The narrative in mobile technologies: reflections on the short film “It’s never nighttime in the map”

Abstract

The text seeks to reflect on the appropriation cinema makes of technical instruments in its narratives, especially the technologies that make mobile services available. In a moment of tension between individual and space, such as the one we live in 2020 due to the pandemic of covid-19, the web and the digital end up becoming territories of atypical experiences of insertion and reflection on the body and the city. We chose Ernesto de Carvalho’s short film It’s never nighttime in the map (sic) (Nunca é noite no mapa, 2016) and its narrative, which incorporates Google Street View as the primary source of its images, as our object of study. To better understand it, the text analyses the film from the perspective of a database narrative, according to Lev Manovich, and of the map as a simulacra as in Jean Baudrillard. The insertion of the filmmaker (who is both a narrator and a character) is perceived from the idea of the body as a central image in Henri Bergon’s perspective and from the flâneur for Walter Benjamin. Finally, the essay-like construction of the short film finds its reflections on Alexandre Astruc.