Movie Posters of the Week: "Black Swan" and "Black Cat"

Adrian Curry

Though they’ve already been plastered all over the internet, I’d be remiss if I didn’t pay attention to the four teaser posters for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan that were released last week. I’ve still to discover who designed these (there seems to be an unreadable credit on the bottom right of all the posters) but in their elegant simplicity and graphic wit they obviously owe a lot to the fan poster phenomenon I wrote about a couple of months ago. At the same time, and not just because they go so beautifully together (just stare at them for a while), I also want to feature the gorgeous brand new poster for Kaneto Shindo’s 1968 Kuroneko, a.k.a. Black Cat, which opens at Film Forum today. The designer is Sam Smith who created the indelible Hausu poster that I featured this time last year and is also the designer of the US poster for Olivier Assayas’s Carlos. Sam lays out his process for Black Cat in a recent blog post, and I especially enjoyed seeing his hand painted lettering, which is the poster’s coup de grace.

And while we're on the subject of black swans and cats, I thought I’d throw these two in for good measure. The Edgar G. Ulmer poster especially is a knockout.

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