◡◶▿ MAPS08 | Maps
🗺️ Your movie's set design as psychogeographic guidebook to the soul. | Greenaway/Maddin/Tarr/Rajk. Jason Patric. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 8
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Welcome, seasoned film students and new subscribers. Sit comfortably and snack freely.
It’s week eight of our series on the mappy, flappy potential of film set design. The scenographic potential of cardboard, paper, and the concept of paper. And so on. And now we’ve arrived at the mappiest issue of all: actual maps and the process of mapping.
But before we get into that, let’s quickly recap last week’s set of micro-essays - Foldable cities. We learned how:
“The concept of city comes before the aesthetic.”
“The city is a slow gesture. Analogue and infinite and trapped in the drag of time. In other words, impossible to capture.”
“the filmmaker must instead decide the level of detail she should use to evoke the city. She must start with the everything of the city and scale down to the appropriate definition.”
“The city exists in so far as you map it through the content and order of your shots.”
And today? Today, through a mist of pollen and professorial sneeze particles, we’ll learn how:
🗺️ Your film is a two-dimensional map, whether you like it or not.
🌐 The map-like quality of a movie’s collective images operates on multiple mental and aesthetic dimensions.
🎥 Peter Greenaway made an entire film using actual maps, and the places are realer than CGI.
🗝️ Guy Maddin mapped his father’s memory with wallpaper, and Béla Tarr mapped Hell onto a quaint Corsican port town.
And more. More!
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Mapping
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
Space is a paradox in 2D movies. To represent space, the filmmaker must squash a three-dimensional volume into a two-dimensional picture. She can run the camera around the space to give the illusion of reaching in. But no matter how fast the filmmaker pushes her camera, the picture ends up two-dimensional.
However, the two-dimensionality of the material does have one narrative advantage: the collected frames of the movie can be stitched into a map. Usually with lots of holes in. Usually more hole than map. But a deliberately planned map - deliberately cohesive or deliberately otherwise - offers an extra level of engagement to the viewer.
Creating stitchable map fragments may be high or low on the filmmaker’s priorities. But she usually cannot escape it happening. And so, she at least considers the option of mapping deliberately, aware that the audience might piece her images together on their drafting table. Aware that her map fragments might infer features she didn’t know were there.
The filmmaker and her set designer might draw attention to the map-like qualities of their material. By moving the camera in a methodical fashion, or flagging (psycho-)geographic details with symbols or colour. Or sounds. Or duration. Flagging the map-like quality of a movie indicates that the layout of the land and architecture in the hero’s world is significant to the:
narrative or
emotion or
intellect or
aesthetics or
dimensionality
of the movie. And mapping highlights the significances.
A map for a film set
The hero of Peter Greenaway’s A Walk Through H (1979) goes on a walk. Greenaway says it is possible the hero is walking to Heaven or Hell, as indicated by the H in the title. But this doesn’t add up, because the hero is said to be walking through H, not to H. Unless the journey is the destination. Hell, like a movie, is a time-based art form. A going-on.
A Walk Through H mostly consists of camera pans across painted maps. The set design is painted maps. But A Walk Through H soon loses the sense of a journey through a map because the viewer acclimatises. It begins to feel like journeying through the space that the map represents.
The style of the maps is quite abstract. Symbolic marks and symbols abstracted from the photographic reality of the ‘location.’ But the viewer imagines that they are walking through the environment, even though they have no idea what that environment might look like. Occasional clues, such as a clip of a bird flying over a field, feel more symbolic even than the painted map.
Doesn’t it make you wonder why you’d spend so much time and money building a set? Hiring actors to walk through it?
Says Peter Greenaway of his maps: “Often they don’t necessarily represent beautiful production values but are ripped and torn and full of ambiguities. And that’s part of the game. Because, in a sense, you have to interpret a map. All its full meanings are not always available because maps are about codes. Who would imagine in another circumstance that a cross on a stick would indicate a wind pump?”
What a strange production design! Even at the point of the filming, the features of the set were barely more than 2-dimensional. In fact, the rips and tears are the most multi-dimensional features of the movie. And yet, there we are, walking through H more vividly than Elliot Page and Leonardo DiCaprio in the foldaway Paris of Inception (2010).
Treacherous geography of memory
A bold word or phrase indicates that an instruction of the same name and concept exists elsewhere in this module.
Jason Patric plays a version of Guy Maddin’s father in Guy Maddin’s film Keyhole (Art Direction/Production Design: Ricardo Alms, Matt Holm, 2011). A gang leader in a memory-like reality. A limbo or purgatory.
This limbo takes place inside a reconstruction of Jason Patric’s/Guy Maddin’s father’s family home. Jason Patric maps the family home by taking the audience with him from room to room. However, it is not the ‘real’ family home. It is a memory-like purgatory.
Jason Patric/Guy Maddin/Ricardo Alms/Matt Holm map the treacherous geography of memory using physical symbols:
Background portals and connecting-ways.
The flow of linoleum from room to room.
Transparencies and holes.
Maps.
Treacherous? Jason Patric fishes impossible details from his dreams. Details that one couldn’t consciously remember or which belong only in the realm of fantasy. The characters themselves redesign the home during the violent siege that frames the movie. Recursive! Slippy.
Here are some clips illustrating the mappiness of Keyhole. All wrapped up in my video lecture for Slow Film Festival a few New Yearses ago. Contains one rude image.
The set design in Guy Maddin’s movies rarely pretends to be the external world. The so-called ‘real world.’ The “real, external world” means the one with Tescos and USB adaptors and that chemical toast smell you always smell on certain roads at certain times of the day. Guy Maddin’s movies rarely pretend to be there.
Guy Maddin’s movies pretend to be in a dream world, or model train world, or in an archaic cinematic continuum. “Archaic cinematic continuum” means another reality where you can step from creaky old movie to creaky old movie without ever putting your foot down in a Tesco.
Guy Maddin’s set design is tactile and floppy. He storyboards with paint, scissors, and glue. Maddin’s sets are made with whatever’s cheap. Made with whatever makes the point. Symbols that both are what they represent and are what they are.
Cardboard and driftwood filling the gaps between patches of shadow and glowing gels. A jelly bean for a moon.
Hell map
Laszlo Rajk told us that there is virtually a library on the topography of Hell. Rajk told us that, from an architectural point of view, you could write a PhD on it.
Laszlo Rajk was the production designer on The Man From London (Director: Béla Tarr, 2007). The world of The Man From London was modelled on a topography of Hell. The topography was that of Dante’s inferno. But you can walk around the real hell of The Man From London on Google Maps. They filmed it in Bastia!
When you walk around the real world of The Man From London on Google Maps, you can see why it is desirable to abstract your images from the so-called real world. Even switching the colours will abstract your images from our recognisable surroundings. Béla Tarr switched the colours of Bastia to shades of black, white, and grey.
Imagine a Béla Tarr film set in that colourful Google town! It would be too depressing. Too existential.
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
Implications
Next week, we’ll learn about implied places: recursive maps, reverse forensics, and filler areas: set designs you don’t even need to bother making!
Class dismissed.
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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