Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography: A Historical Review of Cinematic Maps in Films

Abstract Through an historical review of cinematic maps – or 'cinemaps' – this paper argues that contemporary digital cartography was conceptualized in films. This argument is first developed through a discussion of the emergence of animated maps in docudramas of the 1910s. These early cinemaps were followed by more sophisticated examples that foreshadowed the structure and design principles of 'modern' cartography. The cinemap that appears in the movie M (Fritz Lang, 1931) can be considered the first 'modern' map as it prefigures many of the current functions of contemporary digital cartography such as the combination image/map, use of sound, shifts in perspective and spatial analysis. The remaining functions of digital cartography, including zooming and live data rendering, were conceptualized in cinema by the 1960s, as illustrated by examples from movies such as Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove and Goldfinger. When professional cartographers were creating their first animated maps, most of the functions of contemporary digital cartography had already been implemented in cinema. Building on these results, the paper anticipates the future incursion of mapping technologies into interpersonal, confidential and private spaces through the study of contemporary cinemaps.