1977 poster by David Lance Goines for Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (F. W. Murnau, Germany, 1922) for the Pacific Film Archive.
I recently came across two unusual film posters up for sale at Heritage Auctions, one featuring a winged beetle for F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) and the other featuring a woman at a table with a red rose for Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Both are illustrated in what resembles the Arts and Crafts style of late nineteenth-century Britain and, while neither really capture the essence of either film (for example, the woman in the Ophüls poster looks nothing like Joan Fontaine nor does the rather austere poster reflect the florid style of that film), both are very distinctive and the Nosferatu in particular is a thing of beauty.
The two posters are the work of David Lance Goines, an artist best known for being the graphic face of the celebrated farm-to-table restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, run by chef Alice Waters, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 77.
Digging a little deeper, I discovered that between 1972 and 1983 Goines designed and printed 24 film posters for screenings at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA), at the University of California, Berkeley. The posters were commissioned by his friend Tom Luddy ,who was programming films at the PFA and who went on to co-found the Telluride Film Festival in 1974. (Luddy died in 2023, just six days before Goines). Goines wrote on his website in 1995, on the occasion of his poster celebrating the 25th anniversary of the University Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive:
My first poster for PFA was in 1972, on a handshake deal with Tom Luddy that continued through 1983. He never saw the designs until the posters were delivered. I'd tack up new ones upstairs at Chez Panisse, and at night we'd all of us sit around and drink wine and be pals. I’ve been a printer and graphic designer now for thirty years last April. Alice is looking at the restaurant's 25th anniversary next year in August. Tom's dream is alive and well after a quarter-century, and the Art Museum's roof still leaks in the rain.
Born in Grants Pass, Oregon, in 1945, Goines’s father was an engineer and his mother was an artist and calligrapher whom he often named as his biggest creative influence. He studied classics at UC Berkeley but after being expelled for his involvement in the Free Speech Movement he apprenticed at the Berkeley Free Press, which was printing flyers and posters for the radical anti-war and civil rights groups that were springing up all over the city. It was through the print shop that he met Alice Waters, who was having flyers printed for a political campaign. They became a couple and, while living together, co-wrote a cooking column for the San Francisco Express Times.
In 1970 he and Waters published a portfolio of prints titled “Thirty Recipes Suitable for Framing” for which Goines illustrated and hand-lettered Waters’s recipes. With the proceeds from the book, Goines bought the Berkeley Free Press and renamed it the Saint Hieronymus Press. When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, Goines and Waters were no longer a couple but they remained close friends and he illustrated the distinctive cookbooks, menus, and matchbooks for the restaurant for the next 50 years, and most notably made an annual poster for each anniversary.
1977 poster by Goines for Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, USA, 1948) for the Pacific Film Archive; 1980 poster by Goines for Café Chez Panisse.
His 1980 poster for Chez Panisse is a self-portrait, though in later years Goines, who cut a distinctive figure in Berkeley with his bowler hats and three-piece suits, favored a large handlebar moustache.
He made over 250 posters over the course of his life (255 to be exact, as assiduously catalogued on his website), many for Bay Area stores and organizations, or for exhibitions of his own work. His style remained very much indebted to the Arts and Crafts movement, and to the work and ideas of William Morris, though on his website he detailed a wide variety of influences for each individual poster, ranging from Albrecht Dürer to René Magritte, and from H. R. Giger to art deco cigarette lighters. His style was also quite indebted to the more sinuous and organic work of art nouveau, but it differed somewhat from the art nouveau-influenced look of the psychedelic music posters that defined San Francisco in the late 1960s. Goines pinpoints the origin of that style on his website:
The old University Art Museum, now a fire station, was the site of one of the most important graphic events of the 1960s: a show of Jugendstil posters, organized and curated by Herschel Chipp. I can't quite remember the exact date: it was in 1965 or 1966. This exhibition was seen by all of the people in San Francisco and Berkeley who were doing posters for the rock ’n’ roll events of the time, and their very next posters were all but direct imitations of those of the Jugendstil, particularly reflecting the lettering of Ferdinand Andrei (President of the Vienna Secession in 1905), and Leopold Forstner of the Wiener Werkstätte, which were letters all made to fit into a square, or some other shape, and almost illegible. As a pressman, I printed some of the San Francisco artist’s psychedelic posters, and later became a poster designer myself.
While in the same vein, Goines’s posters were less dense and more symmetrical and eschewed the swirly, cramped, nearly illegible lettering of his peers like Wes Wilson and Rick Griffin. Goines was a more traditional typographer whose 1982 book A Constructed Roman Alphabet: A Geometric Analysis of the Roman Alphabet Including the Greek Characters and the Arabic Numerals won the American Book Award for typography.
Goines’s first film poster, made in 1972, was for Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930).
1972 posters for The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany, 1930) and Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, Germany, 1938) for the Pacific Film Archive.
I don’t know whether Goines chose which films he wanted to make posters for or whether the PFA or Luddy chose them for him, but his output would suggest that his taste in movies skewed toward European and American classics of the 1920s and ’30s. Letter from an Unknown Woman feels unusually modern for Goines (though a film steeped in the romanticism of the past) and the only contemporary film I can see in his oeuvre is Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982).
1973 posters for Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles Trilogy (1931–36) for the Pacific Film Archive.
Three of my favorite film posters by Goines are his triptych for Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy. (Alice Waters named her famed restaurant after one of the trilogy’s characters, Monsieur Panisse.)
1972 posters for The General (Buster Keaton, USA, 1926) and Ruggles of Red Gap (Leo McCarey, USA, 1935) for the Pacific Film Archive.
Goines’s website includes a paragraph or two, written by the artist, about each film, some autobiographical and some quite abstract and philosophical. His poster for the horror film series Unpleasant Surprises leads to a reverie about collecting eggs as a boy growing up on a farm, while his poster for Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) inspires these thoughts:
If you’re going to steal, steal big. If you're going to lie, tell a lie so big that, often enough repeated, it will come to be the truth. Do not pilfer, or tell fibs. You'll just get caught and you’ll be sorry afterwards. About the biggest thing you can steal is a man’s life. That takes everything he has. It doesn’t leave you with much, of course, except his dead flesh. Slavery steals his life also, except that the use of his days becomes the possession, for so long as he hangs on, of another person. The fratricidal war this film celebrates was about stealing, both big and small, and changing the rules about what was stealing and what wasn’t. Compared to stealing lives, and stealing days, stealing a locomotive scarcely seems worth discussion.
While for Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) he wrote about signing his work:
I’d done nineteen posters and a lot of other design work and I hadn’t signed any of it because I felt that my work was so derivative of the work of others that it would be presumptuous to claim any of it as my own. One day I walked past the gallery Dow and Frosini and there was a poster in the window that I really liked. It obviously had been done recently, but it wasn’t signed, so I couldn’t find out who had done it. This annoyed me greatly, and as I stood there being annoyed I realized that I was doing the exact same thing myself, and that there were probably plenty of people out there who were annoyed because I wasn’t signing my posters. So I started signing them. I liked the pattern of four squares arranged into a larger square, and had used that as a sort of signature before, so when I designed a signature I kept that basic idea and made it a square. This movie always makes me cry.
Sometimes his descriptions about his thought process are more specific, as in this for his poster for Fritz Lang’s M:
My six-year-old niece was given a camera to play with at a garden party. She spent a happy afternoon taking pictures of guests, most of whom were grown-ups. When the prints came back, the photographs were of people’s legs and feet. It seems obvious in retrospect that a small child sees the world of adults as a forest of trousers and stockings, but at the time it came to us as a surprise. People see the whole world from their own point of view, and are generally amazed that others see it differently. This film is about a murderer of children, and the poster presents a child’s-eye view.
Below is the rest of Goines’s film oeuvre in roughly chronological order.
1972 poster for the film series Treasures from the Eastman House and 1975 poster for a series of films from the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, for the Pacific Film Archive.
1974 poster for Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1924) and 1975 poster for the series Music and the Movies. Both for the Pacific Film Archive.
1975 poster for Pandora's Box (G.W. Pabst, Germany, 1929) and 1978 poster for the horror film series Unpleasant Surprises for the Pacific Film Archive.
1977 poster for Faust (F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1926) and 1978 poster for The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, USA, 1927) for the Pacific Film Archive.
1980 poster for Wings (William A. Wellmann, USA, 1927) for the Pacific Film Archive.
1982 poster for Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, Japan, 1969) for the Pacific Film Archive.
1983 posters for Parsifal (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, West Germany, 1982) and Frankenstein (James Whale, USA, 1931) for the Pacific Film Archive.
1995 poster for the 25th Anniversary of the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Goines’s final film poster, made some 21 years after his last poster for the PFA, was this typically eccentric and non-representational design for Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), which Goines lists as a piece of self-promotion, possibly anticipating the fan art poster phenomenon that began in the late 2000s.
2004 poster for The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957).
On September 22, 2021, less than two years before his death, Goines wrote on the occasion of his Jubilee poster for Chez Panisse’s 50th anniversary:
My mother called me on my birthday in 1995 and remarked, “I have no trouble being seventy-two years old, but I cannot believe that I have a son who is fifty.” That’s exactly how I feel about the Chez Panisse jubilee. The years have slipped past like water. Every one of those fifty years was jam-packed full of life, and growth and adventure and heartbreak and joy. Every day was one of living, work, eating, sleeping. Life went on at the steady pace of one second into the future per second, same as always. But when it’s past and over, it all seems to have happened at once. I am catapulted from the exciting, chaotic opening night fifty years ago to a muted celebration marred by pandemic with nothing, it seems, in the middle.
Goines’s archive—consisting of over five thousand items—is now housed at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.