Movie Poster Decollage

A decollage is the opposite of a collage. Instead of adding bits and pieces of images onto another image as artists do in a collage, in a decollage, the artist cuts, rips, tears and removes bits and pieces of an image (preferably handbills pasted atop other handbills pasted on even more handbills on a wall) to expose other images and textures that lay beneath it, creating accidental and unexpected juxtapositions, connections and compositions. Some call it action painting without the painting. Wikipedia entry here. The most renown decollagist was Italian Mimmo Rotella, who died earlier this year. Here's an excellent gallery of movie poster decollage, most of the posters of a late '50s and '60s vintage.

French Mag Covers

A very grand collection of French film periodical covers. There's quite a bit of them here. Go here to an index and links to their galleries. Genre fans will like the Midi-Minuit Fantastique gallery (of course, you know that Midi-Minuit Fantastique was the first serious magazine devoted to fantastic cinema, right?). Euro-trash devotees can get their rocks off at the Sex Star System ("Le Magazine du Cinema Erotique") gallery. Bookmark it now! Found through Agence Eureka via Flickhead.
Speaking of French periodicals, I've just found that the grandaddy of French movie magazines, Cahiers du Cinema has been translating some of its online articles into English (as well as Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and, soon, Arabic). Great for non-Francophones, especially for those of us whose high school French is as weak as American tea.

In My Arms

It's such a common image and cliche in movie poster art, particularly in those older posters that pushed a pulpier brand of cinema, that it has become practically invisible (or, more properly,unnoticiable, at least to my dim eye). But not just in the movie posters, but in the films themselves; also, comics and pulp magazines. What horror film before 1960 didn't have its monster carry, in outstretched arms, a screaming or unconscious ingenue? It's so common, it's laughable. The image also carries a certain erotic frisson, of course: the bare outstretched leg, the arched back, the jutting bosom, the exposed throat. And from there it turns into fetish; and what is fetishism but a peculiar kind of obsessiveness. And the true obsessive always builds a webpage about his or her obsession (in this day and age). And here we have In My Arms, which catalogues every sort of image of a woman carried by either man, monster or beast. Enjoy, if you want.

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Poster of the Week!--A surreal and oddly erotic advertisement for the 1933 color horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum. It wasn't the first full length color horror feature. That honor goes to Doctor X, a kissing cousin of sorts to Wax Museum, which had the same director (journeyman and Spielberg fave Michael Curtiz) and the same stars (classic heavy Lionel Atwill and beautiful and plucky Fay Wray). The copy on the poster resembles surrealist verse badly translated: "Images of wax that throbbed with human passion! / Almost Woman! / What do they lack?"
You may find screen grabs of this early example of Technicolor (2-color version) from a DVD review of Warner's House of Wax and Mystery of the Wax Museum on Horror Talk, at an extensive collection of stills and screengrabs from the Fay Wray site (complete with images from Doctor X and Wray's other WB horror film that she again co-starred with Lionel Atwll, the monochromatic The Vampire Bat, and at a blog concentrating on pre-code Hollywood films, Trouble in Paradise (nice!). If you're in the mood for reading and not looking at pictures, you can read the script for Wax Museum here.
It goes without saying: click on the image on the left for a much larger version. 474 K

The Heart Of The World

How could I have gone through the last six years without seeing Guy Maddin's utterly brilliant short film The Heart of the World? Perhaps it was from a less than memorable viewing of Maddin's first feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital about 10 years ago. While I enjoyed and appreciated the archaic film technique and gauzy images, ghostly in the way it conjured a seemingly ancient and almost forgotten style, technology and sensibility, the movie's meandering narrative and fuzzy logic left little for me to hold onto. In other words, I was bored. Maybe I wasn't yet ripe enough to fully dig Guy's maddeningly romantic parody of early sound cinema or his creaky and cranky comedy. Maybe it's not that the films we watched weren't very good, but that we weren't quite good enough when we watched them. In any case, I hadn't watched another Maddin film until earlier today, when I saw The Heart of the World.

Well, I wasn't bored with this one. It's a frenetic six minute montage upon montage of images, ideas, symbols and tropes; a multi-layered mixture of history, theory and an allegorical fiction about a young "State Scientist", Anna, who, while warning the world of an eminent calamity (and ignored), is torn by the love of two brothers. She is tempted and seduced by the filty lucre of a wealthy industrialist (who is fat, smokes big cigars, wears a stylish 1920 pince-nez and carries bags of money stamped with dollar signs like Scrooge McDuck). Just as Anna marries and succumbs to the industrialist, the eminent calamity of which she spoke occurs: the heart of the world fails; the earth has a heart attack (a close up of a bladderlike heart pumping crazily). Buildings fall; nations fall. Now Anna regains her conscience, strangles the industrialist (framed in Murnau style shadow-silhouette) and falls through a chute to the center of the world where she repairs the heart by the creation of KINO (cinema, film, motion pictures, movies) and the flickering image of a shimmering Anna are projected majestically on flags and dancing bodies. Indeed, here cinema saves the world.

Built as a parody/tribute to early Soviet propaganda films (particularly Aelita and Man with a Movie Camera, billed as a tribute to the Toronto Film Festival, by way of a celebration of "kino", it's much more than this, although I would be at a loss to attempt to explain it. It's movies like The Heart of the World that allow me to fall in hopeless love with the artform once again, the combination of visual poetry, rythmn and a density of ideas. The only analogue I could find to The Heart of the World as a film is David Lynch's Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, the very short and cery remarkable film he made with a restored Lumiere movie camera in 1997 (see stills and download a small quicktime file here).

While foraging through Russian Live Journal sites (and finding some very cool things!), I found one such site which had links (and not one but two) to a 45MB avi file of The Heart of the World (and if you don't read Russian, like me, the links are here and here (and none of them the dread rapidshare). So, do yourself a favor and watch it. If you want to read about the movie, here's Jonathan Rosenbaum's take, Gerald Peary's take, and an interesting review of the film's typography. If something aural is what you're looking for, here's a CBC interview with Guy Maddin concerning The Heart of the World.

Ernesto Garcia Cabral

I completely missed it, but the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog had a fantastic collection of Mexican Epoca de Oro lobby cards, all of them illustrated by the fantastic Ernesto Garcia Cabral. Not only does archive director Stephen Worth share some extraordinary images, he also shares a hot eBay tip: "An archive of movie memorabilia in Mexico recently culled duplicates from their collection, releasing tens of thousands of pieces onto the market- both Mexican titles and American ones- musicals, horror movies, adventure films, film noir and westerns by the hundreds. These lobby cards have found their way onto eBay, but since few people are aware of Cabral and even fewer recognize the Spanish titles for these films, these amazing treasures are selling for a song." Nice guy that he is, he also provides a link to the seller of these cards. Let me tell you, these things are cheap, cheap, cheap!

You can find more of Cabral's work at these galleries of vintage Mexican movie posters and political cartooning and cover art for the newsweekly magazine Jueves. And, yes, everything is for sale.

Kurosawa and Mifune

For many years, Toshiro Mifune was, to many Western filmgoers, THE Japanese movie star. In the years shortly after the end of World War II, Kurosawa's films starring Mifune brought attention and glory to the Japanese movie industry (self-imposed, if truth be told), a national cinema that was isolated from Western eyes until after the war, and now, the history of which, from examples of high art, to direct to video exploitation, seems every bit as crucial to the story of World Cinema as the histories ofGermany, Italy, France, or even Hollywood. In the hyper-hip milieu of current critical and pop cine-darlings like Miike, Suzuki and "Beat" Takeshi (and I love all three), we tend to forget the impact and importance of Kurosawa and Mifune's work in opening the door, so to speak.

Here's a good Mifune appreciation site, complete with images from his films, movie reviews, and a nice collection of Kurosawa film poster cards. Here's the BFI's Kurosawa page, along with some appreciations from Bright Lights and Senses of Cinema.

Hitchcock Syllabus

Browsing through online syllabi can be fun; also interesting as they can give you a snapshot of what college students are learning. And some class webpages are just downright interesting, like this site/syllabus for Dr. Glen Johnson's Hitchcock class at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Tons of cool and enlightening stuff here, especially an extensive gallery of framegrabs from Hitchcock's films, including the criss-cross sequence from Strangers on a Trains, Hitchcock's mothers, and how Hitchcock characters throw a punch (usually straight at the camera). Sounds like an interesting class.

MONSTERVILLE

Very nice Flickr set of monster movie ephemera, including this photo of a 1932 newspaper ad for Frankenstein glued to the back of an advertising sign (check out the hand drawn likeness of the monster, already an iconic presence less than a year after the film's release). The same Flickr member (Neato Coolville) also has an excellent set of movie theater ephemera, including this 1933 ticket advertising the next week's attraction, King Kong!

Poster of the Week - 2001: A Space Odyssey

Poster of the Week!--An interesting Polish poster advertising Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've loved this movie for more than 30 years, for different reasons at different points of my life. When I first viewed it from the backseat of a station wagon at a South Texas drive-in theater sometime in the very early 70s, I was struck by the pure spectacle and awesome wonder of the film. I had been awed by movies before in my short movie-watching history, but nothing like 2001. For better or worse, it planted a seed. Fast-forward a bit to the teens and twenties, I discovered that there was more to 2001 than spectacle or fantastic special effects. I discovered that it was ...profound. Monkish, dark, shaggy Kubrick became a prophet. I would pontificate to anyone who would listen about 2001's utter genius and the clean grandeur of its presentation. A couple of pet theories uttered over beer and cigarettes: 2001 is an epic poem to science; it's a religious film for the non-religious, spirituality for atheists. Or something like that.

Fast forward to the thirties and beyond the infinite. In recent re-viewings (once a year, pretty much), instead of pondering the big ideas, piecing the puzzle, I've gone back to enjoying the spectacle just for spectacle's sake or just enjoying the a newfound texture to the visuals. This could be because of two factors: the somewhat recently struck 70mm prints which I've seen projected at least three times in a vintage movie palace; also, ownership of the restored remastered DVD. One way, the movie becomes monstrously huge, grandly universal, telescopic even, as it attempts to bring the whole universe to our big wide window. And then there's the microscopic aspect of the DVD experience, where the viewer can freeze any frame, rewind, fast forward, play in slow motion, zoom into detail. After years of watching SLP pan & scan dupes, these new opportunities to watch and understand 2001 were revelations. Or at least a charge for re-evaluation.

So, is the movie, as they say, profound? Sure. But it's also fun to play in slow motion and capture the perfect freeze frame of Kubrick's reflection (Kubrick was shooting with a hand-held camera) on Heywood Floyd's helmet visor as he's coming down the ramp to view the TMA. It only happens for a split second. Or you might dig on the kitschiness of Space Station V, the impossibly white floors and walls and clashing red Djinn chairs, the HoJo's, the missing cashmere sweater, the Bell Picturephone. Or chuckle at Dr. Floyd's Hugh Beaumont-Fred McMurray goofy sitcom dad routine, especially when he talks about loyalty oaths (with a gladhanded chuckle: "Well, Bill, heh heh heh..."). Or realize that the only "art" created within the narrative space of the movie are Bowman's bloodless drawings of the hibernacla, which HAL kindly appreciates. In fact, HAL appears to be the only being to truly appreciate art. No one reads a book or listens to music. There's a film playing on the spaceliner and Floyd, the dunderhead, is asleep.

Of course, the irony is that many people fell asleep during 2001. But those who didn't fall asleep all started websites. Some of them even started sites about their favorite movie. And for some of them, 2001 is their favorite movie.

You can start with 2001: A Space Odyssey-Internet Resource Archive, a site that's been around since November 1994.... or with The Underview, a 2001 site that's only been with us since March 1996.

And there's a Kubrick fan site with some cool stuff not found elsewhere: scenes from Mad Magazine's 2001 satire (the line about fresh meat from the freezers is wickedly funny) and stills from cut scenes....

And speaking of cut scenes, outtakes and trims, here's an extensive article on what was trimmed and what wasn't, explicating the differences between the premiere version screened on April 2 and what screened after the furious re-edit and 19 minutes were trimmed in a three day marathon that started on April 5. Count me among those who would gladly donate a gonad to see this original cut...

Then there's The Kubrick Site, which, as the site says, is a "non-profit resource archive for documentary materials regarding, in whole or in part, the work of the late American film director and producer Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)". Lots of good things here. One of my favorite pieces about the film is em>2001: Random Insights, by Barry Krusch.... for those a bit more mechanical, here's a rundown of all the space hardware seen in the movie... and also some 3D modeling images.... and if you like modeling, you may like theLego rendition.

Some recollections of their first time.... also the grandmaster chess game Kubrick used for the game between Poole and HAL. So, was HAL truly insane?

If you're looking for intelligent Kubrick talk, there's no better place than the alt.movies.kubrick usenet group. Some interesting threads I've found: a comparison between 2001 and Un Chien Andalou; the incestuous relationship between 2001 and Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Thunderbirds TV program; and the fans' reaction to a Leslie Nielsen parody of 2001....

There was also a play based on 2001 produced in Lansing, Michigan. Here's a newspaper article on the play. Here's the production company's page, complete with pictures and posters.

And there's more. Here's a documentary (in three parts) on Kubrick. I've also put together a Flickr 2001 set for your viewing pleasure.

And, yes, click on the image on the upper left for a larger version. 113 K