Above: US one sheet for KNIGHT OF CUPS (Terrence Malick, USA, 2015); designer: P+A.
Leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, the beautiful new poster for Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups was by far the most popular poster (tallied in likes and reblogs) that I have posted on my daily poster Tumblr since last October. Unveiled nearly a whole year after the first poster for the film premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival (that which made my top ten posters of 2015), the new poster retains the arcane and antique feel of that design—not to mention the palm trees—while making it only moderately more commercial with its image of star Christian Bale (albeit upside down and barely recognizable) haloed by a giant harvest moon.
Sadly, much of the past month or two has been spent commemorating those we lost: Jacques Rivette, Haskell Weller, Ettore Scola, artist Noriyoshi Ohrai and of course David Bowie, three posters for whose The Man Who Fell to Earth (one of which I posted a couple of months before he died) were among the most liked.
It’s always gratifying to see posters for relatively unknown films getting a lot of attention, because then I know that people aren’t just responding to the film itself but to the design. A case in point is the lovely Czech design for the Russian children’s film Sandu Follows the Sun which, with its giant red sun, would make a nice pair with Knight of Cups.
Below are the other nineteen most popular posters of the past three months presented in descending order.
Above: UK one sheet for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Nicolas Roeg, UK, 1976); artist: Vic Fair.
Above: Japanese B1 poster for GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (Takao Okawara, Japan, 1992); artist: Noriyoshi Ohrai.
Above: Italian 4-foglio for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Nicolas Roeg, UK, 1976).
Above: US poster for SEMBENE! (Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, Senegal/USA, 2015).
Above: French grande for PETULIA (Richard Lester, USA, 1968); artist: Jean Fourastié.
Above: French poster for SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DEADLY NECKLACE (Terence Fisher, West Germany, 1962).
Above: US one sheet for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Nicolas Roeg, UK, 1976).
Above: 1984 poster for Jean-Luc Godard Retrospective at the Cinémathèque Suisse. Designer: Werner Jeker.
Above: Czech poster for MARATHON MAN (John Schlesinger, USA, 1977); designer: Milan Grygar (b. 1926).
Above: US one sheet for SCANNERS (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1981). artist: Joann Daley.
Above: US teaser poster for GREASE (Randal Kleiser, USA, 1978).
Above: German poster for THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (Norman Jewison, USA, 1968)
Above: French grande for DUELLE (Jacques Rivette, France, 1976).
Above: Japanese poster for THE MODEL COUPLE (William Klein, France, 1977).
Above: Italian poster for WHAT TIME IS IT? (Ettore Scola, Italy, 1989).
Above: UK one sheet for ABBA: THE MOVIE (Lasse Hallström, Sweden, 1978).
Above: Czech poster for SANDU FOLLOWS THE SUN (Mikhail Kalik, USSR, 1962); designer: Libuše Kaplanová.
Above: US magazine ad for THE STRANGE WOMAN (Edgar G. Ulmer & Douglas Sirk, USA, 1946).
Above: US one sheet for MEDIUM COOL (Haskell Wexler, USA, 1969)
Poster sources are all credited on Movie Poster of the Day; click on the titles above for more information.
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