Posters from Cannes - 2014

The 2014 Cannes Film Festival runs from 14-25 May. Adrian Curry went looking for posters of the 18 films in competition and ended up disappointed. Here are a few examples:

Daniel Nelson: Posters

Daniel Nelson is a graphic designer/web developer from Sweden and the creator of the From up North website. He collects images from around the web and arranges them in useful subsets. Take a look at these:

Great advertising posters

Advertising? I hate it. I mute the sound, I change the channel, I beg.

Please stop assailing my brain with adverts. Bring back the gamma rays from Jupiter!

But there is no escaping. It's everywhere. 

My wife likes the ads. She hums those dumb irritating tunes. She willingly sits through the commercials, then gets up to go to the loo once the program resumes. It kills me.

I was told that marriage was character-building. No one mentioned commercials.

Anyway, occasionally, just occasionally, I see an advert that nails it and I forgive the Madmen all over again.

Here are some posters from PlayBuzz which qualify:

The Lesser-Known Posters of Jean-Luc Godard

Adrian Curry has put together an interesting collection of Jean-Luc Godard's lesser-known movie posters in MUBI. These posters come from Japan, Germany, Denmark, America, Italy, Mexico, and Spain, as well as work by Godard himself.

Détective (1985)

Masculin féminin (1966)

Une femme est une femme (1961)

Bande à part (1964)

Alphaville (1965)

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You can find the original article here.

Heroic movie posters

Did you know that most blockbuster movie posters are based on a 19th century painting? This one:

“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

MaryAnn Johanson's FlickFilosopher recently ran an article highlighting some of the film posters that have been based on this painting. It's an interesting read.

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Saul Bass posters

Saul Bass (1920-1996) was an acclaimed graphic designer, who designed film titles and film posters. Film.Com recently published a collection of "every significant movie poster Saul Bass ever designed." 

And, no, he didn't design the West Side Story poster, though he is often falsely credited with that one.

Such Good Friends (1971)

See the full collection here.

Movie poster clichés

We've seen some of these before, but here is an expanded analysis of standard movie poster clichés, put together by the French blogger Christophe Courtois.

Here's one example: Running In the Street, At a Tilt And Tinted Blue.

To see the rest of the 15 Popular Movie Poster Cliches, click on the link. It is hosted on Demilked, a design milking magazine with the potential to chew up a lot of your spare time...

Bill Gold - classic movie posters

Who's Bill Gold? you ask. 

Only one of the greatest movie poster designers of all time. He worked for Warner Bros. for 70 years. He's 92 now, and retired, except for doing the occasional Clint Eastwood movie poster. 

The first poster he ever worked on was for Casablanca (1942).

Bill Gold: “We had finished the poster. Warner Bros. looked at it for a while, and after few days they said, ‘Is there anything we can do to make this more exciting? More dramatic? It just kind of sits there.’
And I said, ‘Well, maybe. Let me take it back to the office.’
I brought it back the next day; I had put a gun in his hand.”

He'd left the gun out because Humphrey Bogart didn’t use a gun in the movie until the end, in the airport, when he shoots the Nazi. Gold didn’t want to reveal that until people came to see the film.

In the years that followed, Gold would put a lot of guns in the hands of a lot of leading men, especially Clint Eastwood, for whom he designed some 40 posters.

Learn more about Bill Gold:

IMP Awards    Independent    New York Times    Roundtable    Wikipedia   

2012 Movie Posters

Notebook, the digital magazine of international cinema and film culture, has published its annual opinion of the best movie posters for 2012.

To the right is the Japanese version of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. To the left is the American version. The Japanese poster was included on the list for the color palette of its title treatment, paired with those line drawings of fish, the Aladdin’s lamp below the pull-quote and a perfectly placed exclamation mark. (You'll need to see the original article to appreciate those details...)

The poster below, for Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, consists of a great photograph and some perfectly chosen type. The photograph, by the great iconcolastic Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, is priceless and tells you all you need to know about his attitude.

You can see the full poster selection here.

Movie poster sale

If you need something to hang on the wall, Heritage Auctions has an sale running of over 1,000 original movie posters. The 1933 King Kong poster shown below is expected to go for $80,000+, but take a look at the rest.

Harry Potter posters

I have to confess that I never got into Harry Potter, but I know lots of people who love him. If you're looking for memorabilia, The Printorium is selling posters online, here.  To give you some idea of what's on offer...

'Star Wars' dialogue and the vernacular

 How many of these lines do you NOT recognise?

 Origin unknown.

Movie Posters

We've established that I like movie posters and movie poster clichés. Here's some more on the subject from a couple of designers. 

Travis Pitts is an American freelance illustrator and designer. He has provided us with six examples of Modern Movie Posters, each pointing out the design rules commonly drawn on by designers. 

This copy of the poster is too small for you to read the fine print at the bottom. 

CLICK HERE to see the original.

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Peter Stults is an amazing guy. A New York illustrator/designer who doesn't think he's been cool for 20+ years. (I'd disagree.) Just for the fun of it, he created a bunch of reimagined retro movie posters. Like the one below. 

CLICK HERE to see them all.

2011 Movie Posters

Movie posters. Clever. Funny. Beautiful. Haunting.

That's the good ones. We won't mention the others.

Here's a post on Notebook, the digital magazine of international cinema and film culture, giving an opinion on the Best 25 posters of 2011.

Meanwhile, here's a super poster to be going on with...

    IMDb    Website    Wikipedia   

Movie Poster clichés

Flavorwire.com, one of the more interesting sites reporting on modern culture, has an excellent article analyzing movie poster clichés. The one below is titled:

 

How do you properly express your tough-love relationship?  By standing back to back!

 

Nice to see the 1949 B&W Spencer Tracy-Kathrine Hepburn feature, Adam's Rib, get a run amongst that selection.

The flavorwire site features fifteen collections, each illustrating another example of an over-used movie poster idea. My favourite is #2: "There is only one color of dress for romantic comedies."

Take a look for yourself:

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