Above: 2021 UK quad poster for 4K restoration of The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, France, 1959). Design by The Posterhouse.
50,000 Movie Poster of the Day fans can’t be wrong. Yes, just this week my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram—a feed that was a spin-off from this column—surpassed 50,000 followers, which is a little ways off Cristiano Ronaldo’s 411 million and still a tenth of the half a million that Movie Poster of the Day used to have on Tumblr, though I never quite believed those numbers. But I put a lot of faith in my Movie Poster of the Day followers and so every six months I like to collect and rank the most “liked” posters that I have posted in the previous 26 weeks as some sort of bellwether of popular taste.
The 400 Blows poster above racked up 3,168 likes earlier this year, making it the third most-liked poster I’ve ever posted (for the first and second see the last round-up). Which is maybe somewhat surprising and could perhaps speak more to people’s love of Truffaut’s film rather than of this particular poster, except I also posted a Finnish 400 Blows on Truffaut’s 90th birthday last month and that got fewer than 800 likes. The BFI’s 400 Blows poster is actually one of a pair of British quads designed by The Posterhouse for Truffaut re-releases, and their Jules and Jim also clocked in as the fourth most-liked poster on this list.
The second most-liked is also a poster for an old French film, this time for Jacques Tati’s PlayTime. This art print by Vincent Mahé was featured in a Notebook post I wrote last November on a series of art prints for Tati’s films.
In third place is another gorgeous art print. While I like to concentrate on commercial posters for theatrical releases I do bend the rules occasionally for especially attractive pieces. This one is a limited edition screenprint by the geniuses at LaBoca for Julia Ducournau’s Titane.
Although there are a lot of heavy hitters in the top 25 (Rashomon, Possession, La notte) one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the popularity of the lovely Jouineau Bourduge poster for a film I’d never heard of before: Clarisse Gabus’ Melancoly Baby.
It’s good to see a lot of friends of Movie Poster of the Week make the list: as well as La Boca’s there are posters by Akiko Stehrenberger, Midnight Marauder, Marcelo Granero, and Brian Hung, all of whom have been written about in this column. So, without further ado, here are the rest of the 25 most “liked” posters of the past six months of Movie Poster of the Day, presented, as always, in gently descending order of popularity.
Above: 2016 art print for Playtime (Jacques Tati, France, 1967). Design by Vincent Mahé for Nautilus.
Above: 2021 limited edition screenprint poster for Titane (Julia Ducournau, France/Belgium, 2021). Design by LaBoca for Mondo.
Above: 2021 UK quad poster for a re-release of Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, France, 1962). Design by The Posterhouse.
Above: 2021 UK poster for Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, UK, 2021). Art by James Paterson.
Above: 1951 Italian poster for Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950). Art by Ercole Brini.
Above: 2017 Japanese poster promoting a series of films by Jacques Demy and Agnes Varda: “5 films about happiness.” Designer TBD.
Above: 1989 Egyptian poster for Batman (Tim Burton, USA, 1989). Art by Sami.
Above: 1975 Spanish poster for A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, USA, 1975). Art by Jano.
Above: 1963 Czech poster for Accattone (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy 1961). Design by Milos Reindl.
Above: 2021 Mondo poster for Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, Germany/France, 1981). Design by Ghoulish Gary.
Above: 2021 US one sheet for the short film The Runner (Boy Harsher, USA, 2021). Design by Midnight Marauder.
Above: German poster for Pierre and Paul (René Allio, France, 1969). Design by Hans Hillmann.
Above: 1969 Japanese poster for Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, Japan, 1969). Design by Kiyoshi Awazu.
Above: 1969 Japanese poster for Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, Japan, 1969). Design by Setsu Asakura.
Above: 1961 Italian 4-foglio for La notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1961). Art by Giuliano Nistri.
Above: 2021 US one sheet for The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, USA, 2021). Design by BLT Communications.
Above: 1979 French grande for Melancoly Baby (Clarisse Gabus, France, 1979). Design by Jouineau Bourduge.
Above: 2021 South Korean poster for Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2021).
Above: 2021 French grande for Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, Iceland, 2021). Design by Laurent Lufroy.
Above: 2021 poster for the short documentary A Broken House (Jimmy Goldblum, USA, 2021). Design by Akiko Stehrenberger incorporating artwork by Mohamad Hafez.
Above: 2021 French grande for The Crusade (Louis Garrel, France, 2021). Design by Nicolas Clery-Melin for RYSK Studio.
Above: 1969 Italian 2-foglio poster for Secret Ceremony (Joseph Losey, UK, 1968). Design by Piero Ermanno Iaia.
Above: 2021 festival poster for Álvaro (José Alejandro González, Colombia, 2021). Design by Marcelo Granero.
Above: 2021 US poster for Introduction (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2021). Design by Brian Hung.
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