western locations it is the aesthetic expression of plasticity at the crossroads of aesthetics and geopolitics. This process creates a new geography and falls into a postmodernist perspective of cinema.

The Invention of an Encounter between Cinema and the City: The “City Symphony” at the Turn of the 1930s Born in the heart of the modern city, cinema has blossomed within a special relationship with urban space, both geographically and aesthetically. For avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920-1930s, the city was thought to be a suitable environment for the search of an autonomous cinematic language, breaking with the dominant entertainment production by taking advantage of a unique and varied sensory range. In this paper, the author precisely questions the link between urban space and the filmic medium in the historical moment of cultural modernity, by focusing on the city symphony genre. Against the common idea of a natural encounter of cinema with the city, the paper shows how the city portraits of 1920-1930 recreate the sensory experience of the city by working actively on the possibilities of the filmic medium. It analyzes how the avant-garde mise-en-scène of city space not only reflects urban modernity but takes part in its invention. Cinema creates and promotes the specific scopic regime of modernity : an omniscient look, freed from the bodily constraints of the ordinary city dweller. However, the author shows how this dominant regime is troubled by an alternative representation where inhabitants take an active part in the city : throughout the film this tension both documents and performs the complexity of the dynamics that make the city.

Urban geographies for show, urban geographies on show. Paris, Je t'aime and New York, I love you : impossible journeys to the cinematic metropolis? Paris, Je t'aime and New York I love you are both collections of short films. The format- split up into a succession of tiny stories- presented as innovatory and the fact that the proclaimed specificity of the cities becomes the actual value of the cinematic product, are intriguing. The article explores the partially fictional urban geographies built from the films. The spatial dimensions within the two films are, however, constricted by production criteria. The article goes on to question the films'status from a critical viewpoint, by studying their public reception and considering them as a system that in fact reproduces the representations associated with Paris and New York. The study approach used on these two specific films could at least partly be applied as an analytical framework for other cinematic cities.

Cinematic Maps of Mobile Borders and Cross-border Migrations Borders cannot be reduced to more or less continuous lines, in a surface-based, timeless vision of space. Border regions attract dense networks of migrations. Documenting and mapping the mobility of the border and within the border region is an ongoing challenge in geography. As an art of “movement-image”, according to Deleuze's theory, could cinema help produce a mobile geography and cartography of borders? This paper explores the cartographic dimensions of cinema and its potential to suggest new maps of cross-border migrations. Frames, shots and montage, as creations of innovative time/space configurations, will be analyzed in two films showing the US/Mexico border: Sin Nombre, written and directed by Cary Fukunaga in 2009 and No Country For Old Men, written and directed by Joe and Ethan Coen in 2007, after Cormac McCarthy's eponymous novel.

The flâneur on the New York High Line: An Operator with No Camera and a Street Scene with No Film >This article analyses the High Line's urban park in New York City focusing on the gaze this structure invites visitors to adopt. We place side by side, in an intermedial archaeology, three kinds of spectatorship : the one of the flâneur (through Baudelaire, Benjamin, Simmel and Kracauer), the early cinema camera operator, and the one induced while walking on the High Line. The point of view, from the top of the Line, shares some characteristics with old ways of seeing the city. High Line's “spectators”, between curiosity and detachment, are led to contemplate the city : its landscape inhabited by movie memories, frenetic rhythm and appealing visual attractions. His gaze wandering from building to building in a long horizontal and high-angle zoom shot, interrupted by contemplative breaks, the 21st Century stroller discovers the city through a 19th century flâneur's gaze.

The Movies Make their Havana: Analysis of the Spatial Representations Diffused by the Cuban Street Cinema and their Social Consequences. This article deals with the spatial representations spread by a contemporary cinema movement, the Cuban Street Cinema. This movement is analyzed with a Social Geography approach. The article aims to question the interactions between the representations of Havana and its evolutions concerning social issues and identity. The Street Cinema appears to be an answer to the social need for reconnecting some discourses to the everyday experience which characterizes Cuban society. Its objective is to show the faces of the city hidden by the official discourses, and to participate in the creation of a new public sphere for a free social debate. The article shows how the cinematographic representations, in their specific relations with space, are established as an innovating narrative in order to build an identity, and how they show the way to re-appropriation of everyday territories. The text presents the experimental methods used during this research to analyze a corpus of 269 films, most of them short movies, combining quantitative and qualitative methods and to develop an adapted visual language.

The Postmodern Life of My Aunt – un Chronotope de la Chine postsocialiste This article focuses on The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (Yima de houxiandai shenghuo 姨妈的后现代生活, 2006, by Ann Hui), in which the eponymous aunt Ye Rutang is a woman in her 60s living alone in Shanghai. After a series of encounters with her nephew and strangers, Ye loses all her savings and is forced to abandon her neighbourhood in Shanghai to return to her estranged husband and daughter in Anshan, Liaoning in North East China where she faces her painful past – as an intellectual youth during the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1976). The North East, despite recent industrial development, is no match for the vibrancy of Shanghai, or the latter's postsocialist rebirth, and the monochromatic landscape of the region serves as a symbol for “the past” that co-exists with the futuristic metropolis in contemporary China. The disjuncture between the two parts is a spatial metaphor for the breakdown of the grand narrative in postsocialist China. Through employing the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope, supplemented by a discussion of the production of space (Lefebvre) and temporal markers, the study examines how space and time interact with plot, history, and the individuals' journeys in the narrative, visualized by the geographical shifts between Shanghai and Liaoning. Postmodern Life is a narrative about the effects of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent economic reforms, a delayed manifestation of how the past has caught up with the protagonists. As such, the private life of a female protagonist opens up an avenue to consider the cinematic-geographical intersections which give meanings to the social and political contexts in the chronology of China's recent past through the characters who embody the generations, and occupy different subject positions according to their age, class and gender.