ABSTRACT
The cinematic image shares some fundamental aspects with cartography: most importantly, an interest in the superficial appearance of things in the world, and a consequent rhetoric of transparency. This is also why there has been an abundance of thinking, beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century and continuing to the present, around the ‘cartographic vocation of cinema’ and its ‘mapping impulse’. The quite frequent inclusion of maps in films arguably reaffirms the ‘strong visual and rhetorical connection’ between cinema and cartography. This chapter will reflect on this connection, which is perhaps also genealogical and ideological, by comparing it with another specular declination of the same association: if cinema is cartographic because of its realism and its ability to represent the world, since it contributes in its own way to the description of the Earth, on the other hand, cinema is also cartographic because it can be represented as the world and can literally be mapped by film historiography and criticism. Let us think of still inescapable historiographic references such as that of ‘national cinema’. Cinema is both subject and object of cartography, and this chapter will try to trace the directions—and evolutions—of this twofold relationship.
