Movie Posters of the Week

Since I’ve been writing Movie Poster of the Week for two years now, first here, and since March at The Auteurs Notebook, I thought it might be a good idea keep a directory of all my postings here, in reverse chronological order:

 

On The Auteurs:

The House of the Devil

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Le Feu Follet (and the work of Hans Hillmann)

What? (and other Polanski posters)

The 47th New York Film Festival

Gummo (and other Harmony Korine films)

Antichrist

Husbands (and other French Cassavates posters)

Merman and Stolz der Nation (and other fake movie posters)

Independencia

Les herbes folles [Wild Grass] (and other Resnais posters)

The Endless Summer (and other surf movie posters)

The Servant (and other Losey/Pinter posters)

La femme de Paul, avec le sourire (the strange case of the lost Godard film)

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Christmas on Mars (and the work of The Small Stakes)

Moon

The Serpent’s Egg (David Carradine R.I.P.)

Next Stop Greenwich Village (and the work of Milton Glaser)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

The Lacemaker (and the work of Peter Strausfeld)

The Devils

L’Atalante

The Rain People

The Holy Man (and the design work of Satyajit Ray)

In the City of Sylvia

The Girlfriend Experience

Late Spring

 

On this site:

Bruno

Objectified

Made in USA (and the work of Rene Ferracci)

Pickpocket (and the work of Christian Broutin)

The International

Dear Zachary (designed by Evan B. Harris)

Let the Right One In

Cool Hand Luke (R.I.P. Paul Newman)

The Headless Woman

Stranded

Day of Wrath

Getting Straight

Rosemary’s Baby

Burn After Reading

Three Monkeys

Alice in the Cities (designed by All City)

Forgetting Sarah Marshall/Local Hero

Last Year at Marienbad

The Bank Job

Offside

The Longest Yard

The Great Debaters/Carbon Copy

Taxi to the Dark Side

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Decline and Fall of a Bird Watcher

I’m Not There

Cloverfield

Be Here to Love Me (designed by Rob Jones)

Pierrot le Fou

The Savages (designed by Chris Ware)

Reprise (designed by All City)

Funny Games

A Brighter Summer Day

Gloria Grahame night

It’s Gloria Grahame night tonight on Turner Classic Movies. This poster is one of many superb updated posters TCM has produced for their Summer Under the Stars series. You can see them all here. I bow to few in my love of Gloria Grahame, whom I first became infatuated with after reading the tragic memoir written by her much younger British lover Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.

Apologies to anyone keeping track (thanks Paul) for the poor state of disuse this site has fallen into over the past two months. Mostly I’ve been writing Movie Poster of the Week over at The Auteurs, and writing nonsense (and linking to less nonsensical things) on Twitter instead of T.W.I.T.T.. But I will try to keep house around The Wind in the Trees from now on.

Shining Ephemera

In honor of The Shining midnight shows at the IFC Center.

A poster by Polish designer Leszek Zebrowski

 

A doorway mural on Oranienstrasse, Berlin (thanks to I Dreamed Music)

 

The worst wake-up ever: The Shining cuckoo clock by Chris Dimino (thanks to Engadget)

 

Brilliantly oblique tribute poster from Tes One (courtesy of Grain Edit)

 

Poster by Jeff Kleinsmith for Rolling Roadshow screening of The Shining at the Timberline Lodge (the original Overlook Hotel) in Oregon in October 2008. 

 

First edition of the Stephen King book

 

 

The movie soundtrack LP

 

The British teaser poster based on a Daily Mirror spread

 

And, though everybody’s seen it, of course I need to add my favorite fake trailer (if not my favorite You Tube clip of all time)

Movie Poster of the Month: Bruno

Perfect in every way, from typography to tagline to color scheme to use of ümlauts.

Meanwhile, an equally sublime Francis Ford Coppola poster on Movie Poster of the Week at The Auteurs.

Sidney Poitier’s Warm December

I’ve been on a bit of a Sidney Poitier kick lately, inspired by reading Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris’s indispensable book about the five films nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture in 1967, two of which—Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night—starred the great Sir Sidney. I’ve enjoyed watching him, even in hokey pieces like Lilies of the Field and To Sir, With Love, but never more so than in this obscure 1973 London-set romance which I Netflixed purely on the basis of this poster. Poitier plays a brilliant, widowed DC “ghetto doctor” who travels with his 10-year-old daughter to London to race motorcycles (as one does) and falls in love with the alluring, beautiful and doomed niece of the ambassador from Torunda, a fictional East African nation.

A Warm December, just released on DVD for the first time (and seemingly only to pad out the Sidney Poitier Collection that it’s included in), was Poitier’s second film as a director. His first, the western Buck and the Preacher (1972), he had taken over the reins of midway through production. December was a flop, but Poitier went on to become a hugely succesful comic director, helming vehicles for Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder and for 20 years holding the record for the highest grossing film by an African-American director for 1980’s Stir Crazy, until Keenan Ivory Wayans bested him with Scary Movie in 2000. A Warm December, a rather corny and quite touching weepie, is shot like a TV movie, with zooms galore and a terribly dated score, but Poitier never aspired to be Jacques Rivette (despite his occasional experimenting with non-synchronous sound).

What interest A Warm December has, beyond its very charismatic leads, is mostly incidental: its London setting with its Afro-centric enclaves, a succession of fabulous patterned shirts (mostly worn by Poitier, except when he’s walking around with his shirt off), and its plot revolving around international diplomacy, motor-cross racing, hydro-electric dams and sickle cell anemia. There is also a wonderful performance by South African singer Letta Mbulu singing a Miriam Makeba song. And, best of all, a scene in a nightclub where Poitier and Esther Anderson dance to an Afro-funk outfit called Zubaba. Zubaba, it turns out, is the band formerly known as Symarip, best known for their 1969 ska anthem “Skinhead Moonstomp.” 

Making Tea with Satyajit Ray

An ad for The Indian Tea Market Expansion Board designed and illustrated by non other than Satyajit Ray in his days as a commercial artist before he changed the world of Indian cinema with Pather Panchali in 1955. Back in October I griped about the disappearance of Ray from American screens, but I’m happy to report that a Ray-trospective is now in full effect at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I’ve been proselytizing to friends about Ray all week but really all I need do is direct people to this clip from Pather Panchali. The wind in the reeds!

Meanwhile, I write more about Ray’s work as a designer over at the Auteurs.

Movie Posters of the Fortnight

My two most recent entries at The Auteurs Notebook.

Movie Poster of the Week: Now at The Auteurs

After a kind invitation from my good friend D-Kaz, Movie Poster of the Week will now be appearing weekly (I hope!) on the Auteurs Notebook. Check out my debut post. I will continue to post other ramblings and beautiful things here.

Movie poster of the week: Objectified

 

Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica is one of my favorite recent documentaries, and, needless to say, the best documentary I have ever seen about graphic design, and so I’m excited to see that his new doc on industrial design, Objectified, just premiered at SXSW. Today I saw the fabulous poster for the film at the IFC Center and it’s even better in person since the grey is actually metallic silver. The poster (notice the title hidden in the objects?) was designed by the British design studio Build and you can see it in extreme close-up here. There is also already a Japanese website that is trying to name every object on the poster and their designers. Coincidentally a similarly object-centric poster for a thriller called Order of Chaos was recently unveiled online. (Both posters feature an iPhone; on Objectified it’s top right, just before the sunglasses.)

 

Movie poster of the week: Made in USA

One of the least-seen of major-era Godards was revived earlier this month at Film Forum and it was a treat. The poster, which perfectly captures the films’s cut-and-paste spirit, as well as Anna Karina’s unforgettable mod sweater-dress, is by René Ferracci, whose name is distinctively displayed just to the right of Laszlo Szabo’s head. A little Saturday morning research tells me that Ferracci was born in 1927 and died in 1982 and pioneered the era-defining collage style of French movie poster design—using photographs and offset printing—as opposed to the often gaudy illustrated lithographs of the cinema du papa. He was responsible for the posters for, among many others, Au Hasard Balthazar, My Night at Maud’s, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Playtime (the illustration used on the Criterion DVD), Army of Shadows, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Belle de Jour, and, what may have been his final poster, Diva.