Film Posters
One day, after staring at the blank white walls of my room, I made it my mission to decorate. I’ve never been one to decorate my room, but I liked a lot of movies and thought a collage of the posters of my favorite movies would make a great wallpaper. Suffice to say, I never got around to fulfilling this mission, since buying movie posters is actually pretty expensive and printing them at my local Office Depot would have been a huge hassle. The point is, this experience challenge me to consider the very serious question of what place movie poster have in our culture. They have to be more than college dorm decorations.
Posters, though a bit dated in our digital age, are still a popular way for companies to market films. The posters of upcoming films are often placed inside theaters, so that passing cinema-goers can know what is on its way to theaters. A poster needs to do many things, but more than anything it must catch the attention of people walking by and create an interest. According to Berger there are specific elements needed in a film poster to create this interest. These elements are: resemblance, cause and effect, and signification. I will describe these elements using the posters of The Shape of Water (2017) as an example.
In the poster of Shape of Water (2017), the protagonist and the fish-man are embracing as they float in what seems like the deep ocean. The title is below their feet, in a gold color and 1930-esque font. Above the title are laurels from the Venice Film Festival, The Telluride Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival. Under the laurels “A Guillermo Del Toro Film” is written. Resemblance is when the “images used must resemble the essence of what is being presented,” (Kerrigan 133). It can be seen in this poster by the way it includes the laurels and the mention of it being a film by a specific director. This gives us a good idea of the quality of the film, since it was selected in many well-known festivals and that it is made by a reputable and talented director, Guillermo Del Toro.
Cause and effect can be seen in this poster, as well. Cause and effect is when a “sense of logic underlines the design (and interpretation) process and this can be played our through the narrative structures which can back up claims,” (Kerrigan 133). By having the fish-man and the protagonist embracing, we understand this film is a romance and will include narrative elements common to romances such as, girl-meets-fish-man and “will they get together?”
Finally, Signification is where “one act or images indicates another, such as smiling indicating happiness, images of Manhattan indicated a film’s location in New York and so on,” (Kerrigan 133). This can be seen in The Shape of Water’s poster by them being embracing deep in the water. This hints at the fact that water plays a very important part in the film.
Works Cited
Kerrigan, Finola. Film Marketing. 1st ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2010. Print.
