Confessions of a Movie Poster Addict
The people, places, and artistic movements that fuel an obsession
By Steve Dollar
What strange tributaries feed the river of an obsession?
It’s a mystery, really, why I had to have so many movie posters. Although my stash is paltry compared to some movie buffs I know, and probably laughable to the poster hounds featured in 24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters (currently streaming exclusively on Tribeca Shortlist), I still have more posters than the wall space to accommodate them.
Let’s chalk it up to a professional side effect.
I’ve worked as a film critic off and on for most of my writing career, and always got a twinge of excitement from glimpsing the extravagant array of posters plastering the lobby and press office walls at various film festivals — from Montreal to Sundance to Sitges. Much as the new documentary zeroes in on a particular epicenter of poster-obsessive activity, though, I’d have to pinpoint my personal poster renaissance to the same place: Austin, Texas.
At South by Southwest in 2011, amid the micro-budget film boom, I was sucked in by the ad-hoc gallery in the Austin Convention Center, showing off the best-designed posters from the film fest’s selections. The exhibit had company in Flatstock, the roving market for gig-poster designers that’s also part of SXSW and Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival, which has inspired a few purchases as well (although lining up a snazzy design with a band you also love enough to have in daily eyesight can be a challenge).
That spring, inside the Highball Lounge, indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg handed me what is, still, my favorite movie poster, for his fractured, not-really-a-werewolf-movie Silver Bullets. It’s by a Chicago-based French artist Yann Legendre, and it summons the subconscious punch of the Polish poster-art tradition, with all its vivid, Jungian intensity. The design is so perfectly simple, too: a thick, stylized outline of a nude woman whose face is enveloped in a wolf’s head. It references a scene from the movie, but exudes a psychosexual vibe that can stand on its own. And there’s a nice personal connection, as well.
Of course, Austin also is home to Mondo, which got me further hooked on a couple of trips to Fantastic Fest. I’ve got a real thing for Jay Shaw, the most Polish-inspired of the Mondo artists. His series of 17 posters celebrating the grindhouse glories of cult cinema distributor Blue Underground is by turns terrifying, brutal, ingeniously witty and sexy as hell. One Shaw posyer that I really love is for Cold in July, the pulpy Texas thriller directed by Jim Mickle (Stake Land, We Are What We Are), a talented New York genre filmmaker who I first met years ago. Again, it’s a very simple design: a bullet creasing the scalps of three silhouetted heads under a single cowboy hat (representing actors Sam Shepard, Michael C. Hall and Don Johnson). The colors are black, a kind of melon yellow and three shades of orange. The inks are so yummy, you want to spoon them into your mouth.
Some other Mondo favorites are Vania Zouravliov (The Grandmaster and 13 Assassins), Killian Eng (Jodorowsky’s Dune), Florian Bertmer (Santa Sangre, so intense it requires its own room, as the design might trigger an acid flashback) and, of course, conceptual wizard Olly Moss (An American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead). Martial arts, samurai assassins, space opera, sideshow freaks and visceral horror (and comedy) — everything a 12-year-old kid dreams about.
Although it seems like the poster game is all-Mondo all-the-time, there’s a much larger world out there, from classic Cuban poster art to the kicky one sheets of the French nouvelle vague (Anna Karina 4-EVA), to grindhouse cardboard one-sheets from the glory days of exploitation.
Although I knew him from 1970s album covers, like the one for Diamond Dogs with David Bowie as a poised carnival dog-boy, and the book Rock Dreams, Guy Peellaert was off my radar as a poster artist until my friend Olivia Mori (co-director of the documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me) connected the dots for me.
Peellaert’s poster for Wim Wenders’s The State of Things, a visual source for the Big Star doc, conveys an air of suspense in two repeated illustrations, one at dusk and the other in daylight, of a parked convertible in an empty lot. I discovered Wenders in college, where his films were among the first of those that made me crazy enough to want to write about movies for a living. And the poster’s tagline will resonate with any writer: “They didn’t want to kill him. They just wanted a story.”
In the end, I can’t escape Poland. Several trips to Krakow and Wroclaw, cities with great film festivals and well-stocked poster shops, have yielded great bounty. A fan can lose themselves for days absorbing online catalogs of work by names like Pagowski, Starowieyski, Gorka and Lenica. There is abundant scholarship on the history and legacy of classic Polish poster art, and how it reflected the so-called “Age of Anxiety,” the post-WWII era when the country was under Communist rule (a period explored by a generation of filmmakers, such as Krzysztof Kieślowski). So many screaming skulls.
Franciszek Starowieyski’s design for Wojciech Has’s adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s surreal masterpiece The Hourglass Sanitorium, ups the ante. It’s a skull fused with a giant eyeball, a big red cyclops pupil staring you down amid a garish backdrop of blue and green. A worm writhes through what should be the skull’s teeth (they look like a sewer grate), as does the headless, but full-breasted torso of a woman. Fun times!
Movie posters aren’t the only thing I’ve collected. There’s folk art, Southern documentary photography, esoteric jazz and gospel recordings, midcentury modern furniture, snazzy highball glasses and out-of-print first editions by cult authors. I dunno, the usual. But the posters tell their own story as, maybe, they also begin to tell yours. You covet them not simply because they can remind you of a favorite movie, but because they also reflect something of yourself.
Want to feed your obsession? Dive into the world of illustrated posters by streaming 24x36: A Movie About Movie Posters exclusively on Tribeca Shortlist now.
