Sightlines · a concept

diagram

superimposed maps/sheets transforming into one another (cerebral cartography).

On screen: layered maps/plans morphing across time

  • Fail Safe (1964) — The wall-sized display maps and radar screens are rendered as diagrammatic administrative surfaces in monochrome rather than dramatic spectacle.
  • Time Bandits (1981) — The stolen map itself — a layered topological plan of time's holes that the Supreme Being wants back as the blueprint of creation
  • Back to the Future Part II (1989) — Rick Carter's three Hill Valleys — advertising-bright 2015, smog-and-neon 1985 with Biff's Pleasure Paradise dominating the skyline, period-clean 1955 rebuilt to match the original's sets — are one…
  • One Day in September (1999) — The Fürstenfeldbruck airbase is communicated through maps and diagrams that accrue detail as each witness adds a layer to the unseen event
  • Donnie Darko (2001) — the translucent liquid-time 'spears' that push from characters' chests toward their futures, mapping a trajectory onto the body
  • Dogville (2003) — The overhead "God's-eye" wide shots pull back to render the town as a chalk floor-plan of lines and labels, a map reasserting the clinical vantage.
  • Iron Man 2 (2010) — Howard Stark's Stark Expo World's-Fair city model morphs into the atomic lattice of the new element Tony sculpts by hand in the holographic interface
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) — The wall grid of 1966 parade photographs, cropped and enlarged and re-ordered until a static layout becomes a map of a single afternoon's movement.
  • Hereditary (2018) — Annie's miniatures reconstruct the family's own rooms and griefs as small maps, the plan and the lived space folding into one another.
  • La Flor (2019) — The filmed prologue: Llinás sketches four stories that begin and never end, one with a beginning and an end, one that is only an ending — a drawn map of the film's temporal shape, resembling a flower.
  • Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — The dark forest that redraws itself according to whoever holds the map — terrain generated by desire rather than crossed as a fixed milieu.