Playlist: Fonts for the silver screen

In her recent contribution, Hee showed that Barbarella was presented to cinema-goers in the United Kingdom in Edelgotisch. In the United States and also in several European countries, the typeface associated with the 1968 science fiction movie is Peignot. Various posters feature its Bold weight, with tight letterspacing and often with contoured letterforms. On the US One Sheet poster shown directly below, Cassandre’s 1937 design can be see with alternating glyph colors and a shower of stars. The initial B and the double l were lowered so that they sit flush with the other letters (except for the b), further increasing the whimsical appeal of Peignot. In Ugo Tognazzi’s name, the G had to lose its descender, for a vertically more compact line. The art on that poster (and the international variants shown further below) is by Robert McGinnis, who turned 98 last week.

Perfect Days is the latest film by Wim Wenders. Based on a script written by Wenders together with Takuma Takasaki, the Japanese-German co-production combines four short stories and stars Kōji Yakusho in the role of a janitor. Match Factory, who handles the world sales, describes the film as follows: Hirayama seems utterly content with his simple life as a cleaner of toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his very structured everyday routine he enjoys his passion for music and for books. And he loves trees and takes photos of them. A series of unexpected encounters gradually reveal more of his past. A deeply moving and poetic reflection on finding beauty in the everyday world around us. The film premiered on 25 May at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d’Or and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for Kōji Yakusho. It was selected as the Japanese entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. Perfect Days will hit theaters in Germany and Japan later this month. Shown here is the typography for the trailer by US distributor NEON. It uses a single typeface, the bold weight of Granville, exclusively in capitals. Designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée and available from Production Type, this modulated sans is a reinterpretation of the thick-thin style that was a mainstay of signs and posters, as well as advertising text during the mid 20th century. It is built with a rational construction like the early French Moderns, yet without a tie to any specific period or model. In the various text cards, Granville’s letterforms can be seen in interplay with the images: street lanterns were isolated so that they appear in front of the type. The praise from Next Best Picture follows the camera panning as if the text was affixed to the trees. Hirayama and Niko (played by Arisa Nakano) ride their bikes between two lines of text. A van crosses the scene, momentarily obscuring the blurb’s sender. Such spatial illusions with a back and forth between foreground and background are common in static designs (see the “flat depth” tag here on Fonts In Use), but feel still quite fresh in moving images.