It’s a been a while since I did my last post on the The Not-Quite-Lost Art of Film posters, so I thought I was due for another one. Here are five more iconic film posters that are both fine works of art and that perfectly encapsulate the essence of the movie.
Blue Velvet
When Blue Velvet came out in 1986, it hit me with the force of a nuclear blast. If Carl Jung and Salvador Dali had decided to co-direct a sadomasochistic love story that was also a murder mystery, this might be the result. In fact, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is a dreamlike masterpiece whose central tragedy—the doomed love affair between an older, sexually abused woman and an innocent young man who is just discovering the darker aspects of his own sexuality—is perfectly evoked by the poster.
Wings of Desire
I actually own this baby. Springing directly from the imagination of German directory Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire is one of the best movies ever made. Yes, it’s about angels, but not like the ones from the Sistine Madonna painting by da Vinci. These angels are black-clad, Euro-mod wraiths who drift along the streets of Berlin invisible to everyone except children and madmen. They observe human beings of all kinds—usually in moments of day-to-day crisis—and although they want to help, they are unable to physically intervene. Instead, they transmit that most elusive of emotions—hope—just by virtue of their proximity. The story focuses on one particularly lonely angel, Damiel (shown in the poster atop the Berlin Victory Column). Damiel spends much of his infinite time watching a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), for whom his all-too-human yearning leads to a fantastic choice.
Jaws
This poster stands atop many lists, and so it should. It is quite possibly the most effective poster ever made, tapping directly into our primal fear of whatever might be lurking in the water beneath us. Fear, of course, is the theme of the film—all three main characters (Scheider, Dreyfus, Shaw) must face their fear of death as personified by the villainous shark. And the fact that none of these characters is shown on the poster matters not a bit. Rather, as a work of art, the poster is almost perfectly designed. The shark, with its black, impossibly huge maw, is just the right distance from the unsuspecting girl swimming on the surface. I don’t think even Hieronymus Bosch ever created a better evocation of pure, irrational, hellish evil.
Amadeus
What a brilliant poster this is! Milos Forman’s Amadeus has a plot that resembles one of Mozart’s great operas, only with a brutal psychological realism that reminds me of Stanley Kubrick at his best. So why not make the poster look like an advertisement for an opera–in fact, like poster for Mozart’s Requiem, the creation of which is the narrative hinge of the film. I love how Vienna is shown spread out in the foreground like a dark labyrinth. It seems to reflect the madness of Salieri (who is, of course, the true main character of the film) as he reaches out toward us, beckoning us in.
Goodfellas
If you ask someone to name the prototypical mafia movie, he will probably name The Godfather. But for my money, Goodfellas is an even better film. If Cezanne could make us see the sublime beauty in ordinary farmers and tradesmen, then Martin Scorsese is equally deft at sweeping us into the thrilling pleasures of petty mobsters. The poster puts these three guys front-and-center. In their black, old-world style suits, they seem to emerge from the black background like demons. Their particular hell—literally an underworld—is shown beneath, naturally. It is the mean streets of New York City, where a man lies dead. Who killed him? It doesn’t matter. All we know is that everything in this world is dangerous, seductive, and dark.
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