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These eyecatching pictogram film posters by Viktor Hertz continue the trend for minimalist posters inspired by popular movies. You can see more at Hertzen’s photostream on Flickr. And why not follow him on Twitter while you’re at it. Thanks to Catherine Grant of Film Studies for Free for the heads-up on this.
Don’t ask why I decided to compile a gallery and slideshow of advertisements gathered from early issues of the horror magazine Fangoria. I don’t have a good answer. Rummaging through back issues looking for articles about prosthetics, special effects make-up and puppetry, I became a little distracted by the advertisements for video-cassettes (look how expensive it was, in the 1980s, to buy your own VHS tapes!), masks, books, t-shirts and gloopy, gory make-up effects. Ostensibly a journal celebrating the inventive evisceration of the human body, Fangoria actually comes across as a cheery community centre for enthusiasts of rubbery prosthetics and homemade horrors. You’ll find some familiar monsters in this gallery, and some lovely offers to help you simulate demonic possession, or a bit of limb-lopping, gut chewing dismemberment in the comfort of your own home. Avoid if more than a little squeamish. Otherwise, enjoy a bit of 80s nostalgia. Some of these offers may no longer be available, though. Sorry.
I’m enjoying turning up gems like this from old movie magazines, so I hope you won’t mind me posting a few more. It’s often the advertising features in periodicals like Photoplay and Picturegoer that catch my eye, revealing as they do a tight circuit linking fans, stars and media together in a circular exchange of glamour, aspiration and cash. These mags are just packed with beauty products to help fans make themselves over like the silver-screen sylphs that set such an impossible, ethereal standard. But there were also occasional bones thrown to the crowd in the form of competitions to appear in an actual movie. This one, from a 1925 issue of Photoplay, promises a role in Polly of the Ballet, appearing alongside Greta Nissen, taking direction from Cecil B. DeMille. As far as I can tell, this film never got made, so I wonder what happened to the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation‘s guarantee. Any information would be gratefully received.
Following on from last week’s Picture(s) of the Week, here’s the second half of the 1960s French film posters gallery.
Following on from last week’s Godard gallery, here are some French movie posters that begin in the New Wave and take you through to the end of the decade. It’s a big gallery, so hopefully you’ll find something in there that catches your eye, but I’ll post it in two halves, the second one coming up next week…
From A Bout de Souffle (his debut feature) to Week End (the self-styled “end of cinema”), here’s a not-complete-but-still-pretty-good collection of posters from Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary run of movies in the 1960s.
Film posters are promises. If a poster is one of your first points of contact with a film, it has to give a flavour of what to expect when you pay your admission fee. If that’s the case, then here’s a collection of Bollywood horror movie posters that promise you a jolt of lurid colour and an unusual number of deformed, looming faces.
I keep coming across excellent fan-made (help me out in the search for a better term for it than that!) posters, and this week I direct your attention towards Brandon Schaefer’s collection of images, which you can find at his website or on his Flickr pages. Some great, unusual choices, but also some original takes on well-known favourites like Ghostbusters and Tron.
Twitter has its uses. This week, thanks to Lucy Fife Donaldson, I was directed to Jamie Bolton’s minimalist film posters. (Incidentally, you can follow me here if you’d like regular updates on stuff.) Prompted by this, I sought out other attempts to reduce film posters to their component parts, and found this gallery at Hexagonall, where you can find many more. Perhaps you need to know the films a bit to get the significance of those basic shapes, but they’re all well known movies (a lot of these unofficial poster exercises seem to be covering very similar bases).
[See more of my galleries here.]
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