Above: 1963 German re-release poster by Heinz Edelmann for Kind Hearts and Coronets.If you are near Berlin during the next four months there is a movie poster exhibition that you must not miss. It opens today at the Kulturforum and it is called Grosses Kino: Filmplakate aller Zeiten, which translates as The Big Screen: Film Posters of All Time.Grosses Kino has been curated by Dr. Christina Thomson and Christina Dembny of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (the Art Library at the Berlin State Museum) in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival and the Deutsche Kinemathek. The Kunstbibliothek has an extraordinary collection of over 5,000 film posters, 300 of which—dating from 1905 to 2023—have been selected for the exhibition. Earlier this year I was asked to be one of 26 “film industry experts” from the fields of acting, directing, cinema management, film studies, art, and graphic design selected to choose one...
- 11/8/2023
- MUBI
Despite the pandemic disruption of the film industry around the world, which impacted everything in film from production to simple moviegoing, the vibrancy of cinema culture throughout the year has felt as strong as ever, and fiercely resilient. In our small but passionate way we also have made a show of force. In 2021 alone, Notebook has published over 400 articles. Here are some highlights from the year—and we encourage you to use the "Explore" menu or dive into our archives to find even more excellent work published this year.ARTICLESTikTok meets silent cinema in Caroline Golum's witty essay. Cinematic technology used not for social celebrity but rather for criminal forensics was the focus of an article by Emerson Goo.The French New Wave's Luc Moullet, a guiding light for Notebook, was the subject of two pieces, one about the extraordinary TV show How to with John Wilson, the other...
- 12/31/2021
- MUBI
Above: 1981 French grande for Stalker. Art by Bougrine.It’s been six months since I last did one of these round-ups of the most popular posters featured on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram (previously Tumblr).With some 3,349 likes to date, this rare French poster for Tarkovsky’s Stalker, posted just last month, outstripped the pack and is in fact the second most “liked” poster I’ve ever posted, just a couple of hundred likes shy of Andrew Bannister’s UK poster for Parasite which I posted over a Pandemic ago. With art signed by one “Bougrine” the poster is currently offered for sale at Posteritati. Though the style and signature don’t quite look right, there was a Vladimir Bougrine (1938-2001) who was a prominent Soviet dissident painter who ended up in Paris in 1977 where, according to Wikipedia, “the French Ministry of Culture introduced him to...a community of writers,...
- 9/2/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: George Segal and Elliot Gould in California Split (1974). Actor George Segal, a "defining face of 1970s Hollywood" known for his roles in films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Robert Altman's California Split, has died. The 2021 Jury and Special Award winners of the 28th SXSW Film Festival have been announced, with winners including Megan Park's The Fallout and Jeremy Workman's Lily Topples the World. Recommended VIEWINGFor the series A One-Woman Confessional: Eight Films by Cecilia Mangini, Another Gaze's streaming project Another Screen has also made available a video of Mangini and Agnès Varda's first meeting in 2011. Metrograph's official trailer for Claire Denis' L'Intrus, her 2004 adaptation of an essay by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The film will be available at the cimema's virtual theatre from March 26 to April 8. A fan-made...
- 3/28/2021
- MUBI
Above: 1962 poster for The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer.The extraordinary German graphic designer Hans Hillmann (1925–2014) should need no introduction to readers of this column: I’ve written about him on a number of occasions and anyone who loves movie poster design should know his name. For a long time, however, it has been hard to find a lot of his work online, certainly not all in one place. For a while I had entertained the idea of trying to collect images of every single movie poster he ever designed and ranking them from best to least-best. But I knew that even if I could gather together his more than 160 posters that I would tie myself in knots trying to put them in any kind of order.Thankfully author and publisher Jens Müller has done half of the work for me. Müller had first met Hillmann when he curated...
- 3/19/2021
- MUBI
Léo Kouper, who passed away last week at the age of 94, was rather unusual among poster artists for having a special association with one filmmaker, his being Charlie Chaplin. From the early 1950s through the early ’70s Kouper created some of the most striking and charming Chaplin poster designs for almost all his feature films. Born in Paris on August 20, 1926, Kouper was mentored from the age of 19 by the great French poster artist Hervé Morvan (1917-1980) who was nine years his senior. Morvan did his fair share of movie posters, including a stunning double panel Grand Illusion, but is best known for his bold, colorful, child-like illustrations advertising French products like Gitanes, Perrier and Lanvin Chocolate.Kouper’s illustration work is in a similar faux naïf style to Morvan’s and its simplicity and charm no doubt appealed to Chaplin over the years. His first Chaplin poster, seen above, was...
- 2/18/2021
- MUBI
Yorgos Lanthimos's Nimic is exclusively showing on Mubi in the Luminaries series.Above: Vasilis Marmatakis’s poster for Nimic.Has there ever been a graphic designer more closely allied with a filmmaker than Vasilis Marmatakis is with Yorgos Lanthimos? Saul Bass and Otto Preminger are the team that most easily come to mind, but even then, though Preminger was a great supporter of and advocate for Bass’s work, I don’t feel that Bass’s designs quite express Preminger’s ethos in the same way that Marmatakis’s designs encapsulate the wonderful strangeness of Lanthimos’s work. Starting with Dogtooth in 2009, Marmatakis has created the windows to his friend’s worlds with a series of iconic posters that are among the very best of the past 20 years.Above: Vasilis Marmatakis’s posters for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films (clockwise from top left) Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), Alps (2011), The Favourite (2018) and...
- 11/28/2020
- 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
In the past four months or so since I last did this, the following on my @movieposterofthday (leave off the last e for elegance) Instagram has more than tripled, which makes this best-of round-up more competitive. Sadly, as is often the case, a lot of my posts were occasioned by the passing of an actor or director, or, in the case of the most popular poster yet, by a composer. The lovely two-color American half sheet for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was posted in honor of Michel Legrand, who passed away in January at 86 just the day after Serbian director Dušan Makavejev, who was also 86 and whose ribald German poster for Sweet Movie also made the top 20. Other passings recognized were Stanley Donen (with a Japanese Funny Face), Nicolas Roeg (a Us Performance), and Bruno Ganz (a French Wings of Desire). It’s impossible to tell if people are liking...
- 3/22/2019
- MUBI
Above: Tony Stella’s illustration for an alternative poster for Suspiria for Alphaville.One of my favorite working movie poster illustrators is the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Tony Stella, a true connoisseur of cinema as well as a prodigious and prolific artist. I profiled Tony in this column a few years ago. Tony recently joined forces with the designer known as Midnight Marauder to start the boutique movie poster design agency Alphaville, and since I recently asked Mm for his ten favorite movie posters it was only fair that I ask Tony too, a task he took up with alacrity.So, without further ado, here are Tony Stella’s ten favorite movie posters of all-time, in ascending order, with his own comments. His choices take us on a tour through some of the best movie poster illustration of the past 50 years.10. Get Carter (1971)“The number ten spot was a toss-up between...
- 11/9/2018
- MUBI
Above: Us 40" x 60" poster.Currently playing on Mubi in the United States as part of a mini Ealing Comedies series, Kind Hearts and Coronets is often considered Ealing Studios’ greatest achievement (it ranked at number six in the British Film Institute’s 1999 poll of the Best British Films of All Time). It was released in 1949 within the same two months as two other Ealing classics: Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore. All three were nominated for the 1949 British Academy Award for Best British Film, though all three lost out to The Third Man.A dark yet breezy satire of class and mores in Edwardian Britain, in which a dispossessed aristocrat plans to wipe out the line of succession to the dukedom he believes is his, one upper class twit at a time, Kind Hearts is most notable for Alec Guinness’s bravura turn as nine different characters. From the original posters for the film,...
- 7/13/2018
- MUBI
Above: a 1959 West German poster for Rashomon (1950) by Hans Hillmann and a 1960 Polish poster for Drunken Angel (1948) by Wladyslaw Janiszewski.If you are lucky enough to be in Tokyo this summer you have a treat in store at the newly renamed National Film Archive of Japan (formerly the National Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art). Kurosawa Travels around the World: The Masterworks in Posters from the Collection of Toshifumi Makita is an exhibition of 84 posters from 30 different countries for 25 different films and is a glorious testament to the global appeal of the films of Akira Kurosawa. As the exhibition foreward says, “Kurosawa often said that ‘film is a kind of international plaza,’ where people from every country—beyond Europe and North America—can come together. We hope you enjoy these dynamic and audacious interpretations of his films by designers and painters from each country focusing on the...
- 6/29/2018
- MUBI
Above: French poster for Ossessione (1943). Artist: Boris Grinsson.To commemorate the complete retrospective of the films of Luchino Visconti starting today at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, I decided to choose my favorite poster for each film in Visconti’s titanic body of work (including the three portmanteau films to which he contributed episodes). For many of his films the range of posters are an embarrassment of riches ranging from tempestuous Italian romanticism and beautifully executed French realism to stark German stylization and wry Polish surrealism. Although I think that Italian romanticism certainly suits Visconti best of all in terms of really representing his work—Averardo Ciriello’s stirring portrait of storm-lashed fishermen for La terra trema being a case in point—it is the more gnomic Polish films that I seem to have gravitated to most. There are eight Polish posters here and what is remarkable is...
- 6/8/2018
- MUBI
Above: 1960 Us first release one sheet for A Lesson in Love (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1954).Starting on February 7, The Best Show in Town may well be Film Forum’s Centennial Retrospective of the gargantuan six-decade oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman. 47 films over five weeks, 40 of them brand new digital restorations. Usually in these circumstances I gather as many posters as I can find from a filmmaker's career, but collecting posters for all of Bergman’s work would be a monumental task. And so I’ve decided to cut to the chase and select my ten favorite posters for his films.Most American posters for Bergman’s films—especially those from the 60s and 70s—are unusually wordy and quote-heavy, relying on critical acclaim to sell the latest product from the master. But, as much a visual stylist as a cerebral provocateur, Bergman has inspired many poster artists to great heights over the years.
- 2/2/2018
- MUBI
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