The Cartographic Journal Vol. 46 No. 1 pp.

9–15 Cinematic Cartography Special Issue, February 2009

# The British Cartographic Society 2009

REFEREED PAPER

Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture

Teresa Castro
Université de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
Email: teresa_de_castro@yahoo.fr

This paper explores the links between cinema and cartography, focusing on the notion of a ‘mapping impulse’. The ‘mapping
impulse’ is less about the presence of maps in a certain visual landscape and more about the processes that underlie the
understanding of space. In our analysis, we will therefore pay less attention to the symptomatic presence of maps in films,
focusing instead on what we call ‘cartographic shapes’: panoramas, atlases and aerial views. The point of the matter is that a
strong visual and rhetorical connection between cinema and cartography is not as surprising as it might initially appear.

Keywords: aerial views, atlas, cartographic reason, cinema, film, mapping impulse, panoramas, visual culture

A filmmaker should also be a bit like a land surveyor.
(Jean-Marie Straub)
What is the link between cinema and cartography? At first
glance, such an association is not obvious, as the art and
science of mapmaking appears to be quite different from
the art and industry of moving images. Further reflection,
however, reveals that on a general level both cinema and
cartography are graphic means of creating visual images of
the world. The coupling of eye and instrument that
distinguishes cartography’s representation of space is in
many ways very similar to cinema’s coding and scaling of
the world. A look at two particular images – which serve as
visual epigraphs in the context of this paper – should make
matters clearer (Figure 1). The first is the title page of
Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first
atlas ever printed, published in Antwerp in 1570. The
second is an advertisement for the Charles Urban Trading
Company, dating from 1903 (Figure 2). Charles Urban
(1867–1942) was an important figure in the early British
film industry, as well as the inventor of the ‘Urban
bioscope’, a projector so successful that the ‘bioscope’
became a generic term for cinema itself.
It can be argued that Urban’s poster merely illustrates the
survival of a formal motif – the atlas frontispiece – devoid of
any particular meaning, a happy coincidence in the vibrant
universe of this turn-of-the-century visual culture. Taking
such a position would, however, dismiss all too-easily a
fundamental aspect of early film: the fact that it often
presented itself as the modern successor of cartography
(Shohat and Stam, 1994). In this particular case, Charles
Urban’ films seem to be visually promoted as a new form of
(cinemato-)graphic atlas, the visual apparatus that for more
than 300 years had effectively created an image of the
world. Atlases, one should recall, constitute a collection of
maps (i.e. images), assembled in relation to an overall
scheme that aims for thoroughness and completeness. In
this sense, they resemble world maps, but unlike them,
atlases demand to be browsed and navigated. World maps
offer totality at a glance: their synoptic view anticipates
modern-day satellite photographs and invites fleeting,
dreaming looks. Atlases, however, require more careful
scrutiny and the contemplation of details together with
meditation upon the universe they portray. The complete-
ness for which they aim is also different from the one
presented by world maps. Atlases constitute a visual archive,
the summary of the geographical knowledge of a particular
time. The French historian Christian Jacob refers to them as
‘an apparatus that allows for the conciliation of the whole
and the detail’, ‘governed by a cumulative and analytic
logic’ and lent to ‘a different way of grasping the world,
more intellectual and encyclopaedic’ (Jacob, 1992: 97, my
translation).
While remaining sensitive to the quite distinct historical
contexts in which these two images were produced, I am
tempted to draw a parallel between Ortelius’s ‘age of
discoveries’ and the First Era of Globalisation (1880–
1914) that witnessed the invention and development of
cinematography. Seen in this light, it’s not surprising that
the Charles Urban Company, whose famous motto was
‘We Put the World before You’, envisaged itself as a sort
of cartographic enterprise, whose aim was to make the
world visually immediate. Tom Gunning, commenting on
the travel genre in early film (and travel films constitute a
significant part of Urban’s production), notes that it
‘occurs within a context of feverish production of views of
the world, an obsessive labour to process the world as a
series of images’ (Gunning, 2006: 32). Gunning links this
to the industrial and colonial expansion of the time and to

DOI: 10.1179/000870409X415598
10
Figure 1. Title page of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum (1570)
Martin Heidegger’s claim that modern western man
conceives and grasps the world as image (Heidegger,
1977). Obviously, ‘to grasp the world as image’ is a
fundamental cartographic problem, as Italian geographer
Franco Farinelli has pointed out (Farinelli, 1992, my
translation). When Gunning concludes that ‘rather than
ersatzes, images become our way of possessing the world’
(Gunning, 2006: p. 32), one cannot help but to think of
maps and atlases again, so often dedicated to kings,
princes and other men of power.
By briefly evocating these two images and the complex
context in which they emerge, I wish to make clear that a
strong visual and rhetorical connection between cinema and
cartography is not as surprising as it might initially appear.
The fact that cartography has played, and still plays, a
significant role in the construction of systems of power/
knowledge and that cinema appeared at a moment of
widespread colonial expansion, makes this link all the more
thought provoking. One wonders indeed if early non
fiction film, which brought the ‘whole world within reach’
(Méliès’ ill-fated Star Film company slogan: ‘le monde à
portée du regard’), is not traversed by a general mapping
impulse, associated – but certainly not limited – to the
territorializing impulse of nation-states, different imperial
projects and other scientific and commercial ventures. As a
number of film scholars have pointed out, early travel films
The Cartographic Journal
Figure 2. Advertisement for the Charles Urban Trading Company,
1903, Luke McKernan collection
evince a real desire to take possession of the world through
representation. The trip around the world is a common
early film topic (Costa, 2006), as well as more or less exotic
incursions into ‘foreign’ lands, generally in the shape of
expedition or ethnographic films whose effective role is to
fill the blank spaces in the spectator’s imagination.
However, the affinity between mapping and picturing in
cinema (‘picturing’ being understood here as a form of
graphically describing) is not restricted to this overtly
rhetorical interpretation, which certainly deserves further
investigation. As a matter of fact, the mapping impulse
would also refer to a particular way of seeing and looking at
the world, a visual regime. In view of all these elements, and
before discussing in detail a number of examples that will
allow us to see how this cartographic appeal translates itself
into moving images, one fundamental question remains to
be answered: what exactly can we understand by mapping
impulse?
FROM THE ‘MAPPING IMPULSE’ TO ‘CARTOGRAPHIC
REASONING’
The expression the ‘mapping impulse’ was originally coined
by art historian Svetlana Alpers in her book The Art of
Describing (Alpers, 1983). In her study, an exploration of
Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture
the seventeenth century Dutch visual culture, the author
convincingly argues for a connection between painting and
the techniques of cartography. According to Alpers, maps
were the model for this particular visual tradition, which
emphasized the image’s flat surface and favoured descrip-
tion. Despite the criticism concerning her strong contrast
between Dutch and Italian painting, Alpers’ work was
unanimously praised for its reappraisal of Northern visual
culture, and its consideration of other images than those
normally considered to be art, among which maps are to be
counted. Martin Jay subsequently proposed that this ‘art of
describing’ corresponded to a ‘scopic regime of modernity’,
i.e. an historical model of vision, anticipating ‘the visual
experience produced by the nineteenth-century invention
of photography’ (Jay, 1988: 15).
But historians of cartography have also used the
expression ‘mapping impulse’. The late John Brian Harley
in particular observed that:
There has probably always been a mapping impulse in
human consciousness, and the mapping experience –
involving the cognitive mapping of space – undoubtedly
existed long before the physical artefacts we now call
maps. For many centuries maps have been employed as
literary metaphors and tools in analogical thinking.
There is thus also a wider history of how concepts and
facts about space have been communicated, and the
history of the map itself – the physical artefact – is but
one small part of this general history of communication
about space. (Harley, 1987: 1)
Understood in such a way, the mapping impulse is less
about the presence of maps in a certain visual landscape and
more about the processes that underlie the understanding
of space. In the analysis that follows, we will therefore pay
less attention to the (symptomatic) presence of maps in
films, focusing instead on what could be called ‘carto-
graphic shapes’: panoramas, atlases and aerial views. These
are not, strictly speaking, conventional maps, but they share
with them a number of important traits, among which one
counts the graphic deployment of a spatial understanding of
the world. If we understand maps to be ‘graphic
representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of
things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the
human world’ (Harley and Woodward, 1987: XVI), our
focus shifts from the object – ‘maps’ – to the function –
‘spatial understanding’, considerably widening our critical
horizons.
A third, alternative way to think about this ‘mapping
impulse’ would be to follow Italian geographer Franco
Farinelli and to question the cartographic metaphors that
run at the very heart of Western thought (Farinelli, 2003).
Could Western reason be cartographic? As David Harvey
has argued, ‘mapping space is a fundamental prerequisite
for the structuring of any kind of knowledge’ (Harvey,
2000: 111–112), the epistemology that shapes the field of
cartography reaching well beyond the profession of
mapmaking. Even though Farinelli’s inquiry is more
philosophical than anthropological, we are tempted to
draw a parallel with Jack Goody’s arguments, as developed
in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). In his
book, the English anthropologist focused on the impact of
11
literacy on human modes of thought. Similarly, one can
(and should) wonder about the impact of maps and
mapping on our ways of thinking about the world and
how to represent it. In this sense, the notion of a
cartographic reason concerns at least three different
dimensions: that of a mode of thought attached to the
conventional and unconventional graphical representations
of geographical space; that of a historical phenomenon (i.e.
different societies and historical times witness different
cartographic rationalities); and finally, that of an episteme, in
Michel Foucault’s sense (i.e. as the very condition of
possibility of discourse).
CARTOGRAPHIC SHAPES: PANORAMAS, ATLASES AND
AERIAL VIEWS
The analysis that follows will focus on the cinematic
expressions of what I have previous called ‘cartographic
shapes’, i.e. panoramas, atlases and aerial views. These
configurations are in themselves very different: if panoramas
maximize the notion of point view, atlases relate to a way of
assembling images, while aerial views concern a particular
angle of view. The examples discussed here are limited to
non-fiction films from the first two decades of cinema’s
history; in the cases of panoramas and aerial views, they
concern a particular event: the First World War.
Panoramas
Panoramic vision responds to a desire to embrace and to
circumscribe space, allowing for the observer’s eye to seize
the whole of an image. In the Western world, the
development of panoramic vision coincides with the advent
of ‘disciplinary societies’ and the social theory of panopti-
cism (Foucault, 1975). Panoramic views had obviously
existed long before the Irish-born Robert Barker was
granted a patent for his invention of ‘panoramas’ in 1787: a
new type of 360u painting, taken from a high vantage point
and allowing a visual survey. However, it was during the
nineteenth century that panoramic vision acquired a new
status, painted panoramas becoming an important visual
medium, whose characteristics often bring to mind some
fundamental traits of the cinematographic and filmic
apparatus (Griffiths, 2003; Miller, 1996). If some authors,
such as Stephen Oettermann, have insisted on the connec-
tion between panoramas and a specifically modern,
bourgeois view of the world (Oettermann, 1997)Author:
Please supply reference for Oettermann (1997) in the
reference list, the visual experience they facilitate can also be
linked to cartography (and in particular to topography) and
to the notion of a ‘mapping impulse’.
Not surprisingly, ‘panoramas’ or ‘panoramic views’ are
one of the most common entries in film catalogues from the
early period, as if film actively sought to perpetuate the
nineteenth century vogue for panoramas and their detailed
reproduction of reality. Most of these views are in reality
travelogues punctuated by slow panoramic shots, illustrat-
ing what film historian Tom Gunning has called the
‘aesthetic of the view’, i.e. ‘a descriptive mode based
on the act of looking and display’ (Gunning, 1997: 22).
Early cinema seems obsessed with capturing places and
12
landscapes on film and these views – scenes of cities, rural
and natural landscapes, tours of foreign countries, phantom
rides – portray the world in a seemingly simple manner
(‘portraying’ being another term often used in early film
catalogues). The apparent simplicity of these films should
not conceal the fact that they represent the careful scaling
and coding of the world through filmic means, namely,
horizontal and 360u panoramic shots. The panning gesture
is obviously linked to nineteenth century panoramas, to the
feeling of visual control and mastery over space that they
procured, and to a larger process of spectacularization of
landscape (Oettermann, 1997). While the camera, fixed on
a tripod, moves rotationally on an axis, it also guides the
spectator’s eye in journey through space and time. The
cinematic embodiment of these movements takes panora-
mic vision – and the mapping impulse that pervades it –
further, as the following examples will show.
In his discussion of French newsreel films from the First
World War, French film historian Laurent Véray remarks
how the sequences dealing with the ruins and the
destruction caused by the conflict are heightened by
horizontal and vertical panoramic shots (Véray, 1995). A
film entitled Les Allemands s’acharnent sur les églises de
France (1917) illustrates this point well, documenting
through 21 pan shots the destruction of religious buildings
in the Oise, the Aisne and the Meuse. According to Véray,
such camera movements provide a feeling of spatial
comprehensiveness in line with the cameramen’s will to
render the scale of the disaster. Faced with a multitude of
examples, it is natural to speculate about the reasons that
make the panning gesture a recurring movement in such
newsreels. If the panoramic shot belongs to the basic non-
fiction filmic grammar of the time – its movement through
space illustrating the striking visual effects of motion
pictures, its relation to a picturesque aesthetic seems out
of purpose in the grim context of these desolate landscapes.
The reasons behind these pans are most likely the specific
documentary and propaganda needs of the military institu-
tion. On the one hand, these films chart and portray the
destruction of particular places, in a way that was
consensually considered to be accurate and precise: the
pan shot describes. On the other hand, they stress the
enemy’s barbarity, by accentuating the vicarious visual
experience of the mayhem they caused. One could also
evoke the idiosyncrasies of military vision at this particular
moment in time. Trench warfare was all about visibility and
invisibility, the horizon being the ultimate goal of the
strategist. Panoramic vision, with its promise of a panoptical
ideal, was used in order to visually neutralize and map
dangerous terrain.
The feeling of spatial comprehensiveness to which Véray
refers finds its ultimate spectacular manifestation in the
360u panoramic shot. In the war context, this is one of the
few movements that seem capable of rendering the colossal
and unprecedented scale of destruction (the question of
scale being extremely important). Thus, a 360u panoramic
shot in 1917 on the hazelnut woods of Verdun emphasizes
the dimension of the events that took place there. By
placing itself at the heart of that tragic theatre of war, the
cameramen reproduces the visual model that stood at
the heart of architectural and painted panoramas: as the
The Cartographic Journal
camera’s complete revolution around its axis opens up to an
unbounded visual experience, we feel enveloped by the
image. As a way of seeing that predates the invention of
cinema, the panorama was a fundamental geographical tool
(Oettermann, 1997): actualized here by the movie camera,
it becomes a way of ‘e-motionally’ mapping the war and its
effects.
Atlases
But the mapping impulse would not be limited to these
particular camera movements. The Archives de la Planète, a
unique collection of films, autochromes and stereoscopic
photographs assembled between 1912 and 1931, bestowed
on it a different and ambitious goal: the description and
classification of the entire planet. We have already argued
elsewhere for the consideration of this unique visual archive
as a multimedia atlas dominated by a descriptive visual
regime (Castro, 2006): we would nonetheless like to insist
on a number of important aspects, in particular the project’s
‘cartographic imagination’.
The Archives were imagined and funded by Albert Kahn
(1860–1940), a self-made banker who devoted his life and
fortune to carrying out a broad philanthropic project. The
latter included the institution of travel scholarships for
young graduates, the establishment and funding of dif-
ferent intellectual and political forums, the backing of no
less than 14 publications and the creation of the Archives.
The purpose of the collection was, in Kahn’s own words,
‘to put into effect a sort of photographic inventory of the
surface of the globe as inhabited and developed by Man at
the beginning of the twentieth century’ (Kahn quoted in
Beausoleil and Delamarre, 1993: 92). In view of this
objective, a team of five cameramen and six photographers
visited 48 countries in the world between 1912 and 1931,
assembling 4000 stereoscopic photographs, 72,000 auto-
chromes and around 183,000 m of film, amounting to
more than 100 h of projection.
Referring to the Autour du Monde travel scholarships
(established by Kahn in 1898), Henri Bergson wrote of his
friend’s will to open ‘the great book of the world’ to an elite
of young graduates (Bergson, 1931). The expression is in
fact from philosopher René Descartes, a man who settled in
Holland in 1628 and who was certainly familiar with the
cartographic production of his time. What could this ‘great
book of the world’ stand for but an atlas, the visual
encyclopaedia of the world (Figure 3)?
As we have already indicated, the Archives the la Planète
constitute, in many respects, a modern multimedia atlas, a
collection of images whose aim is to convey geographical
and historical knowledge. The films, as well as the
autochromes and the stereoscopic plates, were gathered
for their value as historical documents containing the
memory of a world whose ‘fatal disappearance’ was by then
just ‘a question of time’ (Kahn quoted in Beausoleil and
Delamarre, 1993: 92). Aiming to collect (by surveying the
planet), to organize (through the accumulation of images),
and to present both geographical and historical information
on the represented countries, Kahn’s archives are a
sequenced inventory of the world where History and
Geography peacefully coexist. In that, they evoke Johan
Blaeu’s Atlas, a book where Geography became ‘the eye
Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture
Figure 3. Detail from Interior of a Study (1710–1712), oil on
canvas, 77663.5 cm (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornesmiza)
and the light of History’ (Blaeu quoted in Besse, 2003a). As
a matter of fact, the Archives’ films and photographs are
just another way of recreating reality, allowing us ‘to
contemplate in our homes, directly under our eyes, things
that are very distant’ (Blaeu quoted in Besse, 2003a). Albert
Kahn himself wrote that ‘in order to decipher the meaning
of life, and appreciate the origin and significance of events,
facts have a powerful, irresistible, and incorruptible
language. As an inexhaustible haven for providing informa-
tion, they project incessantly a light which illuminates space
and time’ (Kahn, 1918: 23).
As Paula Amad has argued, the Archives’ documentary
project cannot be dissociated from the establishment of
modern archives and the genuine ‘archival fever’ that swept
French culture in the late nineteenth century and the early
twentieth century (Amad, 2001: 149). In this particular
context, the contiguous notions of ‘archive’, ‘atlas’ and
‘museum’ often overlapped. As a matter of fact, if atlases
prove to be a relevant framework for the consideration of
Kahn’s visual collection, it is because they are not only a
way to create an image of the totality of the world, but also
a means to organise visual knowledge. In other words, atlases
refer as much to a strictly cartographic instrument as to a
graphical means for the assemblage and combination – if
not montage – of images. Ultimately, atlases are collection
spaces, open to different visual agendas, as a number of
contemporary art projects suggest, from Gerhard Richter’s
to Walid Raad’s Atlas. Moreover, science historians Peter
Galison and Lorraine Daston have recently demonstrated
how scientific atlases were central to the nineteenth century
scientific practices across disciplines, playing an essential
role in the pursue of the notion of objectivity. As the
authors observe, atlases are ‘the dictionaries of the sciences
of the eye’ and ‘to call atlas images ‘illustrations’ is to belie
13
their primacy, for it suggests that their function is merely
ancillary, to illustrate a text or theory’ (Galison and Daston,
2007: 22). Run from the start by an acknowledged
geographer – Jean Brunhes (who recurrently used its
material in its lectures and who had embarked, in the early
teens, in another visual inventory of the world, the Atlas
photographique des formes du relief terrestre), Kahn’s
collection cannot be fully grasped without being placed in
a precise scientific context, related to the establishment of
historical archives and to the constitution of French human
geography as a discipline. In this sense, Kahn’s images are
like atlas images, cultivating what Galison and Daston call
‘the disciplinary eye’ (Galison and Daston, 2007: 48).
Paraphrasing the authors, it can be argued that the Archives
de la Planète were the visual foundation upon which
Brunhes’ scientific practice rested. What is more interesting
in view of the mapping impulse is that the collection as an
atlas refers both to a structure that is thoroughly
geographic and to a visual regime marked by its topo-
graphic, descriptive and serial appeal (Castro, 2006).
Finally, the Archives must be situated in a broader visual
landscape, distinguished by the proliferation of (world)
images. Maps and postcards, picturesque views and
panoramas, photographs and travelogues, all contribute to
the shaping and structuring of geographical imagination –
and to the transmission of geographical knowledge –
through images. Ultimately, the idea of a multimedia atlas
does not make sense if it is not approached from the
broader perspective of visual culture. In this sense, the
famous gardens that Kahn created in Boulogne, near Paris,
and Cap Martin, close to Nice, seem especially important. If
the first combined French, English and Japanese traditions,
the second gathered in the same space plants and trees of
African, Algerian, Moroccan, Brazilian and Mexican ori-
gins. Marie Bonhomme has rightly observed how these
gardens seem to realize the ‘heterotopic’ dream of Albert
Kahn (Bonhomme, 1995). In addition, it is important to
link Kahn’s garden to the historical tradition of geographical
gardens (Besse, 2003b). If Kahn’s gardens did not duplicate
the geographical reality of the world as it stands, they
constitute nevertheless another visible demonstration of the
philanthropist’s utopia and his dream of a reconciled world,
eventually made flat, scaled and coded by both cinema and
photography.
Aerial views
Our last example examines aerial views, focusing on an
extraordinary film shot from a dirigible shortly after the
First World War. Surveying the combat zones of Flanders
and northern France, En dirigeable sur les champs de bataille
(1918) was made by the Cinematographic Service of the
French Army (Service Cinématographique de l’Armée),
constituting a unique record of the state of destruction
caused by four years of conflict (Figure 4). The film’s bird’s
eye views of ruined cities and villages, as well as its aerial
shots of moonscape-like battlefields, reveal the full extent of
the devastation, hinting at the reconstruction’s Herculean
task. The fact that the images were edited in order to
resemble a long sequence-shot makes the film even more
remarkable.
14
Figure 4. En dirigeable sur les champs de bataille, Service cinéma-
tographique de l’armée, 1918
Both the Lumière Brothers and Edison Motion Pictures
shot films from hot-air balloons at a very early date (1898
and 1900 respectively), aerial photographs being an
increasingly popular visual theme at the beginning of the
twentieth century. What this exceptional aerial travelling
fully explores, most likely for the first time, are the unique
possibilities allowed by the combination of the eye of the
camera with the aerial motion of the airship, as well as the
striking documentary value of aerial images. If the camera
angle exposes the dimension, i.e. the geographic and
quantitative scale of the devastation, the smoothness and
fluidity of its aerial movement represent an unquestionable
source of emotion: emotion linked to the visual pleasure of
discovering the earth’s surface from a new and exciting
angle of vision, emotion attached to the sudden revelation
of the territory as yet another injured body, and ‘e-motion’,
finally, of being able to move freely in the space–time
continuum. In this sense, En dirigeable sur les champs de
bataille illustrates better than any other film Paul Virilio’s
well-known claim that cinema is not ‘I see, but I fly’
(Virilio, 1984, my translation). The cinematographic
specificity of these images is crucial, since no assemblage
of aerial photographs could convey, in such an immediate
and effective way, the intense sensorial stimulation brought
about by the double kineticism of flight and film. The
attempt to simulate the impression of a continuous
movement is linked, in our opinion, to a timely awareness
of the virtues of such a combination. More than a realistic
ideal, the continuity of movement would be ultimately
bound to the double exploitation of cinematographic and
aerial technology.
Situated halfway between the so-called ‘primitivism’ of
forms that distinguishes the first decade of cinema’s history
and the avant-garde revolution looming in the post-war
horizon, this film without ‘an author’ illustrates an acute
consciousness of the potentialities of film and its language.
What these images provide is nothing other than a
cinematographic sensation of the world, founded on the
original coupling of camera and aircraft. The film also
belongs to a larger documentary project, including the
undertaking of an extensive photographic and cartographic
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campaign. As French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne
recalled some decades after the conflict, the end of the
hostilities was followed by the making of several ‘airplane
maps’ (Martonne, 1948: 70): accurate plans of the
devastated areas were urgently needed, in order to make
progress with reconstruction works. Therefore, this film
takes part of a genuine and extensive mapping project,
articulated around two major elements: the inventory of the
land – through photographic, cinematographic and carto-
graphic means – and propaganda. That these images of
ruins and gloomy battlefields seek (such as the panoramic
shots discussed earlier) the exacerbation of patriotic feelings
seems indisputable, in particular because of their insistence
on the image of a sacrificed land and on the urgency of the
rebuilding campaign. The film is divided into four sections,
which reconstitute the journey made by cameramen Lucien
Le Saint (1881–1931) and probably, by another two men.
Several intertitles locate the views: the first section, entitled
‘From Nieuport to Mont Kemmel’, surveys the West
Flanders; the second section, ‘From Bailleul to Mont-
Saint-Eloy’, documents the North and the Pas-de-Calais;
the third part, ‘From Saint-Quentin to Vauxaillon’ refers to
the Aisne and Oise; and finally, the fourth section, ‘From
Ailette to Reims’ covers the Marne. This ‘landscape film’
reveals a deeply wounded country, the analogy between the
territory and the body quickly imposing upon the viewer’s
imagination.
CONCLUSION
In recent years, the idea of ‘mapping’ has become the
object of much critical attention, gradually turning into a
fashionable notion that found its way well beyond the field
of cartography. Responding to a general and widely
acknowledged ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and the
humanities, this interest has both focused on the map as a
meaningful artefact and on the process of mapping itself.
The latter is understood to cover much more than the
conventional techniques and operations deployed in order
to produce traditional cartographic objects. In this new
critical context, mapping can therefore refer to a multitude
of processes, from the cognitive operations implied in the
structuring of spatial knowledge to the discursive implica-
tions of a particular visual regime. Drawing on this
particular context, the examples discussed above explore a
number of issues related to cinema’s spatial understanding,
suggesting that a particular ‘scopic regime’, linked to the
visual experience of mapping and to a cinematographic ‘art
of describing’, could be identified throughout film history.
In this sense, this paper modestly responds to the
epistemological shift brought about by the aforementioned
‘spatial turn’.
Far from being restricted to the early period of cinema’s
history (or to non-fiction film), the mapping impulse would
manifest itself throughout different periods. Panoramic
shots, in particular 360u pans, can be found in very different
works, from early Edison titles (such as a collection of
panoramas from the 1900 Paris’ World Fair) to contem-
porary artist’s works, conveying a will to describe through
filmic means and often addressing complex spatiotemporal
Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture
issues. Many of Jean-Marie Straub’s and the late Danielle
Huillet’s films – such as Fortini Cani (1976) or Trop tot,
trop tard (1981) – include 360u pans, Straub having
affirmed that a filmmaker is someone who surveys the land
with something other than measuring instruments (Straub,
1995: 17). Atlases have turn into a popular means for the
assemblage of images: one could easily argue that such films
as Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy (1983–2002), could be
approached as cinematographic atlases, in the distant
tradition of Kahn’s multimedia archive. Last but not least,
aerial views have embodied different problems throughout
the whole of film history, from documentarism to abstrac-
tion, ornamentalism, surveillance, etc., deserving much
more than a technical footnote in cinema’s histories.
As a way of concluding, let us recall Harley’s observations
on the ‘mapping impulse’. According to the author, the
physical artefact we call map is but a small part of a wider
history, that of mapping, a form of communicating about
space. One is tempted to ask, after Harley, how cinema fits
into this general history. If the notion of a ‘mapping
impulse’ constitutes a starting point for such a questioning,
the idea certainly needs to be further explored.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Teresa Castro was born in
Lisbon and currently lives
in Paris, where she’s an
Assistant Professor
(ATER) at the Université
de Paris Est – Marne-la-
Vallée. After having stu-
died Art History in Lisbon
and London, she com-
pleted a PhD on Cinema
and the Mapping Impulse
of Images at the Univer-
sité de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle (2008). A former
grantee of the Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia
(Portugal), her current research focuses on visual culture
issues (in particular aerial views in cinema and photography
and photographic and cinematographic atlases) and the
relations between cinema and contemporary art. A co-
founder of the research group Le Silo, she also curates film
programmes and other cultural events.
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