I am in love with this poster. If you have seen the movie, you will understand the design elements, and I think it’s perfect. The haunting bleeding melting colors that break up the “acts” of Punch-Drunk Love were created by Jeremy Blake, a successful artist, whose notorious recent suicide (a double-suicide apparently – he and his girlfriend both died) is a very strange story – he was being harassed by Scientologists, apparently? I haven’t been following up with that story, but it sure was a strange one. More details here.
Thanks to The Auteur’s Notebook for this image, and also other images in the same series.
It’s a film I am not just fond of, but love intensely, so I was so interested to see other versions of the poster, that seemed to capture the emotionality and subjective dream-space that the film lives in.
Haunting is exactly the word that came to mind when I first looked at it. It’s also like a muddled prism – a progression, but a select one. This poster rocks.
Those are breathtaking; but the silhouette on the lowest right example brings Shelley Duvall’s “He Needs Me” to mind, which is lovely and resonant in its own right.
I’d never heard of chirashi before. In addition to seeming a nice collectible (something I’m not into, but I get the impulse), they’ve a wonderful name if I’m correct in understanding it reads as “scatters” as a noun. The implied impermanence makes them seem less a marketing nuisance and more a natural eruption, overwhelming you like blossoms or butterflies for a few weeks, then vanished once their season has passed.
I just read the Vanity Fair article about Jeremy Blake and his girlfriend. Terrible story. Fascinating and sad. I got the impression that they were paranoid and THOUGHT they were being harassed but maybe they really weren’t. Very mysterious story over all.
Anyhoo, love the poster, love the movie!
I too just read the Vanity Fair article. I’m not sure how I missed this fascinating story the first time around, but now I’m mildly obsessed. Did you know that Bret Easton Ellis and Gus Van Sant are writing a screenplay based on their story? The movie is slated for 2011.
// makes them seem less a marketing nuisance and more a natural eruption, overwhelming you like blossoms or butterflies for a few weeks, then vanished once their season has passed. //
Beautiful! I did not know that about “scatters” but it’s really beautiful. Those bleeding melting colors are one of the striking things about that striking film – they start off blue, and then warm up to red and orange in the middle and cool off again – I just thought it was so cool, and used really well. It served the story – wasn’t just a trick.
But yes: that silhouette poster is gorgeous too.
I just love the movie – should see it again.
Bren – yeah, that’s my impression, too – that they somehow got embroiled in a mutual clusterfuck – I really do wonder what the whole story is. Interesting that Anderson is doing a movie about Scientology, with my boyfriend Jeremy Renner now on board. I wonder about the connections – is it the story of that couple (who were his friends)? I am out of the loop.
Cullen – yeah, seeing all of those images at Auteur’s is really something … all the different variations in those dreamy color schemes. Very cool!
Sheila: “I did not know that about “scatters” but it’s really beautiful.”
I’m basing that on the description at the Auteur’s Notebook link: “the word is derived from the verb âchirasuââto scatter, disperse.”
I’ve no doubt brought my own associations to a nondescript term in translation.
It is an interesting concept – especially when you see all those different designs side by side. Rather unbalancing.
Something that interested me about the poster is that they didn’t try to translate the title into Japanese. They usually do, often adapting it freely, with films like Sleepless in Seattle becoming “if we should meet by chance…”, and An Officer and A Gentleman becoming “setting out on a journey of love and youth” (a very clumsy literal translation).
In this case, they just spelled it out phonetically. As far as I can tell from my references, “panchi doranku” didn’t show up as a loanword until fairly recently, so it looks like the movie title popularized the phrase in Japan. Must have been a hit.
As for chirashi, the verb chirasu does mean “to scatter”, but also “to distribute”. Any sort of leaflet or handout is a chirashi: grocery-store coupons, tourist guide at a shrine, call-girl ad stuffed into your mailbox (“pink chirashi”), etc. In a non-leaflet context, chirashi would be “a scattering”, as in “a scattering of leaves”, etc.
-j
J Greely – I love that bit about the translation. Thanks for that – I had no idea!