AUTOPSIES RESEARCH GROUP

Magnificent Maps is an exhibition of old and rare maps, dating from the 1400s to the present day. The exhibition is organised in a series of spaces, each representing different rooms in which maps would have been originally viewed. We journey through a palace’s gallery, audience chamber, bedchamber and cabinet, a secretary of state’s room, a merchant’s house, and a schoolroom. Each of these map-rooms contains a range of different maps, with differing geography, scales, perspectives, and colours which transport viewers around the world as they trace their fingers across the glass frames. It is interesting that so many of the map-rooms are domestic; maps too can be domestic objects, like so many of the ‘dead objects’ the autopsies group is researching.
 
Thinking about the status of these old maps as dead objects provokes many questions. Given that the depiction of the world that they present is now regarded as incorrect, what use can they now have? They are not accurate representations of the world, and not useful in the way that a modern map is, so are ‘out of use’ in a way resembling our other dead objects. But the maps are so beautiful and intricate that they are still in use today as art objects (as well as windows onto the worlds that created them). Indeed, the exhibition explains that in their original form, many of the maps on display were art objects, filling galleries and stored in curio cabinets.[1] So the old maps are dead objects in one sense, but remain in use in another.
 
My favourite maps in the exhibition included one of the world’s smallest maps, engraved on a tiny German coin from 1773, and the world’s largest atlas (1.75 x 2.31m when open – taller than me!) which was made for Charles II in 1660. It’s still in an amazing condition. Another favourite was a 1551 map of Rome by Leonardo Bufalini which depicts ancient and contemporary Rome together on the same map, using different shadings to demonstrate the change in the city over time. So the map represents three dimensions, and movement in space and time. The Frau Mauro World Map, originating from around 1450, which forms the main advertising image for the exhibition[2], is distinctive in its complete lack of correspondence with our understanding of the shape of the continents today. The continents blur together unrecognisably, and are ‘upside down’ compared to usual maps made in the Northern hemisphere. The Garden of Eden appears in a separate small globe in the lower right corner of the sheet, unusual for the time, as Eden normally featured within the world itself. The exhibition’s accompanying book explains that ‘Frau Mauro could find no evidence for the existence of the Garden of Eden on Earth, and so he daringly places it just outside the world outline.’[3] 

These continuing different perspectives and representations of the world make the exhibition a transportive and dislocating visit. Unfailingly, the visitors (myself included) would approach each map, try to make sense of it and its relationship to modern day maps, and then begin pouring over it identifying places we recognised and retracing journeys with our fingers. The fun in this seemed to come from precisely the fact that the maps represented the world in a very different shape than we understand today.  It is interesting to think about the exhibition’s map-rooms in the context of film theorist Giuliana Bruno’s work. Bruno writes that ‘[m]aps on a wall transform the wall itself, turning it into a permeable surface that can be entered in different ways and travelled through.’ [4]  Map-rooms enabled their original inhabitants to journey through them, travelling the world from their homes. Today, the exhibition’s recreated map-rooms are filled with tourists who have travelled across the world to London, only to find themselves transported again by the maps, tracing their journeys on them, and pointing out home.

Stephanie Fuller


References

1. Peter Barber and Tom Harper, Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art (London: The British Library, 2010), p. 9
2. The British Library exhibition held a copy, dating from 1804, of this map by William Frazer
3. Magnificent Maps, p. 52
4. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 275
 
Photo: British Library Magnificent Maps promotional material.

School of Advanced Study
‘Memory, Empire and Technology’ Summer School
29 June – 3 July 2010

The summer school programme was designed to explore the three themes of memory, empire and technology through five days of seminars and events that encompassed film, archives, photography, music and history.

The first seminar, led by Dr Akane Kawakami, investigated the roles of the aeroplane and the telephone in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The discussion focussed on the reception of these technologies in nineteenth century society; in particular, the group became fascinated by the assimilation of these objects into the canon of the everyday through the language associated with them. Symbolic language threatens the new and exotic by awarding it a historic pedigree that makes even the most exciting of technologies seem banal. The technological wonder that was the aeroplane did not inspire the same excitement when it became merely a ‘flying ship.’ Human experience, as well as language, has irrevocably changed the connection we have with certain technologies, and with one another. The telephone disembodies the human voice, and forces us to recognise death every time we take a call. The plane, afforded a prominent role in the conflicts of both twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has borne a breakdown in its semiotic system. Does a plane mean death, or merely a holiday? This uncertainty plagues our relationship with all technologies and our own perceptions and memories. Do we doubt ourselves, or the instruments that enable us to remember?

It is interesting that our talk of technology should always bring us back to death. Found-footage filmmaker Yervant Gianikian suggests that silver nitrate film smells like a rotting corpse: while film preserves the light and shade of the living, providing an afterlife for countless forgotten objects, it is itself in a constant state of decomposition. Robert Lumley’s session on found-footage filmmaking addressed the methodologies and practices of Gianikian and his partner Angels Ricci Lucchi, and described the ways that the filmmakers ‘recycled’ footage to provide a shared public memory. One of the problems they faced, especially when working with film from the early 1900s, was its fragile state and tendency to disintegrate – a sad and rather beautiful reminder that film, too, can lose its memory (described by the filmmakers as a ‘state of chemical amnesia’). I wonder whose memory the film projects before us? In the Hills there is Peace, for example, reveals the cinematography of some soldier in the Dolomite Mountains, dead and long buried, perhaps beneath the snow. Are the flickering ghosts of his comrades his memories? The imprint of the film’s tarnished memory? Or the public memory of the filmmakers and those who view ‘their’ film? Throughout the seminar I struggled with the notion that the indexicality of these films authenticated them, or made them real as objects. The reframing, reediting and tinting of the original films highlighted the representative, unreal quality of the films and the staged process of their projection. Perhaps the question I would really like to ask is ‘who’s film is it, anyway?’

A workshop organised by Junko Theresa Mikuriya gave us the chance to create and develop our own images on film (or in this case, photographic paper). Working from a dark room in Bethnal Green, we were instructed to make our own pin-hole cameras, use them to capture images, and finally develop them. My images – all three were of bikes locked-up next to the road – enunciated the passing of light through, around and between my chosen objects. In negative form, these images preserve moments in time that are solidly rendered in light and yet remain utterly intangible.

A more tangible and physical experience came for me in what was the highlight of the week: a Routemaster bus tour around London. Led by the driver and conductor (and assisted by Prof. Derek Keene) the tour began in Bethnal Green and ended in Archway, taking in Shoreditch, Liverpool Street, Monument, London bridge, Tower bridge, Aldgate, Mile End, Stratford, Walthamstow and Tottenham Hale along the way. My first reaction on boarding the bus was to exclaim ‘Look at the wind-down windows!’ (a reaction repeated by others). The Routemaster bus, we were told, was decommissioned five years ago, with the last one built in 1968. The driver described the buses as ‘very popular objects’ – I immediately thought back to our first Autopsies meetings and furiously wondered ‘did we say a bus could be an object?’ Constructed around an aircraft fuselage, the bus was lighter than most subsequent designs and remained an iconic signifier of London, along with phone boxes and hackney cabs.

All comfortable in our seats, we were issued with tickets by the conductor. He used a Gibson ticket machine with a numeric fare wheel (this was switched to an alphabetic fare wheel in the eighties). In his bag, the conductor would carry a cardboard or Bakelite clipboard, with his fare charts on side and timetable on the other. He would also carry a single key to fit all the locks on the bus.

The tour was designed to show to us the changing topography of London, from its Roman beginnings to the contemporary addition of the Olympic Park at Stratford. The building work and regeneration taking place throughout the city was overwhelming, with offices, homes and railways under construction at every turn of the corner. However, many desolate and derelict spaces still existed. Indeterminate spaces, with no use, filled the gaps between the new and the already-established. What, asked our bus driver, would become of the fringe sites around the Olympic Park and the City? What kind of cultural assimilation, evidenced in the shop fronts along the more suburban roads leading out toward Essex, would take place in these dead spaces?

The bus continued to wind its way through the London traffic and densely populated streets. As other bus drivers beeped their horns in appreciation, it was all anyone could do but smile at the excited tourists and nostalgic Londoners who waved as the Routemaster, obsolete technology of yesterday, drove by once more.

Rebecca Harrison

As I browsed through images of typewriters on the internet, I became aware of a trend in typewriter autopsying that gave new life to the sum of the machine’s parts. Typewriter keys are turned into fashion accessories: bracelets, earrings, necklaces are all available to make or buy. I wonder if anyone has typewriter buttons? Do people make typewriter-key jewellery as mementoes of their much-loved, but now dead, machines? If this is the case, our nostalgia for obsolete technologies has acquired a distinctly Victorian taste. Is it akin to keeping a lock of the departed’s hair around one’s neck? We must surely mourn the hundreds of typewriters whose ‘shift’ keys appear in the image above, like teeth scattered in an unmarked grave.

The image ‘Shift Keys’ was taken by Amy K. Buthod, of the University of Oklahoma, at Freemont flea market in Seattle. The Autopsies Group would like to thank Amy for the use of her image (both on our website and business cards).


Rebecca Harrison

Every summer 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' film festival in Bologna brings together films recovered from the archives of Europe and beyond and presents an audience of film scholars, archivists, enthusiasts, and local Bolognesi a programme of some of the most surprising, strange and exciting films made since the inception of cinema. Why is this festival so important? Exactly because it recovers films thought too damaged, lost or too obscure to be of interest and screens them in the best possible condition.

Moving between the festival's three cinemas as well as the giant screen erected in the Piazza Maggiore for evening screenings, I sampled the festival's different programmes seeing John Ford's silent films, Stanley Donen's musicals, restored colour films, the adventurous women of silent
cinema, and a programme of films from the 1910s that spanned travel films, science films and the grand dramatic displays of Alberto Capellani's Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Miserables.

As is always the way with film festivals, I couldn't see it all, missing as many films as I saw. My discoveries, however, made me forget the things I couldn't see. Highlights included John Ford's Three Bad Men (1926) screened in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore to a new score composed by Timothy
Brock and performed by the Orchestra del Teatro Communale di Bologna. Ford's tale of the Dakota land rush of 1877 was revitalised by a score that had me jumping out of my chair with excitement in the film's most climactic scenes, while its stunning cinematography inspired a new love affair with the western that was only compounded by the following day's restored cinerama screening of Delmer Daves' Jubal (1956), starring a roll call of great leading men, Glenn Ford, Rod Steiger, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson. The first time I had ever seen a film in all its cinerama glory, I was quite dumbfounded by the wide expanses of the American West spread before me. Finally, one of the greatest pleasures of the festival was the programme of Stanley Donen musicals, and particularly Its Always Fair Weather (1955) featuring Gene Kelly tap dancing in roller skates. A sentimental plot about the reunion of three war buddies ten years after they are demobilised is of little consequence in a film that has Gene Kelly, Dan Daily, Michael Kidd, and Cyd Charisse dancing their way through the bars, boxing rings, and streets of New York.

As important as a festival like 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' is for the scholarly appreciation and study of films from the world's archives, for me at least, it is the festival's ability to reignite some of the pure joys of cinema-going that really sets it apart from other festivals. Live scores, cinerama, and the joy of discovery make it not just another week sat inside dark theatres, when others would be enyoying the Italian sunshine, but a week that reminds you of the excitement of the cinematic experience.

Karolina Kendall-Bush