This past weekend, I noticed a poster for The Descent, this year's entry into the subterranean horror flick subgenre (didn't we do that last year?) I knew immediately that I'd seen a similar image before, and that this was somehow inferior and not quite as nuanced.
A google search quickly turned up In Volupta Mors, a 1951 photograph by Philippe Halsman in collaboration with Savador Dalí. The Descent image is short one woman -- which makes sense, since there are five six women in the movie -- and of course they're all fully clothed. But those are minor details.
The big flaw is the backlighting. The human eye has a natural tendency to see whatever contrasts with the background as being the positive image. The creamy white skin of the women in Halsman and Dalí's skull beautifully simulates bleached bone, and contrasts clearly with the dark background in a way that makes sense to our eyes. But in the Descent image, the background is dark and so are the women. The bright backlighting coming through what ought to be the negative space of the eyes, nose and mouth is made more the focus of the image. It distracts from the skull iconography. It's not obliterated, but it's secondary to the perceived positive image of the backlighting.
While I was searching for In Volupta Mors, I came across an interesting tidbit: this isn't the first time the image has been used in a film poster. It appears very small and minus the jaw and sides on the poster for Silence of the Lambs, on the abdomen of the moth.
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Interesting. I've been seeing that poster all around town and while I thought it was clever, it didn't look like a skull upon first glance but you obviously knew to dig deeper. It also bugged me like it did you but I couldn't articulate why but you've done that for me!
In the IVM original, you see the skull first and then realize that it's made up on people. The question is, which, in terms of impact, should be seen first? I prefer the original and latter: the skull first for impact and then trying to figure out what it's made of.
It's in the details after all. The effect is displayed well in this Kozy N Dan poster.
As an aside, this film is MUCH better than the US marketing campaign makes it out to be. It's one of the few genuinely scary films I've seen in years, and one of the best films (horror or non) that I've seen this year.
There are actually six women in the movie and its poster. Seven on the original In Volupta Mors. Great observations, though. I've seen the movie as well and it's definitely one of the better horror movies to come out in awhile. However, I read in Entertainment Weekly that the US version features a different, less hopeless ending.
Duh, you're absolutely right, Mike. That's what I get for counting while watching "Project Runway." I corrected the post.
Mike - this is not good news. I was looking forward to seeing the original British version sans American futzing. Argh!
I imagine they put more thought into drumming this image up than just "this looks cool." To me, the impact of the marketed image is clearly the suffering of the individuals contained therein: Hell is most clearly implied by the agony on the woman's face first, the firey light around her second, and tortured and submissive (dead?) poses of her sisters collected around her. In conveying that message, if indeed it is the one intended but the advertisers, I think the image works quite successfully. It's also a Hollywood-generated chunk of marketing - like it or not, Hollywood has a low view of American viewers' appreciation of sophistication and they typically resort to BOLD over sophisticated. Again: in my mind, the image succeeds in this aspect as well.
Yes, the skull-of-women alone and properly lighted could imply "scary horror film" and they could've relied more on the "original" version of this image to accomplish this. Having not seen the film, I can't make the following question with any claim to being contextually valid, but: I wonder if the poster is meant more to convey to a viewer a direct contextual reference to the film's content (conditioning what a filmgoer can expect to see and assuring them that their decision to view it is a good one) and convey less a nod to the visual debt it owes its artistic predacessor?
That said, I also feel the need to point out that a skull and tortured humans, separately, are a universal images that have existed long throughout our history, and that Dali and his friend are one of numerous artists to use both in their work. It's inevitable that if Dali and co. had not arrived at the image of the two synthesized themselves, another artist (probably Freida Khalo) or artists would have - frankly, its just too obvious to resist (which is not the same thing as saying bad). It's also entirely possible that the movie's advertisers genuinely arrived at the image independent of knowledge of Dali's first and realized the coincidence only after they'd settled on it as iconic of their movie. Coincidences, in my mind, do not always imply rational artistic choice to in someway reproduce the work of another artist - they could just be coincidentally similar. For that reason, I'm not always sure that it's the best course of action to judge the "reproduction" against the "original" - it seems to me to be fundamentally disrespectful of the work in question and doesn't honestly assess whether the image works on its own merits; rather, it first looks at its supposed predacessor, determines its merits, and then holds the image in question to those standards. The unfortunate failing of this method is that the intent for the creation of the two images could very well be very different, so the artists generated them differently to satisfy those different intents, and so the newer work is inherently more likely to fail a test of quality if its being held to a standard/ideal that it never set out to meet in the first place.
I disagree with you on several points, Bran.
1. I don't think it's at all likely that this exact configuration of figures to form a skull could have arisen coincidentally. It's an almost exact duplication of a well-known image. And while skulls and women are well-trodden forms in art, it *is* rare that they're combined into one. I disagree that Kahlo (why her? it's not typical of her imagery) or any other artist would have come up with this exact design. It's not an inevitable creation -- there are much simpler and cruder ways of creating a skull out of the human form.
2. I don't think they chose this imagery simply because it looks cool, but I also think you're giving the designers more credit than they deserve. I see nothing "tortured and submissive" in the poses of the other women -- none of their faces are visible, and their body language is not tense or stressed in any way. They do help communicate that a group of women suffer in the film, but mostly they serve to complete the skull.
3. While I certainly made comparisons between the original and the copy, my criticism of the imagery would stand even if its predecessor didn't exist: the backlighting detracts from the iconography of skull. You're right that it helps highlight the screaming woman, but from across a train platform or down the street, the woman loses detail and the skull becomes the primary image.
4. But overall, you're mistaking a simple design critique for art criticism. This is a movie poster, not a work of art. It quotes from an actual work of art, but does so in a way that weakens the imagery it lifts. Would you be so defensive of a crappy Magritte knock-off?
Thinking about it further, I really don't get why they used this image, since it doesn't communicate much of what the movie is about -- which is creepy orc-like creatures preying on a group of female spelunkers. Sure, the woman at top is screaming and there's whisps of figures in the darkness around the central image, but what does a skull have to do with "the descent" beyond obvious death symbology.
It makes sense with Silence of the Lambs -- the death-head moth plays a part in the film, and the skull of women makes sly reference to the serial killer's prey.
I just wrote a little about the film here, and as regards the worries about the endings, they're true.
Mike - the US version just cuts off the last three minutes. And it's pretty unfortunate. I can be more explicit about it if you email me, but I don't want to ruin it for anyone who might check it out.
Also, film posters can be works of art. Just not any recently. And certainly not this one.
"...and as regards the worries about the endings, they're true?" That doesn't make any sense.
I meant the worries are valid. Or that it's true that the ending was changed. Blah.
Done here a little differently, but still a cool concept.
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