Image and Text

As these will undoubtedly come out much the worse for wear if I print them, I'm just posting links to the pictures I chose. They are various bits of box art from the Criterion Collection, a NY based company dedicated to the remastering and rereleasing of important films.

Monsters & Madmen

This is a boxset filled with bad horror films from the late 50s, half of them starring Boris Karloff. The box art was a deliberate attempt to emulate the great old film posters for these sorts of films that would have been put into circulation around the time of their initial release. I love them because they juxtapose vivid colors, campy, yet ghoulsih font, and cartoonish reproductions of horrible images. It's playful and draws the eye in. To see the individual boxes, simply go here.

W.R. Mysteries of the Organism

The art here is fittingly kaleidoscopic and busy, because the film it represents is similarly so. The film, a half fiction-half documentary film on social reform through sexual liberation by Yugoslavia's greatest auteur Dusan Makavejev, is a blistering indictment of societal repression. The artwork incorporates a sterile font, representative of the calm waters that the movie was trying to shake, the film's pastel color scheme with multi-colored images of the people, real and fake, who grace the screen, entering the discourse whether they knew it or not.

Port of Shadows

Port of Shadows, is a poetic realist film about, as many of them were, wayward symbols of masculinity and femininity clashing over bleak backgrounds, their eyes always pointed at the stars and sparkling, their hair lit by the fill light. This box art appealed to me the instant I saw it, those beautiful blue colours making up a pitch-perfect noir set-up; two lovers under a giant cargo ship bound for the sea; plot be damned, I had to have it. The film was only slightly dissappointing after observing the slick craft of the cover, but, I can't complain when it comes to the French.

Withnail And I

This design is something of a rarity. The movie, Withnail & I, is a little like the Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas of Britain. With that in mind, I suppose it was only fitting that they commissioned Hunter Thompson's artist-in-crime Ralph Steadman, the man responsible for most of Thompson's book covers. Steadman, the master of the grotesque, upset many when he was out in the field in the early days, and so it was only natural that such a troubling movie would need the feverish hand of a mind like his. The cover comes complete with Steadman's indecipherable, yet rakish handwriting, as does the Criterion's release of Fear & Loathing, when they released it a year or so later.


Bonus: The Third Man

I couldn't get it down to just four, so here's an extra one. This is noir personified and the cover only scratches the surface of this brilliantly nuanced, thrillingly composed post-war masterpiece. Anyway, I'm starting to sound like a salesman. But you should watch these movies, they're awesome.