A whole movie in one image

March 18, 2009 10:31 PM

Movie posters carry the movie in one still image. But they're also a great overview of trends, both artistic and popular. Modern major film posters are common enough, and if you're looking for some discussion of modern posters, Movie Poster Addict might be your scene. But dig deeper and you come across quality versions of foreign films, such as Mexican posters (deep link to a section of Pulp Morgue) or hand painted posters from Russia, India and Pakistan, even the US. MeFi's own flapjax at midnite shared a collection of recent finds from the 1960s and '70s on in this Flickr set. [flapjax at midnite's collection via mefi projects] Some-what pre-vious-ly on Me-ta-Filter. And not from MetaFilter, but from our favorite list site: 20 baffling foreign movie posters.
posted by filthy light thief (13 comments total)

Neat. Pignouf has some nice vintage movie posters too.
posted by tellurian at 11:04 PM on March 18

My favorite places to buy film posters (aside from eBay) are:

Posteriati - great selection, not so great prices

and

Polish Posters - Lee Marvin in THE KLANSMAN is a great image (of course I'm a big Lee Marvin fan...)
posted by cinemafiend at 11:15 PM on March 18

Actually, that first Polish Alien poster from the Baffling link is pretty inventive and, I think, pretty well respected. The authors of the article misinterpret the ribs as an attempt at a skull when obviously the idea of something living being embedded in a person's ribcage is pretty spot on. The poster is metaphorical of course, the Alien has no eyes. Also the literal translation of the title is "the 8th passenger of the Nostromo"

The rest of that list is pretty spot on and funny. Some of the descriptions make me feel like I'm playing Broken Picture Telephone. "Patrick from Spongebob tries to avoid being prison-raped by Giant Aardvark Man."
posted by Brainy at 11:21 PM on March 18

I think this guy has done the best job of discussing the polish movie poster phenomenon.
posted by incessant at 11:58 PM on March 18 [1 favorite has favorites]

I LOVE Polish and Czech movie posters. Stop making me want more of them.

One of my friends recently turned me on to these amazing hand painted posters from Ghana. Apparently, during the eighties, peopel would travel with a VCR, television, and somevideos, and these posters were painted especially to advertise the event. The lucky bastard had recently recieved the book Extreme Canvas as a gift, and was justifiably pretty thrilled.
posted by louche mustachio at 1:28 AM on March 19 [2 favorites has favorites]

I have always found it weird to have these posters where the names don't line up with the images.
Example
posted by MtDewd at 3:34 AM on March 19

MtDewd - the answer is contractuals. I generally work on smallish indie titles, so it's not something I'm restricted with every time, but when it does come up, it can certainly make life interesting.
posted by bokeh at 3:42 AM on March 19

Good post, by the way!
posted by bokeh at 3:43 AM on March 19

Actually, this is a whole move in one image.
posted by mmoncur at 4:09 AM on March 19

Thanks for all the additional links. This was built around flapjax's photos, and I was unsure where to go next for photos. I figured others could add onto this in some fantastic ways, and y'all did. There are a lot of sites that sell interesting movie posters, but their photos are too small or watermarked in annoying ways.
posted by filthy light thief at 6:25 AM on March 19

mmoncur - I was hoping for a photo montage. That's an interesting display, and something akin to evaluating the color of top grossing movie posters could be done for whole film. A really interesting mash-up of ideas would be to take movie stills from a film and re-create one of the movie posters via a photo mosaic.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:34 AM on March 19

My favorite restaurant as a kid had giant movie posters from Italy up on one wall. I loved them and still want to know if the Wayne's World poster actually said "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl" or something else entirely. I spent A LOT of time pondering that at age ten.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 12:37 PM on March 19

The Polish posters are seriously badass. I saw no less than five I want now, 'cept I don't have enough wall space.
posted by jquinby at 4:36 PM on March 19