The second shot of Edward Yang’s 1986 The Terrorizers—which just ended a month-long run on Mubi but which is still available in the Mubi library—is a close-up of a woman’s eyes. But the image is grainy and monochrome and there are paper folds beneath both eyes that look like tears. This is followed a beat later by a similar shot of the woman’s open mouth and a man in profile, again highly pixellated. Anyone familiar with Mike Nichols’ film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but especially anyone familiar with its French poster, might recognize the faces of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.The grande-sized poster (though you never see the title or any of the other lettering) hangs on the wall of a photographer who is living with his girlfriend. Over the course of the film their lives will intersect with a number of other disparate characters,...
- 10/8/2020
- MUBI
I recently worked with one of my favorite movie poster artists, Akiko Stehrenberger, on a poster for Louis Garrel’s A Faithful Man which, with its lipstick imprints on Garrel’s face, paid accidental homage to the original poster for François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses. It was Garrel himself who pointed this out—Akiko had never seen the Truffaut poster before and I’d forgotten it—which sent me down a rabbit hole searching for Stolen Kisses posters, of which, it turns out, there is a remarkable variety.Stolen Kisses premiered at the Avignon Film Festival on August 14, 1968 and opened in New York on March 3, 1969, almost ten years after Truffaut’s debut, The 400 Blows, had premiered at Cannes. Stolen Kisses continued the story of 400 Blows’ charming reprobate Antoine Doinel, now all grown up and working as a private detective.The original French poster, featuring an illustration of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Doinel,...
- 7/5/2019
- MUBI
Bruno Ganz, who died last week at the age of 77, had 121 acting credits to his name, from his debut as a hotel page in the 1960 comedy The Man in the Black Derby to his final role as a judge in Terrence Malick’s yet to be released Radegund. His underworld guide in Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built would have been at the very least a fitting send-off, but since that film premiered in Cannes last year he has also played Sigmund Freud in The Tobacconist and starred in a Macedonian war crimes drama, I Witness. Born in Zurich, to Swiss and Italian parents, Ganz was a truly international star, working with Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Volker Schlöndorff in Germany, but also Eric Rohmer, Jerzy Skolimowski, Alain Tanner, Gillian Armstrong, Jonathan Demme, Theo Angelopoulos, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Atom Egoyan, Barbet Schroeder, Bille August, Sally Potter,...
- 2/22/2019
- MUBI
Three years ago this month, on the day that we learnt of the passing of the great Jacques Rivette, I wrote an article on his posters in which I said, while bemoaning the lack of great Rivette posters, that “his adaptation of Denis Diderot’s La religieuse, starring Anna Karina, seems to have inspired the most varied work (so much in fact that I will save most of it for a later post).” I’ve since also done a piece on Anna Karina’s posters (albeit for her lesser-known films), but it is only now, upon the re-release of a gorgeous restoration of La religieuse at Film Forum in New York, that I am finally fulfilling my promise to delve deep into posters for Rivette’s 1966 masterpiece, better known here as The Nun.The most iconic poster for the film is René Ferracci’s simple and elegant montage of illustration...
- 1/11/2019
- MUBI
Above: Us festival one sheet for Hal (Amy Scott, USA, 2018). Designed by Midnight Marauder.One of the best and most inventive movie poster designers currently at work, the L.A.-based artist known as Midnight Marauder should be no stranger to followers of my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr and annual top 10 lists. A graphic designer for some 20 years, Mm a.k.a. Emmanuel, has been designing movie posters for the past five years. He has had two very fruitful collaborations in that time, first with Terrence Malick for whom he has designed a number of posters, most notably the teaser for Knight of Cups, and more recently with the great Berlin-based Italian illustrator Tony Stella with whom he has been producing beautiful alternative posters for films like The Phantom Thread. Together they also designed the poster for the 50th anniversary release of The Great Silence, which opens in theaters today.
- 3/30/2018
- MUBI
Above: German poster for Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961), artist: Tostmann.
Over the past three months of Movie Poster of the Day, the two most popular posters by far were two beautiful (each in their own very distinct way) posters that I posted in memoriam of two dearly departed auteurs: Alan Resnais and Harold Ramis. And two other posters among the most popular (i.e. most liked or reblogged) were those posted in celebration of Philip Seymour Hoffman, including Chris Ware’s lovely 2007 design for The Savages, one of my favorite posters of last decade. So, if nothing else, Movie Poster of the Day has recorded the saddest losses of the year. (Not forgetting the adorable Swedish poster I posted for Shirley Temple which didn’t make the Top 20.)
I’m happy to see a number of new posters here: a very popular Dutch Wolf of Wall Street,...
Over the past three months of Movie Poster of the Day, the two most popular posters by far were two beautiful (each in their own very distinct way) posters that I posted in memoriam of two dearly departed auteurs: Alan Resnais and Harold Ramis. And two other posters among the most popular (i.e. most liked or reblogged) were those posted in celebration of Philip Seymour Hoffman, including Chris Ware’s lovely 2007 design for The Savages, one of my favorite posters of last decade. So, if nothing else, Movie Poster of the Day has recorded the saddest losses of the year. (Not forgetting the adorable Swedish poster I posted for Shirley Temple which didn’t make the Top 20.)
I’m happy to see a number of new posters here: a very popular Dutch Wolf of Wall Street,...
- 4/4/2014
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
For many years I’ve been aware of this poster—a classic by René Ferracci, the appointed affichiste of the nouvelle vague—without knowing anything about Je t’aime, je t’aime, a film which has been almost impossible to see for decades. Today, as a Valentine’s Day gift to New York cinephiles, Film Desk and Bleeding Light Film Group are bringing it back to Film Forum in a new 35mm print.
Ferracci, master of the photo-collage, captures the fragmented whirlpool of Alain Resnais’ time-traveling love story in an unforgettable image that would maybe be better known, as would the film itself, if its protagonists had been bigger names. Je t’aime, je t’aime, made in 1968, was only Resnais’ fifth feature film, twenty-two years into his filmmaking career. (Just this week, at the age of 91, he premiered his latest, Life of Riley, at the Berlin Film Festival.) An...
Ferracci, master of the photo-collage, captures the fragmented whirlpool of Alain Resnais’ time-traveling love story in an unforgettable image that would maybe be better known, as would the film itself, if its protagonists had been bigger names. Je t’aime, je t’aime, made in 1968, was only Resnais’ fifth feature film, twenty-two years into his filmmaking career. (Just this week, at the age of 91, he premiered his latest, Life of Riley, at the Berlin Film Festival.) An...
- 2/15/2014
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
To accompany the exhaustive retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard (49 programs in 21 days) that started as part of the New York Film Festival and runs through the end of October, I had planned to select my ten all-time favorite posters for Godard’s films. But when I sat down to the task and laid out the ten I’d chosen in front of me, the result was a selection of posters so overly familiar as to be banal. It looked like the postcard rack of any film bookstore in Paris. Much as I had hoped to choose less obvious designs, when it came down to it the posters created for Godard’s films in the 60s are hands down among the greatest film posters ever made: Clément Hurel’s Breathless, Chica’s Une femme est une femme, Jacques Vaissier’s Vivre sa vie, Georges Kerfyser’s Band à part and Une femme mariée,...
- 10/18/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Above: 1979 Hungarian poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1968); Designer: unknown.
When I started the Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr almost two years ago to augment my weekly poster essays here, I thought I might well run out of great posters to post daily after a year or so. But the deeper I dig the more gems I seem to unearth and the more popular the site seems to become (nearly a quarter of a million followers to date).
I’ve been posting these Best Of round-ups every six months (see parts one, two and three) but I’ve found so much good stuff lately that I feel the urge to do these four times a year instead of twice. As usual I’m using the very unscientific method of number of likes and reblogs to judge a poster’s popularity, but it does tend to...
When I started the Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr almost two years ago to augment my weekly poster essays here, I thought I might well run out of great posters to post daily after a year or so. But the deeper I dig the more gems I seem to unearth and the more popular the site seems to become (nearly a quarter of a million followers to date).
I’ve been posting these Best Of round-ups every six months (see parts one, two and three) but I’ve found so much good stuff lately that I feel the urge to do these four times a year instead of twice. As usual I’m using the very unscientific method of number of likes and reblogs to judge a poster’s popularity, but it does tend to...
- 9/7/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
One of my earliest Movie Posters of the Week, a few years ago, was for a stunning poster for Bresson’s Pickpocket. Back then I noted that it was “designed by one Christian Broutin. It turns out that Broutin (who was born in 1933 and only 26 when he designed this) also designed the conceptually similar poster for Jules and Jim, another of my all-time favorite French affiches.” In the comments somebody asked if I knew anything else about Broutin but I did not and could not find out much more on the web other than that he was also a children’s book illustrator.
A few months ago I came across another great poster attributed to Broutin and in my search for a better quality image for the poster I discovered his website (“Welcome to the site of Christian Broutin, maxi-realist painter, illustrator, creator of stamps”) which told me that Christian Broutin is alive and well,...
A few months ago I came across another great poster attributed to Broutin and in my search for a better quality image for the poster I discovered his website (“Welcome to the site of Christian Broutin, maxi-realist painter, illustrator, creator of stamps”) which told me that Christian Broutin is alive and well,...
- 5/5/2012
- MUBI
A tonic for the New Year: for the next two weeks Film Forum is running a near-complete retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson programmed by the Tiff Cinematheque. The posters for Bresson’s films are a fascinating grab-bag of styles, verging from melodrama to minimalism to symbolism to the wildly inappropriate (see the Italian Mouchette), as designers tried to express and occasionally subvert Bresson’s celebrated and increasing austerity. My favorite may well be this lovely, witty French grande for Pickpocket, illustrated by the great Christian Broutin (best known for his iconic Jules and Jim posters). But there are plenty of other standouts, most especially Raymond Savignac’s series of playful cartoons for Bresson’s final three films: Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, and the stunning Czech surrealism for Une femme douce.
I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.
I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.
- 1/6/2012
- MUBI
Movie Poster of the Week was on vacation last week and thus missed the opening of the re-release of The Bride Wore Black at New York’s Film Forum. But, before it closes this Thursday, I simply must celebrate the fact that Truffaut’s 1968 Hitchcockian revenge drama may have more great and varied original posters than any other film. I count eleven here, each one a winner. First there are two French posters for La mariée était en noir by the peerless René Ferracci, who must have been more than usually inspired by Jeanne Moreau in her widow’s garb. In the first, above, he contradicts the title by scribbling in white on a photograph of Moreau in her titular mourning robe to turn it back into a wedding dress. (The same design was used for the original American poster which Film Forum and distributor Film Desk are selling reproductions of.
- 11/8/2011
- MUBI
Mathieu Ravier, who writes about movies and movie posters from down under at his blog A Life in Film, recently alerted me, via Twitter, to a wonderful collection, on the website of the French newspaper L’Express, of every festival poster of the last 64 years of the Cannes Film Festival. You can see the full collection here, but I wanted to pick out a few of my favorites.
First of all, I have to say that the poster for this year’s festival may be my favorite of them all. The festival has used beautiful black and white photographs of actresses before (Monica Vitti in 2009, Marlene Dietrich in 1992) but those posters have often been let down by their uninspired typography and layout. But this year’s poster, which uses a Jerry Schatzberg photograph of Faye Dunaway at her most gorgeous (a restored print of their wonderful 1970 film Puzzle of a Downfall Child...
First of all, I have to say that the poster for this year’s festival may be my favorite of them all. The festival has used beautiful black and white photographs of actresses before (Monica Vitti in 2009, Marlene Dietrich in 1992) but those posters have often been let down by their uninspired typography and layout. But this year’s poster, which uses a Jerry Schatzberg photograph of Faye Dunaway at her most gorgeous (a restored print of their wonderful 1970 film Puzzle of a Downfall Child...
- 5/6/2011
- MUBI
A year or so ago, while writing about the brilliant poster for Alain Resnais’s most recent film, Wild Grass, I was a little disparaging of other recent Resnais posters with their wacky ensemble montages. Go further back in Resnais' filmography, however, and there are some truly exceptional designs. The newly reopened Museum of the Moving Image is currently in the middle of “the most complete retrospective of Resnais’s films ever presented in New York,” which is reason enough to look back at some of this work.
Resnais’ first three features, Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), groundbreaking masterpieces all, have inevitably inspired the most inventive and varied work. The stunning French grande for Muriel, above, is one of my favorites. Having not seen the film in a while I can’t tell if this is an unadulterated still from the film or not, but the...
Resnais’ first three features, Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), groundbreaking masterpieces all, have inevitably inspired the most inventive and varied work. The stunning French grande for Muriel, above, is one of my favorites. Having not seen the film in a while I can’t tell if this is an unadulterated still from the film or not, but the...
- 3/12/2011
- MUBI
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