Work of Art / Art that Works
Lasting impressions: experts visit the Campus to discuss the importance of a good movie poster.
Fred Roos
At 24 frames a second, the ordinary feature film contains well over a million in its entire running time. The question is, which one of those millions of frames do you isolate into the seductive stillness of the movie poster? How do you choose the frozen image that could best sell the moving images? At this year’s Berlinale Talent Campus, a special panel shared its expertise on the subject in a session titled “Choosing Images: Posters That Hook An Audience“.
Graphic designer Helga Rechenbach emphasized the persisting centrality of the poster to contemporary marketing practices. “The poster“, she said, “is the leitmotif of the whole campaign.“ Art director and photographer Peter Sickert, known for his work on the posters of films by Fassbinder, Wenders and Godard, argued that the best results usually came from involving the poster artists as early on in the project as possible, perhaps even giving them a copy of the script and inviting them to the set while filming. Similarly, producer Fred Roos emphasized the importance of having a good still photographer on the set, guaranteeing a variety of high-quality, professional photos which could be chosen from at the design stage.
Roos, a stalwart of the American film industry for well over three decades with producer credits on such Coppola classics as APOCALYPSE NOW, THE GODFATHER PART II, and THE CONVERSATION, noted that in Hollywood film directors and producers often have very little say in a marketing campaign devised by corporate interests. As a result, the movie poster is caught between the filmmaker’s commitment to creating a work of art, and the distributor’s commitment to creating art that works. Sofia Coppola, he reveals, was very clear about what she wanted for the poster for her film MARIE ANTOINETTE. “She didn’t want something that gave away the story, she wanted something that conveyed the feel of the film, the ‘let-them-have-bread’ sense of it all.“ Coppola won. “You have to know how to get your way with the distributors”, Roos says. Not that this movie veteran isn’t without his regrets. “Sometimes I think we may have gone wrong with the idea for THE CONVERSATION poster”, he reveals, “I mean maybe putting a toilet in there turned people off”.
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