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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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BOOKFACE | Corpus Libris

If you’re a fan of #bookfacefriday on Instagram, you will likely enjoy this short film made in collaboration with the public library in the German city of Erlangen…

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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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Centuries of Paper

Great Big Story visits the Richard de Bas paper mill, one of the few places in France where paper is still made by hand.

(via Kottke)

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Noir in the Age of #MeToo

With the release of an annotated edition of The Big Sleep this month, author Megan Abbott reflects on noir and the work of Raymond Chandler:

What fascinates and compels me most about Chandler in this #MeToo moment are the ways his novels speak to our current climate. Because if you want to understand toxic white masculinity, you could learn a lot by looking at noir.

Loosely defined, noir describes the flood of dark, fatalistic books and films that emerged before, during, and especially after World War II. As scholars like Janey Place have pointed out, this was an era when many white American men felt embattled. Their livelihoods had been taken away—first by the Depression, then by the war, and then by the women who replaced them while they were off fighting. Into this climate noir flowered: Tales of white, straight men—the detective, the cop, the sap—who feel toppled from their rightful seat of power and who feel deeply threatened by women, so threatened that they render them all-powerful and blame them for all the bad things these straight white men do. Kill a guy, rob a bank—the femme fatale made me do it. These novels simmer with resentment over perceived encroachment and a desire to contain female power.

In an earlier essay for the LA Times, Abbott looks at why women are interested in true crime stories:

[In] the last few years, and especially in recent months as the Harvey Weinstein and associated scandals have dominated headlines, I’ve come to think of true crime books as performing much the same function as crime novels (also dominated by female readers): serving as the place women can go to read about the dark, messy stuff of their lives that they’re not supposed to talk about — domestic abuse, serial predation, sexual assault, troubled family lives, conflicted feelings about motherhood, the weight of trauma, partner violence and the myriad ways the justice system can fail, and silence, women.

While these weighty issues aren’t generally resolved in true crime… these books provide a common site to work through crises, to exorcise demons. I’ve come to believe that what draws women to true crime tales is an instinctual understanding that this is the world they live in.

And at Vulture Abbot talks to Ruth Franklin about her new novel, Give Me Your Hand:

The seductive female criminal, a.k.a. femme fatale, has always been a noir staple: Mary Astor in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Ava Gardner in ‘The Killers’But Abbott argues that these characters aren’t psychologically authentic. They’re “a projection of male anxiety,” she says, vampy caricatures whose primary purpose is to use their irresistible charms to lure the detective-hero into a setup. As Abbott sees it, classic noir “always comes back to the idea of femininity as a kind of dark continent.” Male writers “really don’t want to look in there,” she says. They want to believe female violence “is always an aberration … What if those stories had been told from the femme fatale’s point of view? Think how different they would look.”

On a semi-related note, film critic David Thomson recently wrote a long piece for the London Review of Books on Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir Vertigo in light of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. It’s interesting as a dissection of a classic movie, but it is not, ultimately, the take I wanted. Thomson’s claim that a medium that has historically been dominated by the male gaze is somehow essentially so, is surely something that only a male critic would say. Women need to be given the space to address these issues, and, frankly it is a female critic’s reassessment of Hitchcock that I want to read. 

Both the Abbott and Thompson pieces on noir reminded of Claire Dederer’s 2017 essay, ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?‘, on Woody Allen and whether genius and monstrosity go hand in hand. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already. In the essay, Dederer talks briefly about Roman Polanski. I would love to read a contemporary reassessment of Chinatown. 1        

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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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