We recently received a new book called Translating Hollywood: The World of Movie Posters, which is all about how movie posters get different treatments in different countries. The example here shows the American and Polish versions of the Midnight Cowboy poster from 1969. Because the U.S. focuses on the star-system, it shows Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight looking all fancy and rugged on the street corner, while the Polish version "perfectly encapsulates the lust-filled, androgynous sin that was late 60s New York." Personally, I like the Polish movie posters the best because they became a direct response to the post-WWII government. Basically the government controlled culture (arts), though somehow the movie poster (along with theatre posters) were given some creative freedom, resulting in the best movie posters you've ever seen. I learned that from another book called A Century of Movie Posters: From Silent to Art House. This book has way more information about movie posters from around the world, but it doesn't provide side-by-side comparison like Translating Hollywood does. Another book to definitely check out is Art of the Modern Movie Poster. This book is huge, colorful, and pretty much all-around awesome. I suggest taking a look at these books for the different worldviews, great design, and pretty pictures. Also, if you head back to the PN1995.9.P5 section, you'll find a bunch more books about movie posters.
Results tagged “Art” from Iwasaki Library Blog
Well, my library colleagues have requested that I do a post about websites that I think are pretty freakin' sweet. Why you ask? Well, I'm not sure if you know this about the library staff, but we're all a bunch of nerds. Here's a short list of websites that I think are neato:
Sorted Books: Artist Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project involves arranging books on shelves to create sentences, poems, or just funny phrases.
Big Picture: Boston.com's Big Picture is just that, a bunch of high-resolution, beautiful photographs, emphasizing photojournalism. As the site says: "News stories in photographs." Updated daily.
Shorpy: The 100 year-old photo blog. Every picture reveals a little something about life in American in them olden' days. Oh yeah, and every single picture is amazing.
Vintagraph: I think this site is brought to you by the same people as Shorpy, but this time the focus is on historic American posters.
ArtStor: Available through Emerson's library databases. You can check out and search all sorts of pictures.
Now why would you need any of this? Like I said before, it's fun! Who doesn't like pretty pictures? But also, things like posters from WWI or advertisements from the 50s can say a lot about the visual communication and values from those times.
ARTstor contains over 500,000 images of art, architecture and archeology. Database features include support for viewing and analyzing images through zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline.
Collections within the database include the Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection, Native American Art and Culture, The Museum of Modern Art Architecture and Design Collection, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, The Huntington Archive of Asian Art, The Carnegie Arts of the United States Collection, The Illustrated Bartsch and The Art History Survey Collection.
Access this database from the Library website by choosing "Articles and More," then "Databases A-Z."
Visual and Media Arts Chair Michael Selig, Cher Knight, Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Arts, and Stephen Shipps, Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts, worked closely with Coordinator of Web Development and Reference Librarian James Capobianco to make access to ARTstor possible.