Fade away: Chris Marker | La Jetée and Immemory.
Category: {film}
Film
Vintage movie posters
An example from this Flickr set.
Hell is a City is a Hammer melodrama from 1960 directed by Val Guest, mentioned here recently for his earlier The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This one doesn’t succeed quite as well, being a misguided attempt to do a film noir in Manchester. The poster tries to disguise the mundane reality by showing a city which looks more like New York than our small northern metropolis. But it’s worth watching for the great Stanley Baker and, like A Taste of Honey and other films with Manchester settings, you can have fun spotting familiar places in the background. If it’s Brit film noir you want, there’s only one place to go: Jules Dassin’s marvellous Night and the City.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edward Judd, 1932–2009
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• 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
Einar Nerman
left: No title or date; right: Joker from a playing card set (1924).
A recent post by Silent-Porn-Star draws my attention to Swedish illustrator and cartoonist Einar Nerman (1888–1983) whose work I don’t recall having come across before. There isn’t much available to see online unfortunately, a shame as SPS’s posting of a 1926 cigarette ad shows a distinct Beardsley influence. Nerman seems known chiefly today for his caricatures of Greta Garbo, one of which was used on a commemorative postage stamp in 2005.
Greta Garbo.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Oscar Wilde playing cards
• Surrealist cartomancy
Alan Moore: an extraordinary gentleman
Alan Moore: an extraordinary gentleman | Novelist, magician and “guru of the graphic novel” Alan Moore talks to Steve Rose about Watchmen, the dark side of Hollywood and the morality of pornography.
Antonio Gaudí by Hiroshi Teshigahara
A largely-wordless tour of Gaudí’s architecture by the director of Woman in the Dunes (1964). Like that earlier film this also features a score by the composer Toru Takemitsu. I hadn’t realised before that the famous dragon gate (above) at the entrance to the Parc Güell, Barcelona, was as large as it is.
Teshigahara’s documentary is another film available at Ubuweb.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atelier Elvira