Above: Poster by Frank Stella for the 9th New York Film Festival.Compared to the 32 films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival, not to mention the seemingly hundreds of others playing in sidebars, the 1971 edition of the NYFF, half a century ago, was a lean affair. With only 18 films, down from 78 just four years earlier, the ninth edition of the NYFF was, according to its director Richard Roud, a “belt-tightening festival, a year of consolidation.” In fact, the financially strapped festival almost didn’t take place that year. A New York Times article published midway through the event mentions that “outside the 984-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, there is only one poster announcing the festival [one assumes it was the beautiful Frank Stella poster above] that is quietly and modestly taking place inside.” A far cry from the glorious phalanx of digital billboards currently beaming outside Alice Tully Hall and the Elinor Bunin Center.The...
- 10/6/2021
- MUBI
Above: Us one sheet for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Two weeks ago, as the 57th New York Film Festival kicked off, I griped about the uninspiring quality of the posters for the films in the festival’s main slate. 50 years ago it was a very different story. The posters I have found for the 19 films in the 1969 main selection make up a dazzling collection of illustration and forward thinking graphic design, even, or especially, the type-only poster for the only studio film in the festival: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice which was the opening night film on September 16 (notably a Tuesday evening).Of course, many of these posters might have been made months or even a year after the festival, since we’re looking back with half a century of hindsight, and many of this year’s designs will no doubt be updated, but this was also the era in which...
- 10/11/2019
- MUBI
Above: Chinese poster for Spirited Away; artist: Zao Dao.The most popular poster to date on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram, by a dragon’s length, with more than double the amount of likes of its closest contender, was this gorgeous Chinese poster (and its color variant which you can see here) for Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), which apparently just got a Chinese theatrical release eighteen years after it was made. The posters were painted by the young Chinese comic book artist Zao Dao who you can, and should, read more about here.I was happy to see Renato Casaro’s prop poster for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood’s film-within-the-film Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo—which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago—make such an impression, as well as another of my favorite Casaros painted forty years earlier, for Screamers, a.k.
- 8/9/2019
- MUBI
1. mother!Darren Aronofsky’s divisive nightmare boasted a number of very striking posters this year, including one that blatantly yet beautifully pastiched the iconic Gips/Frankfurt design for Rosemary’s Baby and another in which Jennifer Lawrence’s face is minutely cracked like a porcelain doll. But it is this first teaser poster for the film, by the extraordinary artist James Jean, that stands out for me not only as a surreally appropriate representation of Aronofsky’s uncompromising vision, but as the best movie poster of the year. Grotesque and gorgeous, and dotted with hidden clues, Jean’s looks more like a piece of devotional iconography than a poster for a horror movie. (There is also an accompanying poster by Jean which features Javier Bardem’s character.) Known for his covers for the DC comic book series Fables, Jean has been in high demand this year, creating the charcoal illustration...
- 12/11/2017
- MUBI
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