Daily Book Graphics #1404

©1965

Daily Book Graphics #1228

©1969 / Design: Alfred Manso

Daily Book Graphics #764

©1971

Daily Book Graphics #698

©1963 / ©1974

Daily Book Graphics #300 / Theories of Film

©1973

Daily Book Graphics #257 / Truffaut

©1972 / Edited and designed by Ian Cameron

Daily Book Graphics #88 / Woody Allen

This book was published in 1982. Cover design: Joel Weltman

Daily Book Graphics #58 / The DVD of the 1960's

In the days before VHS and DVD the only way to revisit a film you had seen was to buy a book of the script with pictures. L'avventura was published in 1969, the film came out in 1960, I am Curious (Yellow), was 1968, the film was released in 1967. I haven't seen L'avventura, but I recently watched I am Curious. It is interesting as a piece of unorthodox filmmaking and as a document of Swedish culture on the cusp of change. It was very controversial at the time for the sexual content, of course by 2009 standards it seems pretty tame. In 1970 the film was the subject of an obscenity case in Massachusetts that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was ultimately deemed to not be obscene.

I love this logo for Evergreen Black Cat Books from the L'avventura cover. Both books were published by Evergreen, an imprint of Grove Press

Herzog in the Snow

We went to see Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World on Saturday night. I thought it was really good, and I recommend that it be seen on the big screen. At times he seems to take his Teutonic pessimism a bit too far in the narration, but it ends up being so funny that it all works. Needless to say, he side steps the normal documentary cliches and he doesn't seem to feel any need to shoe horn every encounter into some tight narrative arc.

Herzog in the Jungle

I just found out that Werner Herzog's new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, is opening today in Buffalo. I'm excited to see it. Lately, I've been watching a lot of nature documentaries as I mull over some ideas for future projects. I find Herzog's attitude towards nature a refreshing counter to the pseudo religious cliches about harmony that one finds in most nature documentaries. The best example of it is the clip below (from a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo), where he talks about the "obscenity" and "overwhelming collective murder" of the jungle. After spending a year plus looking at the nightmarish world of spiders, I'm sympathetic to his characterization of nature. He starts talking at the 36 second mark.