ABSTRACT
The field of cultural studies is riddled with the idea of “mapping.” The term is often understood to be a superimposition of one or more critical templates of a given discipline onto others from another that can reveal unforeseen patterns or webbings of relations. The student in the field is not so much a cartographer in the historical sense of a surveyor and draftsman than as an intellectual engineer, an individual designing hypotheses affiliated with codes of spatial reason. The analysis of cinema, increasingly associated with cultural studies, also owes much to mapping. Works of given directors are often set over each other in order to reveal pertinent traits and variations that shape their signatures. Film histories are shown as “maps” by which given historical phases are placed adjacent to one other or else overlapped at transitional edges in order to make visible patterns of change or, in a pedagogical sense, to construct grids in which thousands of films can be stored in a vault of memory.
