![]() He has also designed album covers for, among others, Stereolab, Oasis and his close friends Broadcast who scored Berberian Sound Studio and of which he is an occasional member. House is also co-owner of Ghost Box-“a record label for a group of artists exploring the musical history of a parallel world”-for whom he also records as The Focus Group as well as designs all the Penguin-inspired packaging. It was these designs above all which inspired me to write about Berberian in time for its US release. Not long after the release of the film in the UK last year, a number of House’s dazzling alternative designs for the film’s poster were leaked, all of them, even more so than the official poster, in House’s very recognizable collage style combining extreme halftones, splashes of blood, torn snatches of package design, concentric circles, tape reels and a ravishing duotone color palette. You can watch it here, but I’d highly recommend seeing it in the context of the film first. He designed the 70s-era tape boxes seen within the film and, most notably, created-and even came up with the idea for-the superb fake credit sequence for The Equestrian Vortex, the film that Gilderoy is working on. The UK campaign was designed by Julian House, a brilliant graphic designer, filmmaker and musician who was part of Berberian Sound Studio from its inception. The UK quad eschews the equipment and focusses on Gilderoy’s mental schism, but the official release poster only tells half the story. The poster also conveys the schizophrenic terror of Gilderoy’s gradual unraveling. ![]() Shot by Nic Knowland who has shot both of the Quay Brothers’ features (it is also co-produced by the Quays’ producer Keith Griffiths), the film is a masterpiece of macro photography, full of close-ups of switches and knobs and reels. Schaefer’s poster nods to Strickland’s, and Gilderoy’s, obsession with recording equipment. Well out of his comfort zone of bucolic home counties nature docs, Gilderoy is required to record sound effects, mostly created with a fecund array of fruit and veg, for skull-splittings, red-hot-poker-rape and script directions such as “the dangerously aroused goblin is stalking the dormitory.” Daniel Kasman wrote most perceptively about the film in these pages when it played in the New York Film Festival last year. ![]() I particularly like his introduction about his personal design education, his process piece about Simon Killer, and his rant against the facile nature of fan art minimalism (though I do think there he omits giving praise where praise is occasionally due).īerberian Sound Studio is a mysterious and atmospheric thriller about a meek English sound engineer named Gilderoy who is thrust into a nightmare of Italian machismo, giallio violence and bureaucratic indifference when he is hired to work on a “ thrilling all’italiana” in Rome. The startling grayscale collage of the US one sheet was designed by the suddenly prolific Brandon Schaefer who, as IFC Films’ new house designer, has designed two of my other favorite posters of the year so far, for Simon Killer and Gimme the Loot. He has also started giving me a run for my money writing about movie posters for. Peter Strickland’s British horror deconstruction Berberian Sound Studio opened yesterday in a crowded field of fifteen new releases, but if graphic design was all it took to get people into theaters BSS should be way ahead of the field.
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