Bob Peak – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Vintage movie posters

Hell is a City is a Hammer melodrama from 1960 directed by Val Guest, mentioned here recently for his earlier The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This one doesn’t succeed quite as well, being a misguided attempt to do a film noir in Manchester. The poster tries to disguise the mundane reality by showing a city which looks more like New York than our small northern metropolis. But it’s worth watching for the great Stanley Baker and, like A Taste of Honey and other films with Manchester settings, you can have fun spotting familiar places in the background. If it’s Brit film noir you want, there’s only one place to go: Jules Dassin’s marvellous Night and the City.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edward Judd, 1932–2009
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009

Not only Philip José Farmer but Polish poster artist Franciszek Starowieyski also died this week, something I probably wouldn’t have known had it not been for the indefatigable Jahsonic. I mentioned Starowieyski’s stunning work earlier this month since he produced the poster for Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has. There’s a further link to Bruno Schulz with another of his posters appearing very briefly at the beginning of Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay.

• Starowieyski poster galleries I | II

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Dark horses

A juxtaposition of old and new theatre posters in the New York Times caught my eye this week, part of a feature about the current Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s play. The news there, of course, has been Daniel Radcliffe’s on-stage nudity; understandable, perhaps, but celebrity trivia has overshadowed appraisal of Shaffer’s work as a piece of art.

What struck me seeing these was the two very different approaches to the same design problem. Given the subject matter, using an image of a horse is somewhat unavoidable as well as being immediately attractive since horses nearly always look good. The freight of historical and cultural association they carry is also one of the themes of the play. I really like the spare treatment of Gilbert Lesser’s 1976 poster for the National Theatre (left) and much prefer it to the new version used for the London and New York shows. The Lesser poster has the quality of a puzzle, matching the psychological piecing together of the story and Alan Strang’s accusation that Dysart the psychiatrist is always “playing games”. It also has a sinister quality lacking in the contemporary version; Shaffer’s Equus is an unforgiving god and the black eyes could refer to the blinded horses. The Photoshop horse looks altogether too mundane and is it my imagination or is the horse head misshapen slightly in order to fit the torso?

Continue reading “Dark horses”

Czech film posters

I wouldn’t be surprised if these have been linked all over but I hadn’t come across this site before, Czech posters from the Cold War period when promotional material for Hollywood films was home-produced. This makes for some surprising results as with the psychedelic confection for Dumbo shown above. Elsewhere there’s a Piranesian collage for Raiders of the Lost Ark, a peculiar mangling of Richard Amsel’s poster for Hello Dolly, something for Death in Venice which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the film, and plenty of good solid design such as this piece for Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex.

In a similar vein there’s the extensive Polish Posters site which features some really great work from artists like Franciszek Starowieyski.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters
• Czech book covers

The poster art of Richard Amsel

Hello Dolly (1969); The Sting (1973).
Murder on the Orient Express (1974); Barry Lyndon (1975).

Thanks are due for today’s post to Sebastiane who reminded me of the poster art that Richard Amsel produced through the Seventies up to the mid-Eighties. Together with Bob Peak, Amsel was a major exponent of the illustrated poster, a form that’s now completely vanished from cinema promotion in a sea of floating Photoshop heads and persistently lazy design. Amsel’s most famous piece in terms of success and visibility is probably his Raiders of the Lost Ark poster (and its variants) but I tend to prefer his work from the previous decade.

I collected film posters for a while and have one of Amsel’s Chinatown designs packed away somewhere. The Hello Dolly poster above was his first commission and must count as the first and only time a Spirograph was used (for the flowers) to create a design for a major Hollywood production. The Amsel page at American Art Archives notes that the poster for The Sting is a pastiche of the very popular (and gay) JC Leyendecker whose magazine and advertising art was contemporary with the film’s setting. This is exactly the kind of thing that can’t be done with ease today when the art is predominantly a product of digital techniques.

Amsel died in 1985, an early victim of the AIDS pandemic which possibly explains why there isn’t a site dedicated to his work as there is for Bob Peak. This page features a few examples of Amsel’s other work, however, including his instantly recognisable Divine Miss M album cover for Bette Midler. And there’s a small gallery of his posters at IMP.

Update: A retrospective article and marvellous gallery of Amsel’s work by Adam McDaniel

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters