Thursday, 3:10pm
8 August 2013
Cover story
You’ve seen that face before. But why is Jeanne Moreau (as seen in La Notte) staring soulfully from the cover of Eye 85?
The cover of the current issue, Eye 85, has attracted lots of (largely welcome) attention in recent weeks, writes editor John L. Walters.
The image is an enlargement of a detail from a poster shown in ‘Screen prints’, Rick Poynor’s article about student film posters from the Royal College of Art’s archive.
RCA Film Society poster for La Notte (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), designed by Brian Denyer, silkscreen, 14 March 1963.
Top: the EYEsight winning entry, by designer Richard Marston.
Brian Denyer’s poster for La Notte shows Kodalith-style high-contrast images of two of the movie’s three stars – Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni – that appear to have been taken from a black and white publicity shot taken for the movie. (The third star is Monica Vitti.)
Publicity photograph of Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni for La Notte, 1961.
The photograph was taken on location during a scene that appears early in the movie – you can’t freeze-frame the film and find an image quite like it.
La Notte trailer, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961.
Yet it was a perfect choice for Denyer’s film poster – Moreau wears this impossible-to-read expression throughout the movie, while the complexities of her relationship with Mastroianni’s character are played out.
Jeanne overlooks the architecture of New York and Milan, photographed by art directors Chris Dixon and Kuchar Swara.
Sarah Snaith photographed as a mirror image of Moreau.
The cover of Eye 85 photographed with Lego (courtesy of Florence) by Ben Stott.
Photograph by Catherine Griffiths in New Zealand.
Moreau now stares back at us in countless locations, from bookshop windows, windowsills in Milan and New York, a French car in New Zealand and in the letterpress studio at the LCC, thanks to the EYEsight competition that we ran on Eye’s Facebook page during June 2013.
The winning entry, by Richard Marston, shows a subtly altered Jeanne wearing black headphones, perhaps listening to Giorgio Gaslini’s introspective jazz quartet from La Notte’s soundtrack.
La Notte’s soundtrack: the Giorgio Gaslini quartet play ‘Blues All’Alba’.
More about the EYEsight competition on Eye’s Facebook page.
Eye 85 on display in the window of Artwords in Rivington St, London.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions, back issues and single copies of the latest issue. You can see what Eye 85 looks like at Eye before You Buy on Vimeo.