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Category: Film

Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?

I enjoyed Joshua Hunt’s recent New York Times article on the Criterion Collection:

Always in awe of auteurs but never in their thrall, Criterion producers have never been afraid to look beyond the biggest and most marketable names. When Criterion released “Peeping Tom,” a ’60s psychosexual thriller by the English director Michael Powell, the company chose not to ask Scorsese to record the audio commentary, though he would have been the obvious candidate, having done them for other Criterion editions of Powell films. The job instead went to a feminist scholar, Laura Mulvey, the author of the influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which brought forward the concept of “the male gaze.” Over the years, such decisions added up to an editorial voice that became influential, even authoritative, transforming a mere distributor of films into a creator of film culture.

There are also some nice details about the look of the collection:

Criterion’s distinctive visual language began to emerge in the early ’90s when [Rebekah] Audic, the former head of design, started building up its art staff with an aim “to really show the power of these films through the cover designs,” she told me. To do that it was sometimes necessary to go through every frame of film in search of the perfect image. Other times, images alone were not enough. “For the cover of ‘RoboCop,’ we had an actual aluminum-cast letterpress plate made and then photographed the plate with a 4-by-5 camera,” Audic says. It took days, she told me, but “using a physical piece of metal gave it a feeling of aesthetic truth.”

I don’t know if the Criterion Designs book, written and edited by Criterion art director Eric Skillman, is still available. It must be 10 years old now (dies) — I didn’t see it on the Criterion website — but there’s a nice piece about it on AIGA’s Eye on Design blog from around the time it came out. There is also a Criterion Designs blog, but it hasn’t been updated for a little while (am I imagining that Eric Skillman had a blog himself once upon a time?).

Oh and as an aside, the illustration for the NYT article is by Ben Denzer, who also designs book covers, and is the creator of Ice Cream Books should you ever need to pair great literature with frozen desserts (and who doesn’t?).

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Where Hollywood’s Printed Props Are Made

Special effects designer Adam Savage (Mythbusters) visits the warehouse of The Earl Hayes Press, a prop house that’s been making printed material for Hollywood movies for over hundred years. Fake newspapers, magazines, currency, and product labels all came from their printing presses. Historian and archivist Michael Corrie of YouTube channel Props To History walks Adam through some of the iconic props that originated by the press, including Blade Runner‘s ID badges and, incredibly, the passports and letters of transit from Casablanca. So good.

(via Waxy)

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The French Dispatch

I thought I read somewhere that Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch was based on the Paris Review, but the New Yorker is saying no, actually, it is all about them. IDK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(The poster is by illustrator Javi Aznarez by the way. You can read about it at It’s Nice That)

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The Booksellers Official Trailer

Well, this looks like fun!

Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet essential role in preserving history. THE BOOKSELLERS takes viewers inside their small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers.

According to their Facebook page, the film is in theatres next month.

(via Kottke and others)

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The Collection

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends and their discovery of a unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for movies released in the US from the silent era through to the 1980s:

(via Coudal)

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Design Canada

Design Canada, is a new documentary celebrating the ‘golden era’ of Canadian graphic design: 

The film is screening in Canada in the summer 2018, and releasing digitally in the fall. 

(via Coudal)

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The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Dan Chiasson takes a look at the making (and meaning) of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ for The New Yorker:

Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. “2001” is, in part, a fastidious period piece about a period that had yet to happen. Kubrick had seen exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair, and pored over a magazine article titled “Home of the Future.” The lead production designer on the film, Tony Masters, noticed that the world of “2001” eventually became a distinct time and place, with the kind of coherent aesthetic that would merit a sweeping historical label, like “Georgian” or “Victorian.” “We designed a way to live,” he recalled, “down to the last knife and fork.” (The Arne Jacobsen flatware, designed in 1957, was made famous by its use in the film, and is still in production.) By rendering a not-too-distant future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: thirty-three years later, his audiences would still be around to grade his predictions. Part of his genius was that he understood how to rig the results. Many elements from his set designs were contributions from major brands—Whirlpool, Macy’s, DuPont, Parker Pens, Nikon—which quickly cashed in on their big-screen exposure. If 2001 the year looked like “2001” the movie, it was partly because the film’s imaginary design trends were made real.

Much of the film’s luxe vision of space travel was overambitious. In 1998, ahead of the launch of the International Space Station, the Times reported that the habitation module was “far cruder than the most pessimistic prognosticator could have imagined in 1968.” But the film’s look was a big hit on Earth. Olivier Mourgue’s red upholstered Djinn chairs, used on the “2001” set, became a design icon, and the high-end lofts and hotel lobbies of the year 2001 bent distinctly toward the aesthetic of Kubrick’s imagined space station.

I have to confess that I’m with Renata Adler — I’ve always found 2001 to be simultaneously “hypnotic and immensely boring.” I think I just like reading about Kubrick’s films far more than I actually like watching them. 

Chiasson’s essay reminded me Keith Phipps great series on science fiction films ‘The Laser Age’ for late and lamented film website The Dissolve, which started with 2001. Someone really should collect those essays together into a book if they haven’t already, 

The cover of Michael Benson’s book on the making of 2001, Space Odyssey,  was designed by Rodrigo Corral and was featured in this month’s book covers post.  

 

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Rams: Teaser Trailer

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit has posted the first teaser trailers for his documentary about designer Dieter Rams on his website

The documentary, set to be released later this year, will include in-depth conversations with the designer, and feature original music by pioneering musician and producer Brian Eno. 

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Blade Runner 2049

I am very skeptical about the necessity of making a sequel to Blade Runner, but I liked Denis Villeneuve’s previous movie Arrival a lot, and Peter Bradshaw’s review of Blade Runner 2049 for The Guardian has piqued my curiosity…

The sheer electric strangeness of everything that happens is what registers. Every time K finishes a mission, he is taken to an interrogation module to be … what? Debriefed? Decompressed? Deconstructed? He is subjected to a fierce kind of call-and-response dialogue in which he has to respond to key words… It is utterly bizarre, and yet entirely compelling, and persuasively normal in this alienated universe… The production design by Dennis Gasner and cinematography by Roger Deakins are both delectable, and the largely electronic musical score by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer provides a kind of aural neon: gaunt, harsh, angular, like the noise of machinery. It’s an incredible lucid dream. Weirdly, I had forgotten about one of the little-discussed pleasures of the big screen: the simple effect of dialogue, echoing in a movie theatre. This film’s scale is extraordinary. It places the acid tab of cinema-pleasure on your tongue.

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Design Canada Documentary

Greg Durrell of Canadian design firm Hulse&Durrell, and Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit of Film First are putting together a documentary about Canadian graphic design:

The project is currently on Kickstarter. There are a couple of weeks to go and they are still a few thousand dollars shy of their goal. Please help out if you can. 

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BOLES

Based on the short story “Her Lover” by Maksim Gorky, BOLES is short animated film by Špela Čadež about a writer with writer’s block and the woman who lives next door:

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