Sometimes it’s simply down to artistic invention – such as Al Hirschfeld’s take on Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky. Sometimes, as the book’s co-editor Tony Nourmand points out in his introduction, this was out of financial necessity – multi-coloured nuanced illustrations were beyond the budgets of many smaller films. It’s noticeable throughout Separate Cinema how often black actors are pictured as silhouettes – a trend that isn’t nearly as prevalent in posters advertising films with white actors. Problems occur when films featuring black actors started to be marketed to white audiences. Kisch’s collection uncovers a lively tradition of poster design for early independent black films (whose directors were keen to counter the negative stereotypes of The Birth of the Nation). But the book also highlights how, particularly in Hollywood posters, black faces and figures have been caricatured, obscured, abstracted or, occasionally, absented entirely. Little-known designs about little-known films sit alongside those for lauded films by directors such as Oscar Micheaux and Sidney Poitier. Through the prism of posters, Kisch’s Separate Cinema provides an essential overview of black cinema. Remember the controversy last year around the Italian poster art for 12 Years a Slave featuring its ‘protagonist’ Brad Pitt?įlicking through Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art, the lavish film poster compendium compiled from John Kisch’s extensive collection, shows the extent to which racism has plagued film poster design, much as it has magazine covers (and continues to do so, a case in point being this February’s UK Vogue – Jourdan Dunn is the magazine’s first solo black model cover star in 12 years). But it’s a solemn, disruptive and confrontational design, and with its echoes of Ferguson’s street scenes uses photography to foreground race in a way that many film posters haven’t. If the poster has a downside, it’s that it endorses the misconception that King was one man battling the system solo, which DuVernay took pains to show wasn’t the case (as she elaborates in our March 2015 issue. Instead of picturing in the background King’s fellow protestors ( see this alternative design) and selling Selma as an uplifting, triumphant film, both we and David Oyelowo’s King face a wall of white state troopers, who weren’t in Somerstsein’s photo. Did she have any sway over the film’s poster? The use of Rückenfigur signifies loud and clear that this is not a normal biopic. Selma’s director Ava DuVernay hails from a background in film publicity.
Rückenfigur posters for Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station and Lee Daniels's The Butler So too did the design for Lee Daniel’s film about an African-American servant in the White House, The Butler. Ryan Coogler’s docudrama Fruitvale Station, which reconstructed the last day of Oscar Grant’s life before he was shot in the back by a policeman, did. Interestingly, Selma isn’t even the only recent film about racial injustice to have a Rückenfigur poster. Look at posters for westerns past and present and you might see an actor’s back in stand-off stance Christopher Nolan’s recent posters often seem like tributes to Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic landscapes with their protagonists looking out and up at the spectacle around them (they prompted a slew of imitators) Polish poster art of course provides countless examples of imaginative Rückenfigur as does the poster for Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou, coincidentally released at the same time as Selma. There’s a small but fascinating tradition of the Rückenfigur motif in film poster history.
0 kommentar(er)
