Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen,
2018
Images from the Internet
24 x 36: A Movie About Movie
Posters
Directed by Kevin Burke
Post No Joes Productions / Snowfort
Films / FilmRise / MVD Visual
82
minutes, 2017
Hopefully, this is past the Statue of
Limitations: when I was in my late teens, I worked as an usher in a cinema
palace in Brooklyn that has now been razed. It was one of the big ones with
only one screen then, a balcony and two aisles that were split into three
sections (smoking on the right side, only). My boss hated me, but that’s neither
here nor there. In back of the ticket booth, there was a stack of previous film
posters that the boss would not give out to us¸ saying its company property; however,
when the stack got too high, he chucked them into the trash bin out back. So, I
starting sifting them off the bottom, never taking enough to be obvious, only
enough of them to have a nice stack after a year. Some include O! Lucky Man and American Graffiti. And yes, I still have them.
Film posters, back then, were exciting. It
wasn’t merely photos of the stars dressed in costumes layered on top of each
other with the film’s name underneath, they were luscious artwork that was full
of imagination and talent. Horror and Sci-Fi were especially attractive. I
still remember seeing the poster for The
Masque of the Red Death in the theater as a very young kid and being impressed by it. While the film was pretty
bad, the poster still stands as great art.
This documentary combines artists,
collectors, directors and movie poster shop owners, and weaves a series of
ideas about the history of the poster on many different aspects, from the very
beginning of graphic art that was used in the silent era.
Broken into chapters, we learn that poster
artists were not generally compensated well, nor were they allowed to sign
their work until at least the 1970s
or ‘80s. Despite that, the documentary correctly posits that the poster showed
a possibility of what was in the film
being shown. Even The Goonies, in its
goofy way, posited a type of adventure. But over time, as actors’ agents and
the players themselves became more powerful, the poster became dominated more
by an image of the star than what the film was about. There’s a close-up of the
face of Tom Cruise, or Will Smith, with no context to the actual story. With
Photoshop and egos, the posters became, as I said before, a series of
interchangeable pictures of the stars.
As a digression that I think is relevant, I
recently went into a bookstore and saw three different magazines that had
covers about the Avengers movie that just opened. Each of them had the exact same
five photos of its stars in costume, but in a different order, obviously thrown
together. I once argued that technology killed rock and roll for a while when
the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s,
and then that happened with the poster world.
During an interview segment, artist David
Byrd (who gives some of the best quotes here) states that the computer, while
scary, is just a technological tool, much like the invention of the paint
brush. He’s right, and perhaps one day film historians will look back and talk
about how amazing the poster art of the 21 Century was compared to whenever
they are doing their research. That being said, this film shows just how cut
and paste – and unimaginative – modern posters are by showing a series of them
side-by-side that are nearly identical in form, but tell nothing about the film
it’s supposed to promote. They give a great example of a dozen or so Johnny
Depp films where the posters are nearly duplicated.
To change gears for a sec, just so you know,
I’m giving sort of a titles version
of the film, not really disclosing much, because the interviews are the thing,
and there is a lot of information throughout.
For example, and I hadn’t thought of this before, the pictures of the cast
needs to be large sometimes because with all the Internet streaming services,
the posters are mostly thumbnails and the pic needs to be larger and simpler to
make it out.
Marshall McLuhan once said that when a
technology is replaced, it comes back as art. This is also true of art. Much as the Ramones arguably brought
back rock’n’roll to the mainstream after Sgt.
Peppers, a group of fans in Austin, TX, started a company called Mondo that
started bringing back original art silk screened art movie posters to some
popularity. Most of the collective, which includes some major artists, are
shown and interviewed here, which of course, inflamed the opening of newer
start-up poster companies. Fascinating stuff.
It’s also interesting that a large majority
of the new wave of posters focuses on fantasy, horror, noir, sci-fi and cult
films; I’m surprised there aren’t more musicals, because that is so open for splashes
of bright colors and design, but it does makes sense for me for the genres that
are popular to be so, as they are also based on imaginative machinations.
One of the “chapters” is dedicated to all the
new artists that are coming up, and there are lots of interviews and examples
of their work. And natch, there’s a second on the collectors and how they approach
the direct market as opposed to the secondary market (e.g., eBay). A chapter I
found really interesting, though, was about licensing, as artists and marketers
discuss the positives and negatives of getting permission to use images from copyrighted
films (the same arguments can be made for downloading films).
Another point brought up a couple of times,
once in detail, is that the expectation now in mainstream films is that if the
poster is artwork, the assumption is that it is an animated feature. What isn’t
mentioned is that it is most likely (in my opinion) a result of the relatively
recent rise of Pixar (and hence Disney) and the re-emergence of popularity of
animated films. Every positive has a negative, and the modern movie poster – or
the expectations of it – reflects that.
Considering this is Kevin Burke’s directorial
debut, it’s an impressive output. He takes the talking head concept and keeps
it interesting throughout, adding in some really nice animation around the
posters that is fun to watch. While this is hardly the first documentary to use
animation to liven up the imagery, he uses it effectively in a way that makes
the viewer keep watching the screen, rather than just listening. But of course,
movie poster art really is an art form, and deserves the attention on its own
right. Burke punches it up to a nice level.
The way to look at this film is to equate it
to comic books, as it is a symbiotic collecting field and buying/trading mode. In
comparison, this film would be more about modern comics than the Golden and
Silver Ages, or the Comix period.
That being said, as much as I enjoyed the
film, I would like to see a second one that digs significantly deeper, perhaps
how the earlier posters effected culture for example, or how the art was used
to send a specific message to the audience on both a conscious and subconscious
level, such World War II imagery to promote the war effort at that time. They’ve
done well scratching the surface; now let’s talk about the bigger picture and
go into the deep end of the poster pool.
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