Robert Altman's Images (1972) is showing on MUBI starting November 15, 2020 in the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, and Canada.
Robert Altman’s dizzying psychological horror film Images (1972) is one of those slippery films that has inspired a wide variety of poster art ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. I only recently came upon the stunning British double crown poster above, thanks to New York poster house Posteritati (more on that in a minute), but I’d long been aware of a number of very different pieces for the film.
Seemingly tossed off in between Altman’s two indisputable masterpieces McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Long Goodbye (1973), Images is unusual in the Altman canon for being a horror film of sorts (though it has been said to form a loose trilogy of female psychosis with That Cold Day in the Park [1969] and Three Women [1977]), and also for its non-American setting (it was filmed in Ireland). Gorgeously shot in Cinemascope by the peerless Vilmos Zsigmond, hauntingly scored with Japanese instrumentation by John Williams and Stomu Yamashta, and anchored by Susannah York’s riveting (and Cannes-winning) performance as a children’s book author battling hallucinations of present and former lovers, Images is a dazzling work of art. Though I’ve never seen it verified, I’d like to believe that Krzysztof Kieślowski was a big fan of this film because elements of it remind me of both The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colors: Blue.
The American poster (artist unknown) uses a number of prominent elements from the film: an antique camera, a kitchen knife and, pictured in the lens, duel Susannah Yorks, echoing one of the best and most disorienting scenes early on in the film.
While the American poster is striking (and I love the title treatment though it’s a little buried amid all that other text) it doesn’t scream horror. The British poster on the other hand is full on Grand Guignol. What I didn’t know, until Posteritati pointed it out last month, is that it is based on a once famous 1892 drawing by C. Allan Gilbert (1873–1929) titled All is Vanity. The drawing is a visual pun in which a Victorian lady sitting in front of a large round mirror at her dressing table (aka vanity) is transformed with a squint into a floating skull, with her head and its reflection as the eye sockets and the bottles on the table as the teeth.
The title treatment on the British poster is much more straight-forward than the American one: all elegant, bold Helvetica. The same type is used on the monochrome British quad (there is a color version too) which places a posterized Susannah York on an indefinable background which may be waves or Irish mist.
Similar elements were used for the Australian poster (which has a pleasing layout but is completely lacking any of Images’ atmosphere) and again for the Yugoslavian poster (the title of which translates as Apparitions.)
The beautiful Italian 2-fogli poster by Ferrari takes the film into giallo territory...
But what, pray tell, is this? As far as I can remember, the image in the giant 4-fogli Italian poster (tagline: “a hundred minutes of fear”), also painted by Ferrari, has absolutely nothing to do with Altman’s film, apart from the knives.
The Cuban poster by the great Antonio Fernandez Reboiro is a lovely design but again doesn’t really capture much about the film, except perhaps its autumnal rural setting.
When the film played at the New York Film Festival in October 1972 it was panned in The New York Times by Howard Thompson who called it a “clanging, pretentious, tricked-up exercise...almost a model of how not to dramatize the plight of a schizoid” (sic). But by the time it opened theatrically on December 17 it had racked up a number of raves from other publications, as the opening day half-page ad in the New York Times ad attested.
The reviews on the whole were mixed (Pauline Kael, who had been a major champion of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, didn’t like it). Images opened on only one screen in New York, the same week as Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Billy Wilder’s Avanti!, Claude Sautet’s Cesar and Rosalie, Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson, Jacques Tati’s Trafic and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. The big juggernaut of the season, however, was The Poseidon Adventure which had been released just the week before. Poseidon was also scored by John Williams and he was Oscar-nominated for both films (it was Images’ only nomination) though he lost out in both cases to Charlie Chaplin’s 20-year-old score for the belatedly-released Limelight.
Images played exclusively at the Columbia I on 2nd Avenue for two months and then, on February 16, 1973, opened wide with a new and very different campaign.
The new campaign may have been a bit of a Hail Mary pass because by the following weekend the film’s release seems to have been reduced to a single engagement once again, this time at the Cinema Village. And by the following weekend it was off-screen altogether, replaced at Cinema Village by Lady Sings the Blues.
Images did not last long in theaters in the UK either and Altman later complained that the producers, the Hemdale Company, had not supported the film. By the time I was getting deep into Altman in the ’90s, Images was almost impossible to see. Judging by the splendid VHS cover below (artist unknown) it seems to have come out somewhere on home video in the 1980s, no doubt mutilated by panning and scanning, but it wasn’t released on DVD until 2003.
In 2018 Images got the home video release it deserved, on a deluxe UK Blu-ray from Arrow Films. The cover design, which restores the original swooping US title treatment, is by Luke Insect and Kenn Goddall under the collaborative name of The Twins of Evil.
I’d like to dedicate this piece to my good friend Bill Gosden (1953–2020) who ran the New Zealand International Film Festival for nearly 40 years and who lost his battle with cancer just last week. Bill had impeccable taste in movies (as his 2012 all-time top ten for Sight & Sound can attest) and he was a lifelong Altman fan.