Mapping out Patience: Cartography, Cinema and W.G. Sebald
Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, Montreal H3G 1M8, PQ, Canada
Academic Editor: Les Roberts
Humanities 2015, 4(4), 554-568; https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040554
Received: 1 August 2015
/
Accepted: 29 September 2015
/
Published: 10 October 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Mapping)
Cinematic cartography can be an especially powerful tool for deep mapping, as it can convey the narratives, emotions, memories and histories, as well as the locations and geography that are associated with a place. This is evident in the documentary film Patience (After Sebald) by Grant Gee, which follows in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald and his walking tour of Suffolk, England, as described in his book The Rings of Saturn. A variety of strategies in cinematic cartography are used quite consciously in Gee’s exploration of space, place and story. Using Teresa Castro’s three cartographic shapes of cinema, I structure an analysis of the film’s opening scene through a discussion of cinematic cartography, or the plotting of geospatial data onto a map, as well as what I will differentiate as cartographic cinema, or the mapping of space through the cinematographic image. I argue that both are necessary not only to have a deep understanding of the world and our place in it, but also in how to transmit that knowledge to others.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
cartographic cinema; cinematic cartography; deep mapping; Grant Gee; essay film; documentary; W.G. Sebald
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Ng-Chan, T. Mapping out Patience: Cartography, Cinema and W.G. Sebald. Humanities 2015, 4, 554-568. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040554
AMA Style
Ng-Chan T. Mapping out Patience: Cartography, Cinema and W.G. Sebald. Humanities. 2015; 4(4):554-568. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040554
Chicago/Turabian StyleNg-Chan, Taien. 2015. "Mapping out Patience: Cartography, Cinema and W.G. Sebald" Humanities 4, no. 4: 554-568. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4040554
Find Other Styles
