November 2007 – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

The poster art of Richard Amsel

Hello Dolly (1969); The Sting (1973).
Murder on the Orient Express (1974); Barry Lyndon (1975).

Thanks are due for today’s post to Sebastiane who reminded me of the poster art that Richard Amsel produced through the Seventies up to the mid-Eighties. Together with Bob Peak, Amsel was a major exponent of the illustrated poster, a form that’s now completely vanished from cinema promotion in a sea of floating Photoshop heads and persistently lazy design. Amsel’s most famous piece in terms of success and visibility is probably his Raiders of the Lost Ark poster (and its variants) but I tend to prefer his work from the previous decade.

I collected film posters for a while and have one of Amsel’s Chinatown designs packed away somewhere. The Hello Dolly poster above was his first commission and must count as the first and only time a Spirograph was used (for the flowers) to create a design for a major Hollywood production. The Amsel page at American Art Archives notes that the poster for The Sting is a pastiche of the very popular (and gay) JC Leyendecker whose magazine and advertising art was contemporary with the film’s setting. This is exactly the kind of thing that can’t be done with ease today when the art is predominantly a product of digital techniques.

Amsel died in 1985, an early victim of the AIDS pandemic which possibly explains why there isn’t a site dedicated to his work as there is for Bob Peak. This page features a few examples of Amsel’s other work, however, including his instantly recognisable Divine Miss M album cover for Bette Midler. And there’s a small gallery of his posters at IMP.

Update: A retrospective article and marvellous gallery of Amsel’s work by Adam McDaniel

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Bollywood posters

left: Jangal Mein Mangal (1972); centre: Shalimar (1978); right: Jaani Dushman (1979).

Three examples of the art of the lurid from this site which has a huge selection of Indian poster art from the Fifties on. I still haven’t seen Shalimar but I’ve been playing the great soundtrack by India’s Ennio Morricone, Rahul Dev Burman, continually for the past year. There’s also several pages of Lollywood billboards from Pakistan. And a gallery of posters for trashy horror movies from the west; these people are lurid connoisseurs. I actually own the David Cronenberg Shivers/Rabid poster on that pulp page, something I’d completely forgotten about. Had I seen the utterly dreadful art for Zuma 2: Hell Serpent earlier I could have included it in the Men with snakes post.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters
• Shalimar by Rahul Dev Burman

The magic kingdom

The magic kingdom
| Edward James and Las Pozas again.

From LSD to OSX

A few servings of iTunes jelly.

I’ve spent the past week or so enjoying the delights of Leopard, the 10.5 iteration of Apple’s OS X operating system, but have only just noticed the new Visualizer patterns in the latest version of iTunes. I don’t use the Visualizer much, especially since the introduction of Front Row, Apple’s home media management system, but it’s always nice to know it’s there. The original Visualizer isn’t so far removed from the graphic tricks I used to laboriously program into my old Spectrum computer in the 1980s, simple repeated shapes with coloured lines, albeit a lot faster and with far more detail and animation than a 48k Spectrum could ever manage. The latest Visualizer has been significantly supercharged, however, and the new “Jelly” setting creates some really beautiful (and it should be noted, trippy) patterns, reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters UFOs or James Cameron’s Abyss inhabitants.

I can’t help but see a direct line of continuity here from Apple’s origin in the head culture of Sixties and Seventies’ California to the present. Writer John Markoff examined some of the connections between psychedelic culture and the nascent computer scene in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry where we find Apple CEO Steve Jobs saying that “taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” Given this, the glowing, pulsating mandalas in the new iTunes can be seen as a vestigial remnant of that era, and it seems fitting that those patterns are integrated into a music player; it was upon the Sixties’ music scene, after all, that LSD originally had its greatest cultural impact.

Update: For anyone wanting to play with iTunes Jelly, there’s a couple of undisclosed features (this is for Macs but I imagine they’d be the same in the PC version). Pressing M tells you the name of the pattern currently being displayed, pressing 1 shrinks part of the pattern, 2 zooms it out and 8, 9 and 0 cause different colours to over-saturate. It’s a full-on psychedelic light-show, in other words.

Update 2: If you press M so it shows the pattern name then press the Up or Down arrow, you can flick through the various pattern settings.

• Watch Jelly in action
• Steve Jobs drops acid in Pirates of Silicon Valley

Previously on { feuilleton }
• iTunes 7

Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

A slight return to the Lovecraft art exhibition that’s now running at Maison d’Ailleurs, the museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland. As mentioned last month, An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things: Works inspired by HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book includes my large digital work based on the lines “Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city”.

Curator Patrick Gyger has now posted two sets of photos of the exhibition on Flickr. My picture can be seen on this page and for Lovecraft art aficionados the 128pp catalogue should be along soon, featuring 90 illustrations and original fiction by Paul Di Filippo, Jeffrey Ford, Lucius Shepard, Norman Spinrad and others.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive