Above: 1986 Japanese poster for She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, USA, 1986).
In the ten months since I last did a round-up of the most popular posters on Movie Poster of the Day, two things have happened. I’ve slacked off a bit: after running the site since November 2011 and posting one poster every single day for years, in the past year I’ve let my self-appointed task slide a little and have been posting more sporadically. And at the same time it seems that Tumblr is starting to atrophy. At its height my site had over 300,000 followers—it still does officially (312,798 to be exact), but I would guess that a large percentage of those people are no longer still on Tumblr or rarely check their feed. I’m often asked why I don’t up sticks and move to Instagram instead, but while I love Instagram for personal stuff, Tumblr is still the ideal platform for sharing posters with a wider community, allowing them to be posted and reblogged with ease. And I never did get the hang of Pinterest.
So, over the past ten months these are the 20 posters that have got the most attention, starting—with over 400 likes and re-blogs—with this terrific Japanese poster for Spike Lee’s 1986 debut She’s Gotta Have It, which showed up on Posteritati’s site around the time that the Netflix reboot of the film premiered. (It is still available, if anyone wants to snap it up.) Running a very close second was this gorgeous piece of contemporary fan art by the great Adam Juresko for Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris. Juresko uses the Japanese title for his poster, making the top three (rounded out by a lovely Godard chirashi) all ostensibly Japanese designs.
I was heartened to see another Tarkovsky poster makes the list, this one, for The Sacrifice, designed by yours truly as one of my first duties as design director for Kino Lorber. It was a labor of love to design a poster for a Tarkovsky film and one that I was anxious not to screw up. So I appreciate the likes.
The top 20, presented below in gently descending order of popularity, includes its usual sad share of in memoriam posts—for Jeanne Moreau, Tobe Hooper and George Romero—the only other topical post being the poster for a little-known Polish film called Alabama that I dug up to tangentially celebrate Doug Jones’ surprise win in the Alabama Senate race in December.
There are plenty of gems here: Jonathan Burton’s clever Mondo art for The Invisible Man, Jano’s split-screen for Serpico, Fourastié’s striking posters for Eva and More, and that knockout 40s one sheet for The Boy With Green Hair. And there are plenty more where these came from—I’ve posted over 2,000 posters since I started doing this—so I’ll keep on posting.
Above: Art poster for Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972); Designer: Adam Juresko.
Above: 1997 re-release Japanese chirashi for A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1964).
Above: Advance UK quad for Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, UK/Italy, 1966).
Above: Mondo poster for The Invisible Man (James Whale, USA, 1933); Artist: Jonathan Burton.
Above: French affiche for Eva (Joseph Losey, France/Italy, 1962); Design: Jean Fourastié.
Above: Spanish poster for Serpico (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1973); Artist: Francisco Fernandez Zaza-Perez aka “Jano.”
Above: 2017 re-release poster for The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, France, 1928); Designer: Eric Skillman.
Above: Polish poster for Alabama (Ryszard Rydzewski, Poland, 1984); Designer: Wieslaw Walkuski.
Above: Original US one sheet for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, USA, 1974).
Above: US re-release poster for The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden, 1986); Designer: Adrian Curry.
Above: French grande for More (Barbet Schroeder, France/Germany, 1969); Designer: Jean Fourastie.
Above: French grande for The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, USA, 1934); Designer: Roger Vacher.
Above: US re-release poster for Le Gai Savoir (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1968); Designer: Dylan Haley.
Above: 2018 restrospective poster for Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema; Designer: Jason Hardy.
Above: US one sheet for Ingrid Goes West (Matt Spicer, USA, 2017); Artist: Akiko Stehrenberger for Mondo.
Above: US one sheet for The Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Losey, USA, 1948).
Above: US one sheet for The Crazies (George A. Romero, USA, 1973).
Above: French grande for The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, USA, 2003).
Above: German poster for Porto (Gabe Klinger, Portugal/US/France/Poland, 2017); Designer: Heike Jörss.
Poster sources are all credited on Movie Poster of the Day; click on the titles above for more information.
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