In the world of movie poster collecting, title trumps everything. A mediocre half-sheet for Casablanca or a lobby card for The Wizard of Oz will sell for thousands whereas an exquisite piece of graphic design for an obscure Czech drama can be picked up for peanuts. For good reason of course: people want movie posters to remind them of the movies they love. But I am always endlessly impressed by the bottomless well of superb design and illustration that is out there for films that have been all but forgotten. As a random example, this week the French poster dealer Dominique Besson released 171 posters for auction on eBay, and, though many of them are for well-known films I was struck by the fact that many of the most eye-catching designs were for quite obscure French films from the 40s and 50s. And all can be picked up for a song.
- 8/31/2014
- 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
On May 24th, New York’s Film Forum will continue their ongoing resuscitation of the French Old Wave with a revival of a 1956 film that has been all but forgotten outside France: a film whose French title translates as The Crossing of Paris, which was originally released in the Us as Four Bags Full, but which is being re-released now with its more alliterative and far more charming UK subtitle A Pig Across Paris.
Set during the Occupation, this black-sausage comedy may not be quite as cute and animal-friendly as Clément Hurel’s brilliant poster suggests. A hilarious, nail-biting companion of sorts to Wages of Fear, which had been released three years earlier, A Pig Across Paris follows two men (Jean Gabin and comic star Bourvil) who must transport not nitroglycerine across South American mountains, but four black-market suitcases of pork across nighttime Paris, under the nose of the Nazis.
Set during the Occupation, this black-sausage comedy may not be quite as cute and animal-friendly as Clément Hurel’s brilliant poster suggests. A hilarious, nail-biting companion of sorts to Wages of Fear, which had been released three years earlier, A Pig Across Paris follows two men (Jean Gabin and comic star Bourvil) who must transport not nitroglycerine across South American mountains, but four black-market suitcases of pork across nighttime Paris, under the nose of the Nazis.
- 5/11/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
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