Jan Lenica – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The poster art of Akiko Stehrenberger

W.E. (2011).

Being someone who enjoys adopting and pastiching different art and design styles for different projects I naturally like to see other people doing the same. American illustrator and designer Akiko Stehrenberger is very adept at using this approach for her film posters. Without knowing the identity of the person responsible you wouldn’t guess that they were all the work of the same person.

The Madonna and Polanski posters are the two most overt pastiches, being based respectively on the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka, and the posters by Jan Lenica for Polanski’s Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac. Good as the poster for W.E. is, it seems the studio preferred a more cliched “romantic” treatment for their international sales. Stehrenberger’s Mac desktop design for Burn After Reading was dropped in favour of yet another Saul Bass pastiche. (As a sidenote I’d suggest a moratorium on imitating Saul Bass for the time being; it’s getting boring.) The Lost Highway design isn’t a poster but I added it here since it’s a surprising take on David Lynch’s noir piece. I like the way the dotted line can be taken either as road markings or a line signifying the division in the film between the separate storylines and the separated characters.

Akiko Stehrenberger talked to Adrian Curry earlier this year about her favourite film posters.

Burn After Reading (2008).

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008).

Lost Highway (Spanish Blu-ray cover).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Belle et la Bête posters
• Dr Mabuse posters
• The poster art of Frank McCarthy
• Repulsion posters
• The poster art of Vic Fair
• Petulia film posters
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Wild Salomés
• Druillet’s vampires
• Bob Peak revisited
• Alice in Acidland
• Salomé posters
• Polish posters: Freedom on the Fence
• Kaleidoscope: the switched-on thriller
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Rhinoceros by Jan Lenica

As noted here last year, Polish artist Jan Lenica (1928–2001) was also an animator as well as a celebrated poster designer. Die Nashörner (1964) is an 11-minute condensation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros that no doubt works best if you’re familiar with the play but which nevertheless contains some funny moments, especially when “Rhinocerosism” starts to spread. The film is free to download at the Internet Archive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Repulsion posters
• Dom by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica

Repulsion posters

More Roman Polanski. The BFI is running a season of the director’s work through January and February so Repulsion (1965) and Chinatown (1974) have been put back into circulation nationwide. I don’t live in London but I have a large number of Polanski’s films on DVD so it looks like this month will also see a mini-season in south Manchester. Anchor Bay released a set of Polanski’s first three films (plus a disc of his short works) a few years ago, a great collection whose only flaw was a lack of Jan Lenica’s poster art for Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac (1966). I don’t know what posters are being used to promote the new release of Repulsion but something using Lenica’s artwork would seem essential.

The colour and brush style of the prone figure is very typical of Lenica but when combined with either the Clarendon typeface in the British example above, or the blocky lettering for the French poster, a Saul Bass-like design appears. The gender and eye symbols in the hand-drawn lettering reinforce a resemblance which I’d guess was deliberate. The title sequence for Repulsion, with the credits sliding across a close view of Catherine Deneuve’s eyeball, could almost have been created by Bass; the director’s credit (below) requires no further argument.

Continue reading “Repulsion posters”

Dom by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica

Dom.

Having referred this week to individual animated films by Borowczyk and Lenica here’s their ten-minute collaboration from 1959. “Dom” means “house”, with the house in question providing a vague framing device for otherwise disconnected episodes, some of which repeat themselves. It’s more of a curio than anything, most interesting (again) for the moments that would be better explored by future directors. In addition to further collage animation there’s a short sequence which gives octopoid life to a human wig that’s very reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer. Watch the whole thing here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Les Jeux des Anges by Walerian Borowczyk
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk

Les Jeux des Anges by Walerian Borowczyk

Les Jeux des Anges.

Following yesterday’s post, we can be certain that Terry Gilliam had seen Les Jeux des Anges because in 2001 he included it in a list of ten favourite animated films. Jan Lenica co-directed Dom (1959) with Walerian Borowczyk but doesn’t work on this film which is the darkest and strangest of all Borowczyk’s works I’ve seen to date. Once again there’s some unavoidable subtext, although whether that applies to the Holocaust or to Stalinist repression is for the viewer to decide. What we see is a series of painted tableaux in which various mechanical processes are butchering angels. The atmosphere isn’t far removed from the cruelties of Roland Topor while the painted scenes are very similar to those that David Lynch would be animating a couple of years later. The soundtrack is credited to electronic composer Bernard Parmegiani. Watch it for yourself here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Les Temps Morts by René Laloux
• Short films by Walerian Borowczyk