Sucker Free City is a 2004 film directed by Spike Lee. The film takes a look at the friction between white, black, and Asian gangs in the city of San Francisco at the beginning of the 21st century.
The film was first released in 2004 at the Toronto Film Festival and was subsequently released on television through the Showtime Network.
The movie opens with a satellite image of Earth with superimposed text ("showtime presents", "a spike lee joint") and then camera zooms in to show an image of the United States, then California, then San Francisco, and finally Hunter's Point, the setting of the first segment of the story, which is introduced by an expository caption.
Spike Lee's choice of using a cartographic-style opening featuring a bird's eye view of San Francisco is reminiscent of the Google Earth's aesthetics...
...The interesting thing is that Google's cartographic tool was released in 2005, a year after the movie was produced (sure, EarthViewer 3D was released in 2001... But how popular was it?).
An example of visual pre-mediation?link: A flickr photoset
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