The Cartographic Journal Vol. 46 No.

1 # The British Cartographic Society 2009

pp. 915

Cinematic Cartography Special Issue, February 2009

REFEREED PAPER

Cinemas Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture

Teresa Castro
de Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France Universite 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 rst 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 reection, 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 cartographys representation of space is in many ways very similar to cinemas 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 rst is the title page of Abraham Orteliuss Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the rst 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 (18671942) was an important gure in the early British lm 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 Urbans 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 lm: the fact that it often presented itself as the modern successor of cartography (Shohat and Stam, 1994). In this particular case, Charles Urban lms 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
DOI: 10.1179/000870409X415598

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 eeting, dreaming looks. Atlases, however, require more careful scrutiny and the contemplation of details together with meditation upon the universe they portray. The completeness 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 Orteliuss age of discoveries and the First Era of Globalisation (1880 1914) that witnessed the invention and development of cinematography. Seen in this light, its 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 lm (and travel lms constitute a signicant part of Urbans 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

10

The Cartographic Journal

Figure 1. Title page of Abraham Orteliuss Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)

Figure 2. Advertisement for the Charles Urban Trading Company, 1903, Luke McKernan collection

Martin Heideggers 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 briey 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 signicant 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 ction lm, which brought the whole world within reach lie ` s ill-fated Star Film company slogan: le monde a ` (Me e du regard), is not traversed by a general mapping porte impulse, associated but certainly not limited to the territorializing impulse of nation-states, different imperial projects and other scientic and commercial ventures. As a number of lm scholars have pointed out, early travel lms

evince a real desire to take possession of the world through representation. The trip around the world is a common early lm topic (Costa, 2006), as well as more or less exotic incursions into foreign lands, generally in the shape of expedition or ethnographic lms whose effective role is to ll the blank spaces in the spectators imagination. However, the afnity 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

Cinemas Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture

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 nally, that of an episteme, in Michel Foucaults sense (i.e. as the very condition of possibility of discourse).

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 images at surface and favoured description. 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 lms, focusing instead on what could be called cartographic 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: 111112), the epistemology that shapes the eld of cartography reaching well beyond the profession of mapmaking. Even though Farinellis inquiry is more philosophical than anthropological, we are tempted to draw a parallel with Jack Goodys arguments, as developed in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). In his book, the English anthropologist focused on the impact of

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 congurations 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-ction lms from the rst two decades of cinemas 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 observers 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 panopticism (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 lmic apparatus (Grifths, 2003; Miller, 1996). If some authors, such as Stephen Oettermann, have insisted on the connection between panoramas and a specically 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 lm catalogues from the early period, as if lm 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, illustrating what lm 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 lm 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 lm catalogues). The apparent simplicity of these lms should not conceal the fact that they represent the careful scaling and coding of the world through lmic 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, xed on a tripod, moves rotationally on an axis, it also guides the spectators eye in journey through space and time. The cinematic embodiment of these movements takes panoramic vision and the mapping impulse that pervades it further, as the following examples will show. In his discussion of French newsreel lms from the First ray remarks World War, French lm historian Laurent Ve how the sequences dealing with the ruins and the destruction caused by the conict are heightened by ray, 1995). A horizontal and vertical panoramic shots (Ve glises de lm entitled Les Allemands sacharnent sur les e France (1917) illustrates this point well, documenting through 21 pan shots the destruction of religious buildings ray, in the Oise, the Aisne and the Meuse. According to Ve such camera movements provide a feeling of spatial comprehensiveness in line with the cameramens 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 nonction lmic 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 specic documentary and propaganda needs of the military institution. On the one hand, these lms 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 enemys 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. ray The feeling of spatial comprehensiveness to which Ve refers nds 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

cameras 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 ` te, a particular camera movements. The Archives de la Plane unique collection of lms, autochromes and stereoscopic photographs assembled between 1912 and 1931, bestowed on it a different and ambitious goal: the description and classication 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 projects cartographic imagination. The Archives were imagined and funded by Albert Kahn (18601940), 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 different 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 Kahns 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 ve cameramen and six photographers visited 48 countries in the world between 1912 and 1931, assembling 4000 stereoscopic photographs, 72,000 autochromes and around 183,000 m of lm, 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 friends will to open the great book of the world to an elite of young graduates (Bergson, 1931). The expression is in Descartes, a man who settled in fact from philosopher Rene 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)? ` te As we have already indicated, the Archives the la Plane constitute, in many respects, a modern multimedia atlas, a collection of images whose aim is to convey geographical and historical knowledge. The lms, 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, Kahns archives are a sequenced inventory of the world where History and Geography peacefully coexist. In that, they evoke Johan Blaeus Atlas, a book where Geography became the eye

Cinemas Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture

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), Kahns collection cannot be fully grasped without being placed in a precise scientic context, related to the establishment of historical archives and to the constitution of French human geography as a discipline. In this sense, Kahns 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 ` te were the visual foundation upon which de la Plane Brunhes scientic 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 topographic, 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 rst combined French, English and Japanese traditions, the second gathered in the same space plants and trees of African, Algerian, Moroccan, Brazilian and Mexican origins. 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 Kahns garden to the historical tradition of geographical gardens (Besse, 2003b). If Kahns gardens did not duplicate the geographical reality of the world as it stands, they constitute nevertheless another visible demonstration of the philanthropists utopia and his dream of a reconciled world, eventually made at, scaled and coded by both cinema and photography.
Aerial views

Figure 3. Detail from Interior of a Study (17101712), 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 lms 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 signicance of events, facts have a powerful, irresistible, and incorruptible language. As an inexhaustible haven for providing information, 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 Kahns 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 Richters to Walid Raads Atlas. Moreover, science historians Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston have recently demonstrated how scientic atlases were central to the nineteenth century scientic 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

Our last example examines aerial views, focusing on an extraordinary lm 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 matographique de lArme e), French Army (Service Cine constituting a unique record of the state of destruction caused by four years of conict (Figure 4). The lms birds eye views of ruined cities and villages, as well as its aerial shots of moonscape-like battleelds, reveal the full extent of the devastation, hinting at the reconstructions Herculean task. The fact that the images were edited in order to resemble a long sequence-shot makes the lm even more remarkable.

14

The Cartographic Journal

maFigure 4. En dirigeable sur les champs de bataille, Service cine e, 1918 tographique de larme

` re Brothers and Edison Motion Pictures Both the Lumie shot lms 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 rst 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 uidity of its aerial movement represent an unquestionable source of emotion: emotion linked to the visual pleasure of discovering the earths 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, nally, of being able to move freely in the spacetime continuum. In this sense, En dirigeable sur les champs de bataille illustrates better than any other lm Paul Virilios well-known claim that cinema is not I see, but I y (Virilio, 1984, my translation). The cinematographic specicity 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 ight and lm. 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 rst decade of cinemas history and the avant-garde revolution looming in the post-war horizon, this lm without an author illustrates an acute consciousness of the potentialities of lm 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 lm also belongs to a larger documentary project, including the undertaking of an extensive photographic and cartographic

campaign. As French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne recalled some decades after the conict, 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 lm takes part of a genuine and extensive mapping project, articulated around two major elements: the inventory of the land through photographic, cinematographic and cartographic means and propaganda. That these images of ruins and gloomy battleelds 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 sacriced land and on the urgency of the rebuilding campaign. The lm is divided into four sections, which reconstitute the journey made by cameramen Lucien Le Saint (18811931) and probably, by another two men. Several intertitles locate the views: the rst section, entitled From Nieuport to Mont Kemmel, surveys the West Flanders; the second section, From Bailleul to MontSaint-Eloy, documents the North and the Pas-de-Calais; the third part, From Saint-Quentin to Vauxaillon refers to the Aisne and Oise; and nally, the fourth section, From Ailette to Reims covers the Marne. This landscape lm reveals a deeply wounded country, the analogy between the territory and the body quickly imposing upon the viewers 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 eld 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 implications of a particular visual regime. Drawing on this particular context, the examples discussed above explore a number of issues related to cinemas spatial understanding, suggesting that a particular scopic regime, linked to the visual experience of mapping and to a cinematographic art of describing, could be identied throughout lm 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 cinemas history (or to non-ction lm), 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 contemporary artists works, conveying a will to describe through lmic means and often addressing complex spatiotemporal

Cinemas Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture

15
ographe/Regards de la Ge ographie, Monde, Regards dun Ge e Albert Kahn, Boulogne. pp. 91107, Muse te Autour du Monde, 14, Bergson, H. (1931). Bulletin de la Socie p. iv. Besse, J.-M. (2003a). Les Grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects du Savoir ographique au Seizie ` me Sie ` cle, ENS Editions, Lyon. Ge oramas, Besse, J.-M. (2003b). Face au Monde: Atlas, Jardins, Ge e de Brouwer, Paris. Descle te rotopie?, Bonhomme, M. (1995). Les jardin dAlbert Kahn: une he alite s dune Utopie, ed. by in Albert Kahn (18601940). Re e Albert Kahn, Beausoleil, J. and Ory, P., pp. 97105, Muse Boulogne. ` te: a cinematographic Castro, T. (2006). Les Archives de la Plane atlas, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, (48), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/KahnAtlas/ text.html. Costa, A. (2006). Trips around the world as early film topic (1896 1914), in Landscape and Film, ed. by Lefebvre, M., pp. 245266, Routledge, London and New York. Farinelli, F. (2003). Geografia, nIntroduzione ai Modelli dal Mondo, Einaudi, Turin. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage, New York. Galison, P. and Daston, L. (2007). Objectivity, Zone Books, New York. Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Griffiths, A. (2003). Le panorama et les origines de la reconstitution matographique, Cine mas, 14, pp. 3565. cine Gunning, T. (1997). Before documentary: early nonfiction films and the view aesthetic, in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Films, ed. by Hertogs, D. and de Klerk, N., pp. 924, Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Gunning, T. (2006). The whole world within reach: travel images without borders, in Virtual Voyages. Cinema and Travel, ed. by Ruoff, J., Duke University Press, Durham and London. Harley, J. B. (1987). The map and the development of the history of cartography, in The History of Cartography, Vol. I, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. by Harley, J. B. and Woodward, D., pp. 142, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Harley, J. B. and Woodward D. (1987). Preface, in The History of Cartography, Vol. I, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. by Harley, J. B. and Woodward, D., p. XVI, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper and Row, New York. orique de la Jacob, Ch. (1992). Lempire des Cartes. Approche The ` Travers lHistoire, Albin Michel, Paris. Cartographie a Jay, M. (1988). Scopic regimes of modernity, in Vision and Visuality, ed. by Foster, H., pp. 323, Bay Press, Seattle, WA. Kahn, A. (1918). Des Droits et des Devoirs des Gouvernements, Imprimerie de Vaugirard, Paris. ographie Ae rienne, Albin Michel, de Martonne, E. (1948). Ge Paris. Miller, A. (1996). The panorama, the cinema and the emergence of the spectacular, Wide Angle, 18, pp. 3469. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, London. Straub, J.-M. (1995). Rencontres avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danielle Huillet, Limelight, Le Mans. ray, L. (1995). Les Films dActualite Franc Ve ais de la Grande Guerre, S.I.R.P.A./A.F.R.C.H., Paris. ma I. Logistique de la perception, Virilio, P. (1984). Guerre et Cine ditions de lE toile, Paris. ma/E Cahiers du Cine

issues. Many of Jean-Marie Straubs and the late Danielle Huillets lms such as Fortini Cani (1976) or Trop tot, trop tard (1981) include 360u pans, Straub having afrmed that a lmmaker 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 lms as Godfrey Reggios Qatsi trilogy (19832002), could be approached as cinematographic atlases, in the distant tradition of Kahns multimedia archive. Last but not least, aerial views have embodied different problems throughout the whole of lm history, from documentarism to abstraction, ornamentalism, surveillance, etc., deserving much more than a technical footnote in cinemas histories. As a way of concluding, let us recall Harleys 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 ts 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 shes an Assistant Professor (ATER) at the Universite de Paris Est Marne-la e. After having stuValle died Art History in Lisbon and London, she completed a PhD on Cinema and the Mapping Impulse of Images at the Univer de Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle (2008). A former site ncia e Tecnologia grantee of the Fundac ao de Cie (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 cofounder of the research group Le Silo, she also curates lm programmes and other cultural events.

REFERENCES Alpers, S. (1983). The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Amad, P. (2001). Cinemas sanctuary: from pre-documentary to ` te (1908 documentary film in Albert Kahns Archives de la Plane 1931), Film History, 13, pp. 138159. moins de leur temps: Beausoleil, J. and Delamarre, M. (1993). Deux te Albert Kahn et Jean Brunhes, in Jean Brunhes: Autour du