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Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters
From the collection of New York City's Posteritati, and proprietor Sam Sarowitz's personal collection, Translating Hollywood delivers a fresh perspective on movie posters. How does the US poster for Blue Velvet differ from the Italian poster? How did Japanese distributors try to portray Raiders of the Lost Ark as compared to the Polish? The differences are about much more than language.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 29, 2019
A delight for film buffs and pop art collectors
Many of the posters presented in this very attractive book are “translations” (actually representations) of Hollywood movies, but some are the other way around, Hollywood poster translations of foreign films. The selections are from the world-renowned collection of Sam Sarowitz from the Posteritati Gallery Collection in New York. The emphasis is on famous movies: Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Sunset Boulevard, The 400 Blows, La Dolce Vita, The Birds, Dr. Strangelove, My Fair Lady, Chinatown, Annie Hall, etc. In the case of each film, posters are present in brilliant color or black and white as the case may be from various countries showing the varying ways that artists sought to promote the film. Thus presented are three posters of John Schlesinger’s 1975 film The Day of the Locust. The one from Germany, which also graces the cover of the book, shows a green female silhouette burning in front of the Paramount Studio logo. The French poser of Le Jour du Fleau is an abstraction of a woman’s head with puckered lips for her eyes floating ethereally above a celluloid clip of a grasping hand and below that a Hollywood sign in lights The US poster shows an eerie Karen Black in lights above a mob seemingly reaching for perhaps the Hollywood dream.
There is some sprightly commentary about each of the posters sets. Here’s the take on the three posters advertising Roger Corman’s The Trip (1968):
“This title can be construed many ways, though all three posters exude the trappings of a drug-induced trip, a popular theme in 1967. Kaleidoscopic coloring, 1960s rock poster lettering, and the superimposed blurry forms scream LSD, as does the use of those three letters on all of these posters. Most interesting about this is the fact that on the American poster the acronym is converted to ‘Lovely Story of Death’ while the Japanese decided on ‘A Love Story of Dream.’ (Of course, everyone knows that LSD stands for ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’)”
The poster reproductions are beautifully realized on heavy glossy paper on pages that are about 7 by 11 inches with no more than two posters on any given page so that these old eyes do not have to strain to see the fine print.
There’s a brief introduction to the book followed by a mini word portrait of Sam Sarowitz, both written by Dave Kehr. In the latter I learned that the highest price ever paid for a movie poster was $700,000 for the German poster of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). That poster does not appear in this book since the earliest images are from movies from the 1940s. The final set on pages 172-173 features three posters from Spain, England and the US of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs from 1992.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the sensational mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
Many of the posters presented in this very attractive book are “translations” (actually representations) of Hollywood movies, but some are the other way around, Hollywood poster translations of foreign films. The selections are from the world-renowned collection of Sam Sarowitz from the Posteritati Gallery Collection in New York. The emphasis is on famous movies: Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Sunset Boulevard, The 400 Blows, La Dolce Vita, The Birds, Dr. Strangelove, My Fair Lady, Chinatown, Annie Hall, etc. In the case of each film, posters are present in brilliant color or black and white as the case may be from various countries showing the varying ways that artists sought to promote the film. Thus presented are three posters of John Schlesinger’s 1975 film The Day of the Locust. The one from Germany, which also graces the cover of the book, shows a green female silhouette burning in front of the Paramount Studio logo. The French poser of Le Jour du Fleau is an abstraction of a woman’s head with puckered lips for her eyes floating ethereally above a celluloid clip of a grasping hand and below that a Hollywood sign in lights The US poster shows an eerie Karen Black in lights above a mob seemingly reaching for perhaps the Hollywood dream.
There is some sprightly commentary about each of the posters sets. Here’s the take on the three posters advertising Roger Corman’s The Trip (1968):
“This title can be construed many ways, though all three posters exude the trappings of a drug-induced trip, a popular theme in 1967. Kaleidoscopic coloring, 1960s rock poster lettering, and the superimposed blurry forms scream LSD, as does the use of those three letters on all of these posters. Most interesting about this is the fact that on the American poster the acronym is converted to ‘Lovely Story of Death’ while the Japanese decided on ‘A Love Story of Dream.’ (Of course, everyone knows that LSD stands for ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’)”
The poster reproductions are beautifully realized on heavy glossy paper on pages that are about 7 by 11 inches with no more than two posters on any given page so that these old eyes do not have to strain to see the fine print.
There’s a brief introduction to the book followed by a mini word portrait of Sam Sarowitz, both written by Dave Kehr. In the latter I learned that the highest price ever paid for a movie poster was $700,000 for the German poster of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). That poster does not appear in this book since the earliest images are from movies from the 1940s. The final set on pages 172-173 features three posters from Spain, England and the US of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs from 1992.
--Dennis Littrell, author of the sensational mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
August 10, 2012
Not much of substance, but interesting if you care to learn (more visually than verbally) how movie posters are designed and with what intentions. Some ideas might even surprise you. In any case, it is neat coffee-table book for random browsing through pages.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews