No Maps for These Territories
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No Maps for These Territories is a 1999 documentary film by Mark Neale focusing on the science fiction author William Gibson. It was released by Docurama.
[edit] Premise
The following is an account of the documentary featured on Docurama's website.[1]
| On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of the cult-classic novel "Neuromancer," stepped into a limousine and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a television, a stereo, and a cell phone. Generated entirely by this four-wheeled media machine, No Maps for These Territories is both an account of Gibson’s life and work and a commentary on the world outside the car windows. Here, the man who coined the word "cyberspace" offers a unique perspective on Western culture at the edge of the new millennium, and in the throes of convulsive, tech–driven change. |
It features appearances by Jack Womack, Bruce Sterling, Bono, and The Edge.
[edit] Content
During the documentary Gibson muses both on his past and the circumstances that led him to write what he wrote, as well as our present which, accordingly, is starting to resemble in many particulars the futures he has variously penned. He speculates on topics as wide-ranging as post-human society and mechanics, nanotechnology, drugs and drug culture, the effect of Neuromancer on his fans and his later writing career, and the normalisation of technology (that is, the ways in which we have justified the use of technology to the point that it is invisible to us, a concept similar to the "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" concept of Arthur C. Clarke.) The documentary is extremely free-flowing and also highly personal, in that it allows one to gain an extremely close understanding of both the thought processes and internal psychological triggers of William Gibson. Occasionally prompted by an unseen Driver figure (female in voice) and sometimes communicating with outside figures (specifically, Jack Womack and Bono, who was also being filmed at the time, the final product being superimposed on an electronic billboard).
The entire documentary revolves around footage taken from the car, either from front-facing cameras (presumably mounted near the dashboard or on the actual chassis) or from internally-mounted ones, fitted to center on Gibson, who sits in the back seat of the limousine. Only on one occasion does he leave the car, to wander up and down a favourite beach, and here he is also filmed, providing one of the documentary's iconic images, that of a weathered monochromatic Gibson in a long black coat being buffeted by the strong coastal breeze. Neale consistently plays with the recorded footage, reversing sections of the film while keeping others playing or stopping them entirely, fading between similar but fundamentally different pieces of footage, and even at one point combining footage of Gibson with the screen of an antique television as he describes the advent of television in the Southern United States.
