Tonight the 50th incarnation of the New York Film Festival gets underway at Lincoln Center, and for the third year running I have tried to find posters for all the films in the festival’s main slate (see 2010 and 2011). Poster art not being what it used to be, these inevitably pale in comparison to the posters I collected last week for the very first NYFF of 1963. For starters, most of those were illustrated, whereas only two of this year’s batch are hand drawn: the folk-art Filipino design for Bwakaw and Spanish artist Riki Blanco’s illustration for The Dead Man and Being Happy. But there are some other standouts, like the striking UK quads for Holy Motors and Ginger and Rosa, the near-abstract monochrome and gothic lettering of Leviathan, the unconventional titling for Barbara (coupled with that can’t-lose photo of Nina Hoss on a bike, one of two posters featuring women on bicycles), and the shocking pink lips of Notebook favorite Passion (which I somehow missed as a wonderful scrim banner in Cannes).
I couldn’t find anything for three brand new American films: First Cousin Once Removed (Alan Berliner), Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) and Not Fade Away (David Chase), but the rest of the 33 films in the main slate are below, leading off with the Opening Night film, Life of Pi, (another of the strongest designs and one of two posters featuring tigers) and followed by the others in alphabetical order by English-language title.
Above: Life of Pi (Ang Lee, USA).
Above: Amour (Michael Haneke, Austria/France/Germany) and Araf—Somewhere In Between (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Turkey/France/Germany).
Above: Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany) and Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, Romania).
Above: Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana, The Philippines) and Caesar Must Die (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Italy).
Above: Camille Rewinds (Noémie Lvovsky, France) and The Dead Man and Being Happy (Javier Rebollo, Spain/Argentina/France).
Above: Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel) and Flight (Robert Zemeckis, USA).
Above: The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh, Israel/France/Germany/Belgium) and Here and There (Antonio Méndez Esparza, Spain/US/Mexico)
Above: Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter, UK).
Above: Holy Motors (Léos Carax, France).
Above: Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell, UK) and Kinshasa Kids (Marc-Henri Wajnberg, Belgium/France).
Above: The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Portugal/France) and Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, France/UK/USA).
Above: Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France).
Above: Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento, France/Portugal) and Memories Look at Me (Song Fang, China).
Above: Night Across the Street (Raul Ruiz, Chile/France) and No (Pablo Larrain, Chile/USA).
Above: Our Children (Joachim Lafosse, Belgium) and The Paperboy (Lee Daniels, USA).
Above: Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, France) and You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Alain Resnais, France).
Above: Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal).