Cinema and the Crisis of Cartographic Reason

media geography at mainz Edited by Anton Escher Chris Lukinbeal Stefan Zimmermann Veronika Cummings Editorial Staff Elisabeth Sommerlad Volume 6 Media’s Mapping Impulse Edited by Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, Elisabeth Sommerlad and Anton Escher Franz Steiner Verlag Cover illustration: Imagination of a Media Mapping Impulse, Thomas Bartsch, Eric Dedans und Elisabeth Sommerlad, © 2016 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2019 Druck: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-12424-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-515-12425-6 (E-Book) CONTENTS Acknowledgments 7 Chris Lukinbeal and Laura Sharp Introducing Media’s Mapping Impulse 9 The View From Here Denis Wood Mapping’s Complicated Media Impulse 33 Marcus A. Doel The Swamp of Signs 43 Cartographic Anxiety Giorgio Avezzù Cinema and the Crisis of Cartographic Reason 67 Paul C. Adams Mapping the Influx: Cartographic Responses to Europe’s Refugee Crisis 87 The Map and the Territory David B. Clarke Memento and the Haussmannization of Memory 117 Sam Hind and Alex Gekker On Autopilot: Towards a Flat Ontology of Vehicular Navigation 141 Eva Kingsepp Mythical Space: Egypt in World War II TV Documentary Films 161 Maps on the Net Gertrud Schaab and Christian Stern Mobile Map Apps: Toys or Tools? 189 Víctor Aertsen, Agustín Gámir, Carlos Manuel and Liliana Melgar Analysis of a Filmed Urban Area Through a GIS Tool: Madrid Movie Map 213 6 Contents Tobias Boos Online Neighborhood Mapping: The Case of Siena’s Online Eco-Museum 235 Gregor Arnold Crowdsourcing, Bottom-Up Web 2.0 and Critical Web Mapping of Vacancies: The Power of Digital Maps and Urban Movements on City Development 255 Checking In: Maps and Social Media Mengqian Yang and Sébastien Caquard Mapping the Shawshank Redemption: Film Tourism, Geography and Social Media 281 Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthuis The Geography and Gaze of the Selfie 301 Contributors 321 CINEMA AND THE CRISIS OF CARTOGRAPHIC REASON Giorgio Avezzù This chapter investigates a possible evolution or, rather, involution, in the relationship between geography and film in light of what has been called the “crisis of cartographic reason.” The issues discussed here may sound abstract, and indeed, the nature of this ‘evolution’ poses a quintessentially theoretical problem, yet, as I argue, it can be observed in a number of textual phenomena. In the pages that follow, I discuss the geographical aspect of cinema in relation to specific films – including some mainstream, even obvious Hollywood titles – with the intent of clarifying and giving concrete illustration of the problem at hand. This chapter is, therefore, concerned with a problem. It revolves around the state of the relationship between film and geography, a relationship whose recent evolution has been driven by the changing roles of both actors, cinema and geography, in the contemporary culture. As much as geography has, in fact, undergone a radical reconsideration, both as a science and as the epistemic project of modernity, a project whose ideology – its discursive, non-neutral, “interested” character – has been deconstructed, for example, by recent trends in critical cartography, so has cinema seen fundamental changes in its cultural role after more than a century since its invention. The new course of this relationship impacts a wide spectrum of topics; here, I only touch on a number of essential points, sketching, so to speak, a rough outline of the issues facing cinema and geography at this historical juncture. THE “GEOGRAPHICITY” OF CINEMA At the root of this discourse is what many scholars describe as the intrinsic geographical vocation of cinema. Indeed, the emergence of the cinematic medium ought to be addressed within the framework of the time-space compression brought forth by modernity, i.e., within the context of a series of technological endeavors leading to the creation of an image of the globe as a “knowable totality” (Harvey 1992, 246). This is what scholars mean as they often and rightly mention the “geographical penchant” of cinema (Bruno 2002, 111), the “strong visual and rhetorical connection between cinema and cartography” (Castro 2009, 10): Cinema exhibits a “cartographic impulse,” a “furor geographicus” (Bruno 2002, 181, 174), it “could transform the obscure mappa mundi into a familiar, knowable world” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 106). The new medium was born “within a context of feverish production of views of the world, an obsessive labor to process the world as a series of images” (Gunning 2006, 32), a context marked by a veritable “frenzy of the visible. […] The effect of something of a geographical extension of