The Anatomy of a Movie Poster: Audition

“There is nothing new under the sun”—when they wrote this in the Bible, I’m sure they weren’t thinking of graphic designers, but that’s definitely a profession it could apply to. Every new idea has some sort of precedent or echo from the past. Nothing in design is ever really original or new.

But that’s not so bad after all. Visual elements get reused because they have a certain power. They work. And we, the audience, also look for familiarity in things (even if something completely new was possible, we probably wouldn’t like it.). With each new project, the job of a designer is to strike the delicate balance of originality and familiarity.

When starting a new project, faced with a blank canvas, we rely on past experience. New work emerges in part through earlier work. Solutions that worked before could work again. No one (hopefully) sets out to make plagiarism, but as visual people, we are constantly in some kind of relationship with work by other designers—everything we see in books, online and around us on a daily basis. Judging by how hectic the design process can sometimes be (often it’s described as dancing tango with the client, but maybe a less elegant dance could also apply?), it’s impossible to plan or predict what ends up as final artwork. But we hope it’s something not quite seen before—a somewhat new combination of elements which makes it unique and memorable enough. And once the work is done, we can start searching for the inspiration which wasn’t known at the time.

One of the coolest books on my design bookshelf is The Anatomy of Design by Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic. The authors dissect fifty examples of graphic design (posters, packages, etc.), revealing their influences, or just similar things that happened in the past. It’s certainly an entertaining way to dig through design history. It’s also a way to establish that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. Everything is derived from what came before. Each artwork has its own visual baggage.

This book inspired me to try and do something similar with my own design work, so what follows is a dissection of the poster for Audition (1999), a disturbing Japanese thriller by Takashi Miike. The point of this exercise is to have fun and to highlight a bunch of great design(er)s in the process! Can you think of other examples as well? Let me know!

Let’s have a more detailed view of these 9 sections below! Each artwork is listed in the description (with credits where possible).

Dark Zero Thirty [movie poster], design by Ignition
West Side Story [movie poster], design by Joseph Caroff
Real Australians Say Welcome [poster], design by Peter Drew
The Cardinal [movie poster], design by Saul Bass
Tout Va Bien [movie poster]

Asako I & II [movie poster], design by Sam Smith
Belladonna of Sadness
[movie poster], design by Kuni Fukai
Julieta [movie poster], design by Barfutura
Titane [movie poster], design by La Boca
Carrie [movie poster]

Knight of Cups [movie poster], design by Midnight Marauder
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [movie poster]
De Stijl [journal cover], design by Theo van Doesburg
Fritz August Breuhaus De Groot [book cover]

Claes Oldenburg by Barbara Rose [catalog cover]
Fetisch by Xmal Deutschland [album cover], design by Vaughan Oliver
Pirelli [book cover]

A.I. [movie poster], design by Intralink Film Graphic Design
A by Louis Zukofsky[book cover], design by John E. Johnson Jr.
A Clockwork Orange [movie poster], design by Bill Gold

Tesla [movie poster], design by Brandon Schaefer
AEG Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft [poster]
Enemy [movie poster], design by Sam Smith
Metropolis [movie poster], design by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm

Dancer in the Dark [movie poster], design by POV
SVA [poster], design by Mirko Ilić
I Love NY More Than Ever, design by Milton Glaser
Typographie by Emil Ruder [book cover], design by Emil Ruder SWB
Cooper Black [type specimen]

Esquire [magazine cover], photograph by Carl Fischer
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote [book cover], design by S. Neil Fujita
Hellraiser [movie poster]

Colossal [movie poster], design by Akiko Stehrenberger
Painting [acrylic on a cigar box] by Edel Rodriguez
Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret [litograph], by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The Archer [journal cover]
Charlie Chaplin by Erich Burger [book cover]

Neven Udovicic1 Comment