CRASSH

The history of navigation has been adversely influenced by a reductionist scientific world view which prioritises the abstract and the visual in the distancing technique of ‘map-making’. The opposing technique of ‘wayfinding’ (Ingold) is more complex and experientially richer and is associated more with the aural and the haptic. Car drivers familiar with cityscapes navigate as ‘wayfinders’ with a ground-level perspective, as opposed to aircraft pilots who navigate with a ‘map-reader’s’ birds-eye view. Map-making/ -reading ignores the original narrative element in navigation which ‘wayfinding’ retains. Films about car journeys, and especially those set in cities, with their increased experiential complexity, relate to ‘wayfinding’. Certain non-mainstream modern films can be perceived as part of a predominately urban philosophy and aesthetic of ‘everyday life’, a trans-media phenomenon vital especially to recent French cultural life, which attempts to atone for a perceived neglect of the everyday-ness within our lived experience. The quirky film ‘Night on Earth’ directed by Jim Jarmusch (U.S.A.1991) comprises five vignettes, each concerning a taxi-journey in a different city: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. Each vignette begins at the same time and ends with a connection traced to the next city on the same world map used in the film’s opening sequence. The five separate narratives are varied, unconventional and apparently directionless. The film’s visual content is juxtaposed to its more haptic and aural content, including a soundtrack by Tom Waites. Shots of mostly empty night-time cities oppose shots of a more complex, human interaction (or inaction) and ‘dwellingness’ (Urry) inside the confines of five taxi-cabs. ‘Night on Earth’ is a film which shows, in five taxi journeys (of which only three are examined here) a connection between two neglected notions: that of urban ‘wayfinding’ and that of ‘everyday life’.