Note: screenshots are from my laptop, taken in July 2020. The featured image at the top of this page is from Fårö, Gotland, Sweden – the entrance to Bergman’s island. His estate can’t be accessed, unfortunately.

“I have never stayed so long anywhere,” I think, sitting at my kitchen table, laptop open, coffee dripping quietly. Where to next? I’ve just returned from the palaces of Munich, where the paths are gravelly, and the grounds are symmetrically arranged sleepily, geometrically. There, I saw sublime seventeenth-century Baroque ceilings above my head, sprawling out onto French-style lawns. Where did Delphine Seyrig say that line? The wall she leaned on? I click and drag, and lo and behold I stand where she stood, facing out onto the iconic gardens where Alain Resnais had actors’ shadows painted into the gravel. Triumph. I float through “empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps.” I was alone, and yet also among the awkward tourists grappling cameras in an effort to capture this place. However, nothing captures Schloss Nymphenburg the way L’Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (1961) did. I feel I’ve accomplished something, but this ‘tour’ can’t match actually watching the film, or indeed visiting the place. 

 

 

Google Maps allows me to visit favourite film locations without the effort of really finding them. It’s lazy tourism, which doesn’t impact the climate or your bank account. Certain locations are easier to get to than others. Buildings have been gentrified, demolished; sets were built to feign reality. This isn’t a new hobby. In fact, long before the pandemic I visited London, tracing David Hemmings’ route in Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966). The obsession began. Between library books and the website, movie-locations.com (which I’ve found mostly accurate), I searched first for the ominous Maryon Park, Woolwich, where Thomas, a fashion photographer, takes snaps of an affair. Like Thomas, I return to the park now, as I write. In the film, Thomas studies his park photographs and spots something odd in the bushes. He returns and sees a body, which later disappears. It’s silent, except for the wind in the trees. The trees outside my house rustle. I don’t see a body – only the pixelated semblance of grass from an aerial point-of-view. Is this grass any realer than the grass Antonioni had painted greener for these scenes? Or indeed any more real than the black-and-white photographs Thomas studies? I see the tennis courts where Thomas throws an imaginary ball to street performers – where the end titles appear with Herbie Hancock’s blasting jazz track. My voyeuristic activities seem oddly fitting for the essence of Blow-Up. 

 

I can visit the exterior, not the interior, of Thomas’ studio (77, Pottery Lane, Notting Hill). Tracing Antonioni’s route, you realise how geographically unrealistic it is. Thomas’ “neighbourhood” posits that Woolwich is within a short drive from Notting Hill (which, even as a tourist I can discern it definitely isn’t). While there I visit the main location of Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970) – the house where Mick Jagger and James Fox switch personas (25, Powis Square). Some locations, like this property, are private and I feel terrible for snooping. Yet it’s much less invasive than actually peeping about the place — which is something I’ve done before, remorsefully. Even Jean-Luc Godard, who maintains a moderately private lifestyle, isn’t immune to the gaze Google Maps permits. The director was captured walking with partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, on Rue de Temple in his home city of Vaud, Switzerland in 2013, causing a stir on Twitter when he was discovered in 2016. I return to check up on him. He remains there, static, timeless, face blurred. Considering a director who has embraced 3D technology and adapted to digital cinema, I perhaps incorrectly assume that this panoptical mechanism intrigues him. 

 

 

Paris! Thanks to the youthful innovation of directors like Godard to shoot on-the-go and in the streets, it’s not very difficult finding locations here. Using movie-tourist.blogspot.com, I find some locations for Le cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970). I want to see Jansen’s (Yves Montand) weird house, but the blogger hasn’t found the location yet. Perhaps it has been demolished. I visit the exterior of Alain Delon’s dreary, minimalistic apartment at Impasse des Rigaunes from Melville’s Le samouraï (1967). I stand there digitally, waiting for him to appear in his fedora and trench coat. Much has changed here – shopfronts, style, cars. I visit the bridge from Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1975); Bois de Boulogne, where Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) sat in Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967). I head southwards. I catch a sweaty and frantic tourist’s photo of Casa Malaparte in Capri – the iconic villa from Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) where Brigitte Bardot sunbathed on the roof. Seemingly, it’s private property. The site of Homeric betrayal and colossal hubris, the villa doesn’t seem real to me. Up to Rome to see the bustling Trevi Fountain where Marcello Mastroianni nearly kissed Anita Ekberg. How did they manage to be alone here? A real trip to Fårö, Sweden, where Ingmar Bergman worked and lived, is logistically difficult. Yet, I resign to peer about the island – seeing where Persona (1966) was shot on the beach; the sea-eroded rauks from Shame (1968); guessing where Bergman lived. 

 

 

A transatlantic flight later and I speculate over how much the street where the vile Sport (Harvey Keitel) pimps in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) has changed (204, East 13th Street, Manhattan). I peep at the neighbourly Stuyvesant Avenue from Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989). Sal’s Famous Pizzeria doesn’t exist. The Bramford Building (The Dakota, West 72nd Street) from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) is as gothic as it feels in the film. I gaze at the ornate engravings and turn around to see Central Park. I feel relief not having to navigate the subway system. I prefer to travel the open expanses. A road from my favourite film, My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), appears to be inaccessible (Route 216, Maupin, Oregon). Using a snow-topped mountain for reference, I judge where River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves stood. I realise Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) was shot in Alberta, not Texas, and that Sam Shepard’s Edward Hopper-esque mansion was a set. 

 

 

 

Inherently, cinematography and production design affect the way we see things. Using Google Maps, you learn that what lies outside of the frame is different or perhaps similar to where you interpreted a character to live. A morning has passed, and I’ve been in several cities. Indeed, it’s unrealistic and voyeuristic, but it’s also thrilling (in a modest and perhaps sad sense) in a time of Covid. Revisiting locations like the palaces of Munich, I feel not too distant from Resnais’ Marienbad, despite being over 1,700km away and about 60 years too late.