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Tag: Criterion

Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?
Published March 8, 2024

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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Published November 1, 2015

Eric Skillman on Designing for Criterion

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On the Waterfront, illustration by Sean Phillips

At AI-AP, Robert Newman interviews Eric Skillman, designer and art director at Criterion Collection:

Because film is a visual medium, each project comes with an established aesthetic, which for a designer can be inspiring but also sometimes limiting. The challenge is in figuring out how best to channel that aesthetic—either by distilling it down to a single still composition, or somehow bouncing off of it in an interesting way.

I try not to make such a strong distinction between “illustration” and “design.” Almost everything I make involves some custom-created components, whether it’s type or image or decorative elements or whatever, so for me it’s not such a hard line between the two disciplines. Whatever technique will best solve a problem—assuming it’s within the limits of my abilities—I’ll give it a try.

Because we have access to such great films, we’re lucky enough to be able to call on the best illustrators in the world to work on them, so really it’s total hubris that I ever design anything myself. When I draw something myself, it’s usually because I have such a strong, specific idea of what it has to be that I would be literally dictating exactly what to draw and how, which is no fun for anyone. You’ve got to leave room for the artist to surprise you, otherwise why bother?

And on Newman’s own blog, Skillman selects his 10 favourite Criterion DVD covers.

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Wise Blood, illustration by Josh Cochran

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Published October 28, 2015

Criterion at Thirty

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In a fascinating piece for the Paris Review, art director and book designer Charlotte Strick talks to the Criterion Collection’s head art director Sarah Habibi, and designer/art director Eric Skillman about their work:

“There are cases where everyone thinks of a movie in one way, but Criterion feels the director was aiming to say something different than what is typically thought. So for us, it’s about repositioning the film to show that it’s not actually the film that marketing people said it was all those years ago.” Package design can do a lot of this work. Instead of traditional marketing meetings, Criterion holds what they call “brief meetings,” in which the staff reviews a film’s historical significance—where it occurred in the director’s career, its genre, the political climate, and so on. After a brief, they typically have two to three weeks for initial cover sketches. Habibi referred to this as “the heavy lifting period,” in which they aim to nail down the look and style they’re after. Once a cover direction has been selected, another three months is spent refining the artwork and carrying the visual language throughout the entire package so that the design feels truly unified. Design by committee, Habibi insisted, never produces the most inspired work, so to ensure that the designs don’t become muddled by too many voices, they strive to keep the approval process as simple as possible and the meetings quite intimate with only the art department, the in-house producer, and the most senior staff weighing in.

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Published October 22, 2015

Criterion Jacques Tati Covers by David Merveille

I am at least a year late on this, but I do love these covers for the Criterion Collection box set of Jacques Tati films. The illustrations are by Belgian illustrator David Merveille who has also created a series of books inspired by the work of Jacques Tati. Currently, only Hello, Mr. Hulot is available in English, but I believe a second book, Mr. Hulot on the Beach, will be published in English in 2016 by NorthSouth Books.

You can see more of David’s designs and illustrations for the box set on his blog.

Thanks to designer Andy Allen for bringing these covers to my attention. Images and other interesting stuff via Adrian Curry’s marvellous Movie Poster of the Week column.

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Published January 7, 2015

Criterion Designs

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Another book for the wishlist (because in a shocking development no one gave it to me for Christmas), Criterion Designs features covers, art, and sketches art commissioned for the Criterion Collection. It looks beautiful…

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Published January 31, 2011

Monday Miscellany

These are mostly links I was going to post on Friday, but with a long post on Mendelsund and a last minute WordPress fail (to add to all the usual pressures of part-time blogging) I thought I might as well hold them over until today. Think of it less as a bad end to last week, and a great start to this one (or something like that)…

Designer Eric Skillman on Adrian Tomine’s illustrations for the Criterion boxed set of Yasujiro Ozu’s The Only Son/There Was a Father.

And on the subject of Adrian Tomine, David L. Ulin reviews his new book Scenes From an Impending Marriage for The LA Times:

Tomine has always been a master of the small gesture, as anyone familiar with his work knows. Such encounters motivate the deceptively informal stories in his series “Optic Nerve,” as well as his graphic novel “Shortcomings,” which explores the limits of identity and intimacy. With “Scenes from an Impending Marriage,” though, he seems almost willfully understated, tracing, in a series of offhand comics, the peculiar rigors of the wedding dance, from guest lists to seating charts to invitations and beyond.

(For the record: several of Adrian’s books, including the new one, are distributed in Canada by my employer, Raincoast Books).

The Impulse to Write — Patti Smith talks about her writing and music in The Guardian:

“More than anything that’s been the thread through my life – the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it’s taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I’m not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock’n’roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty – I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.”

And finally…

London Intrusion — China Miéville, author most recently of The City and The City and Kraken, is posting a webcomic on Tumblr (via Robot 6).

(And speaking of Tumblr… Posts from here and The Accidental Optimist are now also available on Tumblr if that’s your thing.)

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Published February 11, 2009

The Back of My Head

The Caustic Cover Critic has posted some amazing book covers by the legendary Saul Bass that are just too good not to share:

I love the covers adapted from Bass’ movie posters for the Penguin editions of Saint Joan and Anatomy of a Murder, but this cover of Preminger: An Autobiography (pictured) is less well known. And it was nice to be reminded of the movie Yi Yi in which 8-year-old Yang-Yang makes it his mission to lovingly photograph the back of people’s heads…

…And in looking an image for Yi Yi, I came across a rather lovely post by designer Eric Skillman about creating the DVD edition for Criterion Collection:

The actor who played Yang Yang was obviously no longer available, so we had find a back-of-head double. We found a photographer (the talented Andre Constantini), who led us to a young model named Brian, the back of whose head was a fine match for Yang Yang.

Eric also designs books as it turns out. His blog looks great! A day of nice finds.

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