I haven’t done one of these posts in a while, since April in fact, and back then I talked about how I was resisting moving my movie poster curation over to Instagram from Tumblr. But just a couple of weeks later I bit the bullet and launched Movie Poster of the Day: Instagram edition. I still don’t love Instagram as a platform for posters as much as Tumblr—people tend to look at it on smaller screens for one thing, posters are not so easy to share and re-blog, and I much prefer the look of Tumblr’s archive page which keeps posters at their original ratio. But Instagram is the future, or at least the present, and so I’m now posting in both places, and though Tumblr tells me I have 314,457 followers, versus 1,094 on Instagram, the number of likes I get on each is surprisingly similar (though often the same poster will get very different results on each platform).
So these are the most popular posters on my Instagram account since its inception in May. The most liked so far is a poster that is very well-known to readers of this column: Akiko Stehrenberger’s design for Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games, which I rated as the best poster of the ’00s in one of my earliest Notebook columns. Its posting was prompted by an interview with Akiko on the Poster Boys podcast, which I highly recommend listening to. The second most popular poster was a welcome discovery born out of my recent post on the 1968 New York Film Festival. Researching one of the two films that I could not find posters for—Vatroslav Mimica’s Kaya, I Will Kill You—led me to this stunning Polish design for his follow-up film, An Event (1969). I’m also very happy to see Everett Aison’s beautiful, minimalist ’60s poster for Yojimbo right up there, as I wrote about the fascinating and multi-talented Aison in the most recent edition of Film Comment.
The rest of the 20 most popular posters on my Instagram to date are presented in gently descending order of popularity. It’s a welcome mix of Polish posters for Italian films, Italian posters for Russian films, Japanese posters for French films, French posters for American films, and so on. There are two posters for Tarkovsky films and two for Kubrick, as well as two for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and two, running neck and neck, for Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming The Favourite (of the two I prefer the teaser by Lanthimos’s brilliant long-time designer Vasilis Marmatakis). And there are three other new posters: Eric Skillman’s reworking of his Criterion Blu-ray design for Janus’s theatrical re-release of Wings of Desire, and two unique and very different designs—one all splatterific maximalism, the other restrained minimalism—for the remake of Suspiria and the experimental sports doc John McEnroe : In the Realm of Perfection.
Above: 2007 US one sheet for Funny Games (Michael Haneke, USA, 2007); designer: Akiko Stehrenberger.
Above: 1969 Polish poster for An Event (Vatroslav Mimica, Yugoslavia, 1969); designer: Zygmunt Bobrowski.
Above: 2018 re-release poster for Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1987); designer: Eric Skillman.
Above: 1961 US poster for Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1961); designer: Everett Aison.
Above: 1966 Polish poster for Boccaccio ’70 (Vittorio De Sica, Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini & Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1962); designer: Andrzej Krajewski.
Above: 1974 Italian 2-fogli for Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972); artist: Renato Casaro.
Above: 1975 French petite first release poster for Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1957); designer: Jean-Claude Labret for Joineau Bourduge.
Above: 1979 Hungarian poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1968); designer: Gábor Gyárfás.
Above: US one sheet for Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, USA/Italy, 2018); designer: LA.
Above: 1981 French grande poster for Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1979); artist: Jean-Michel Folon.
Above: 1972 US one sheet for Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney Pollack, USA, 1972).
Above: US one sheet for The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/USA, 2018); designer: Midnight Oil.
Above: US one sheet for The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/USA, 2018); designer: Vasilis Marmatakis.
Above: 1958 US one sheet for Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, France, 1958).
Above: 1962 Polish poster for Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1961); designer: Eryk Lipinski.
Above: 2010 Japanese re-release poster for Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, France, 1958).
Above: 1976 US one sheet for Dogs (Burt Brinckerhoff, USA, 1976).
Above: 1973 Japanese poster for Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto, Japan, 1973); designer: Fukai.
Above: 1969 Italian 2-foglio for Justine (George Cukor, USA, 1969); designer: Michelangelo Papuzza.
Above: US one sheet for John McEnrore: In the Realm of Perfection (Julien Faraut, France, 2018).
Poster sources are all credited on Instagram and Tumblr. Follow me on either or both.
You can see an index of all my Movie Poster of the Week posts here, and if you want to see more of Movie Poster of the Day and you’re not on Insta or Tumblr, you can follow me on Twitter and get daily updates there.