It’s been a busy few months since the start of the year with four new World Film Location books hitting the shelves at once; Vancouver, Marseilles, Chicago and Venice. It’s a joy as ever to work on these books as each editor puts heart and soul into delivering a well researched, well written and entertaining manuscript for me to beautify. I can’t quite believe that we’ve now produced 22 titles in less than two years. The accumulation of content and the fantastic feedback I’ve received about the series as whole is both gratifying and encouraging.

The series has recently come to the attention of the V&A in London who invited me to talk about Los Angeles and film to coincide with their Hollywood Costume exhibition which ran from October last year until January 2013. My lecture accompanied others by Prof Clive Webb who spoke about LA as a city of angels and demons and Prof. Greg Votolato who’s lecture title was ‘the Architecture of Autopia’. The talks are part of the V&A’s Style Cities series. It was a real honour to speak at such a prestigious venue and, following a talk given last weekend about Venice onscreen, I’ve been asked back to talk about Berlin in June and New Orleans in September, both of which are cities that we’ve produced books for. The lectures are great fun and it’s been a real treat to meet so many knowledgeable people from such a diverse range of academic backgrounds.

Covers for the Fan Phenomena series are now done, so marketing can begin in earnest for the run-up to publication of all six in September. It’s been a long, hard slog getting this new series up and running but I’m so pleased with the content for each – again, the editors have been fantastic and have gathered together so many important and influential people involved with each one of these treasured fan subjects. I’m really looking forward to getting some marketing weight behind these now to raise awareness at conferences, on blogs, websites and through the press.

The covers will have a die-cut roundel that reveals the main iconic image through the hole. Colour matching the thick cover and text pages will be tricky but I’m hoping the overall effect will help the books stand out from the other shelf-fillers. The icons chosen and created had to be recognizable enough while leaving room for a touch of creativity, although there wasn’t much that needed doing to the Batman logo or Doctor Who Tardis. Six further books have now been commissioned for Spring 2014, so rejoice all fans of Sherlock Holmes, Audrey Hepburn, The Hunger Games, Marilyn Monroe, Supernatural and The Big Lebwoski – your cries of ‘what about us??’ have been heeded.

Designers love ‘things’. Mostly beautiful things that are carefully considered and fulfill their purpose effectively. We live in an age where the gadget and gizmo have replaced the doohicky and doodad. Prone to the allure of all that is shiny, fiddly, stylish and trendy – the ordinary and everyday is often overlooked as some designers become too enamored with their own ability to re-fashion and consumers are too gullible to notice when the wool is being pulled firmly over their eyes (I mean seriously, are we really so lazy as to need this?).

I was reminded of this the other day when my 5 year old used a clothes peg to seal up a cereal packet that had been mysteriously separated from its box (the box was later found having been transformed into a multi-storey car park). Children have an innate ability to put everyday objects to multiple uses – the relationship between form and function being revisited each time a new object is picked up and used. Spending any length of time with a group of kids demonstrates just how inventive young minds are, often more open to interpreting new ways of putting an object to use beyond its initial and intended purpose.

I’ll never forget the time I saw a group of Palestinian kids playing with a cardboard box that had been converted into a wheel-less go cart that kept them occupied for ages or the Somalian children that refashioned coke cans into animals to sell for food – the added dimension of poverty creating an impetus for creativity. There are books and websites aplenty about the D.I.Y kids craze – which seems a clever way of cashing in on something that comes naturally to most – but designers can learn a lot about resourcefulness and ingenuity by simply observing young’uns at play.

The prevailing economic model of today is to sell us more things, more often – frequently trying to sell us the same stuff with arguably unnecessary minor additions or modifications. The term ‘planned obsolescence’ is accurate inasmuch as tech companies realise that desirability for new things can be more powerful than functionality, hence many gadgets are built with a limited ‘shelf’ life – either becoming unfashionable or simply failing to work properly after a certain period of time.

A designers role is not simply to make new ‘stuff’ but to make us think again, often about things that are around us and which have a world of possibility waiting to be revealed. Ken Garland in his original 1964 First Things First manifesto (and echoed later in the revised 2000 version) argued about the need for values in design and I would suggest interpreting that phrase literally: the value ‘in’ (a) design. Advertising and marketing can suggest the precise value of a given object but as mentioned above, this value can be extended and reinterpreted in the hands of a creative mind. Some recent projects, such as Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn’s ‘Significant Objects’ experiment have taken this idea even further by demonstrating that the effect of narrative on any given object’s subjective value can be measured objectively.

Sure I understand the need for jobs and the whole economic argument to support productivity, but ingenuity and creativity need to be aligned equally as much with cultural, environmental and political changes in a world that faces growing resource shortages, increased consumption and overpopulation.

This is a big topic and mine are small words, but I do feel that a more concerted awareness of – and reconnection with – childhood creativity continues to provide inspiration for everyone, not just designers.

Travel to any new destination brings with it a mixture of excitement, anticipation and trepidation.

Last month I was invited to give a lecture at the 14th annual Eskisehir film festival in Turkey – a festival that takes place at Anadolu University, one of the largest universities in the world due to its successful distance education program which has an intake of nearly 2 million students. The festival took place from 3rd to 9th of May with an eclectic lineup of films, workshops and presentations all exploring the growing influence of Turkish film in world cinema and acting as an effective platform for emerging film makers.

My talk was entitled ‘The Cinematic City’ which focused specifically on Istanbul’s appearance in movies over the past 60 years and which acted as a tie-in to the book recently produced as part of my World Film Locations series, published by Intellect in Bristol.

I had never been to Turkey before and so was a bit wary of discussing Turkish film with Turkish film students – all too conscious of coming across like an outsider speaking with inauthentic authority, which is why I was so grateful to have had the opportunity of spending a few days immersing myself in Turkish cinema before delivering my presentation. Not only was I able to see a range of films that touched on various ‘localized’ topics, but I gained wonderful insights about these topics from the film-makers themselves who often introduced their movies and gave Q&A sessions following each screening.

There is nothing quite like fully experiencing the place about which you are preparing to discuss, either from a point of research or practice, and I was so much more equipped for engaging with my audience after only a few days in Turkey.

Issues such as immigration, religion and familial obligation, all common and recurring themes in Turkish film, made far more sense to me when being discussed with those who experience these things on a day to day basis and added to my sense of inclusion and participation.

Mark Twain famously said that ‘travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrow mindedness’ which is such a spot-on assessment of why it’s so important to get out and about every so often. Not only does travel challenge our (often narrow) perceptions of the world but – if we make a real effort to connect with the people and culture we visit – can truly be life changing.

There is a fleeting scene about 8 minutes into Wim Wenders’ heartbreaking but life-affirming film Paris, Texas  that has stayed with me ever since I first saw it twenty odd years ago. The scene is of Walt Henderson (Dean Stockwell) parked up at a gas station, checking his map which is propped up on the hood of his car while on the way to pick up his wayward brother Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) deep in the Texas scrubs. I had yet to experience the great American open road even though I was living in Los Angeles at the time, but this one glorious shot encapsulated what I had always imagined a typical Stateside road trip to look, and more importantly, feel like.

The first quarter of Paris, Texas is essentially a road movie which shows just how taken Wenders was, as so many of us are, by a generic roadside Americana that includes fabulously lit-up gas stations, convenience stores and diners bathed in multicolored neon that often transforms them into alluring dreamscapes. The unique ability of a film maker is of course to elevate these ‘non-places’ even more by the use of ambient sound, cinematography and action – something that Wenders has done so well throughout his career. As both a photographer and film maker, Wenders appreciates the power of the still image which may explain why many of his films use an idle camera that allows scenes to unfold within the space of a carefully composed frame. This lingering, elegiacal method fits perfectly with both the mood of Paris, Texas and the measured pace of Travis’ character as he makes slow but steady progress towards his personal redemption – and scenes such as Walt’s gas station pit stop help to establish this tone early on.

I’ve been lucky enough to venture out on a few American road trips since first watching the film in the late 1980s so now have my own experiences to compare to those onscreen, and while I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each journey none have quite lived up to the dreamy promise of Paris, Texas. Understandable I guess as reality very rarely lives up to a fictional account, especially one created by a film maker like Wim Wenders so versed in transforming the everyday into the extraordinary.

In his foreword to the book ‘On Location: Cities of the World in Film‘ Wenders describes this evocative nature of landscape:

‘A street, or a house front, or a mountain, or a bridge, or a river, or whatever, is not just “background”. Each also has a history, a “personality”, an identity that deserves to be taken seriously.’

He reinforces this idea by putting forth the example of how the Aboriginal people of Australia see every landscape formation as embodying some figure from a mythical past – every rock, tree or hill carrying a story that is related to their ‘dreamtime’. I can fully relate to this and remember a time in my own childhood when spaces, landscapes and objects had this kind of resonance, either in how I co-opted them into my own imagined play-space or seeing what they could reveal about my own fears and dreams i.e. that house is haunted or that skyscraper is literally scraping the sky.

These ideas and beliefs must inform the way in which Wenders makes his films and no doubt are one of the reasons why his films–Paris, Texas in particular–have made such an impression on me, essentially because I share the same beliefs. So when I see Walt sipping his coffee beside an ice dispensing machine as the setting sun ignites the sky into a thousand shades of orange, I don’t simply see what is there but what is ‘dreamed’, both by the the film maker and by my own imagination.

I could point to Robert Venturi’s 1972 book ‘Learning from Las Vegas‘ as a primary reason for why the city is now looked at with genuine interest rather than simply derided as a commercialized and tacky roadside attraction, but academic analysis only goes so far in helping us to understand our unique relationship or emotional response to a given place. Granted the more I read about and around the city’s history the more I’m inflating the bubble of mystique and significance of it in my own head, but recent visits to Vegas in support of a book project have helped me to balance out the theoretical with the actual physical experience of being there.

I can’t say that my visits have been pleasant experiences (I’ve either been too ill, too tired or too much of a miserable sod to make the most of what Vegas has to offer) but they have been learning experiences, and ones that seem to make more sense to me when looked at in hindsight and form a distance, which brings to mind Roman Polanski’s oft quoted remark about Los Angeles. As a design lecturer I’m still blown away by the neon signage that radiates across the city at night-time and had the opportunity to visit the phenomenal collection of signs at the neon boneyard, where hundreds of iconic relics whose lights have long since faded still pulsate with historical importance and relevance. I also managed to meet with local Las Vegas residents to chat about what the city has to offer beyond the strip and outside of the escapist transit of tourists, hucksters and players. Photographs I took there of derelict and stalled building sites due to the current economic climate sit uncomfortably alongside shots of recognizable Vegas movie locations, and a folder of reference material collected prior to my trip that includes excerpts from Michael Light’s book ’100 Suns’ about the nuclear tests carried out in the Nevada desert from the mid 1940s to the early 1960s jar when placed beside a $4.99 all-you-can-eat buffet receipt kept and brought back. I’ve realized though that perhaps this odd juxtaposition of artifacts, historical oddities and lived experiences is precisely the reason for my fascination with Las Vegas, in that it throws up more questions than it can ultimately answer – and what enquiring mind doesn’t like questions?

For now I’ll keep sifting through my photographs, read with interest of development plans for the city’s future and look out for the next probing documentary that inevitably searches for some of the answers I seek.

I’m currently reading this book as research for a potential project that may or may not ever see the light of day. I’ve been increasingly drawn to the idea of utopia ever since delving deeper into the origins of the kibbutz movement a few years back while on a trip to Israel. While there I visited my family who live on a kibbutz in the north of the country and briefly chatted with my uncle about how things have changed since he first moved there in the late 1960s. Discussions with him led to further talks with my cousins who were both quite outspoken about growing up in a movement often classed as a ‘utopian ideal’ but to them was very often anything other than perfect.

Israel’s first kibbutz, Degania, was founded in 1911 and sparked off a communal enterprise unlike any other in the world which would play an essential role in the creation of the modern state of Israel. As a model for communal living with its emphasis on shared responsibility and shared wealth, kibbutzim were the backbone of a nation that quite literally emerged from the desert – providing a network of essential manufacturing industries that would fuel the growth of the country’s wealth, especially in terms of agriculture.

What I find more fascinating though are the social structures and community ideals that the kibbutz movement once strived for and which subsequently placed them in the ‘utopian communities’ category, but which have ultimately come undone as generations of ‘kibbutzniks’ complain of a dysfunctional upbringing resulting from unorthodox social engineering techniques. This added to other social and economic crises saw a massive decline in membership over the last few decades as people simply left kibbutzes to live in larger cities or saw their beloved social ideology diluted by creeping capitalism as kibbutzes struggled for economic survival. As an imperfect embodiment of the utopian ideal, kibbutzes nevertheless place great importance on morality and social responsibility which is why they still matter and which may explain the reason for their renewed popularity as more young people look to bring up families in a safe, caring and socially cohesive environment.

I’m keen to look back at how the ideal was created, how it developed and how it fell apart but also want to look at it alongside other utopian systems of living and social experiments from the past.

A big undertaking but one I hope to at least develop content for in the coming months.

A fun little project just completed for my son is this fanboy DC and Marvel comics table, which was simple enough to do and has ‘really tied the room together’. Great to scour the local comics store for old-school issues of Iron Man, The Avengers, Superman, Daredevil and others which were Ruben’s first encounter with the wonderful world of comic book art. I was a pretty avid reader and collector when I was a kid, so sharing this newly re-discovered passion with my boy was a real joy – and working on the table together even more of a buzz. Made from one piece of rounded mdf, painted, comics applied with wallpaper paste, cut then varnished. 3 foot x 3 foot with 2 foot leg supports.

Somewhere | Dir. Sofia Coppola (2010)
Poster design by Mojo

It’s fair to say that Sofia Copolla has made the subject of alienation into a running theme throughout her career. FromVirgin Suicides and Lost in Translation toMarie Antoinette and now Somewhere, characters set adrift looking for some anchor to reconnect them to anything or anyone of substance features prominently. The poster for Somewheretakes this theme and runs with it – placing the two stars (Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning) off centre and in the shadow of The Chateau Marmont, Hotel to the stars and home to Dorff’s pampered yet bored protagonist. The poster is less a representation of wealth and priveledge as that of indifference and a cold disconnectedness which is helped by the use of simple bold typography spread evenly around the page. This economic use of type again echoes Copolla’s film making style which has tended to split audiences – some labelling it pretentious and dull others dreamily poetic and contemplative. The same could no doubt be said about this poster.

127 Hours | Dir. Danny Boyle (2010)

Poster design by Ignition Print

Meant to be read as a literal fractured narrative,  the poster for 127 Hours suggests both the film’s style and content. The digital, handheld film making approach has been a permanent fixture ever since The Blair Witch Project exploded onto the screen over a decade ago and has been used with varying degrees of success ever since. By incorporating small frames into the main distressed video image, the poster communicates the film’s themes of isolation and fear but also those of hope (he’s looking up you see) and the importance of memory to help set us free. The mish-mash of type – all set in a variety of Akzidenz Grotesk styles – could be arranged with a bit more panache, but help support the overall feeling of tension that this docu-drama is no doubt aiming for.

Black Swan | Dir. Darren Aronofsky (2010)

Poster designs by La Boca

It’s a crying shame that film posters like these rarely get made and even seldom still – get used. Designers La Boca have produced a set of four striking illustrated posters steeped in the art deco style of the 20s and 30s with their bold use of stepped forms, sweeping curves and angular yet elegant typography. With their intelligent use of negative space to render two ideas within one image, these posters not only help tell (and sell) a story but work as pieces of standalone art – something pretty rare in these days of increasingly generic and creatively bankrupt film posters. Fine examples of courageous art direction and sublime execution that begs the question of why we don’t see more of this more often. Oh yeah, marketing departments have no balls.

Somewhere is released 10 December
127 Hours is released 7 January
Black Swan is released 21 January

It’s worth remembering that while we in the profligate ‘west’ ponder cinema’s fate – with seemingly endless developments offering us even more choice as to how and where we interact with film – there are some places that don’t afford their inhabitants the same kind of freedoms. The image above then, by celebrated photographer Simon Norfolk, should act as a stark reminder of just how fortunate we are.

Taken as part of a series for a book entitled Afghanistan: Chronotopia, the photo is of a bullet scarred outdoor cinema at the palace of culture in the Karte Char district of Kabul.

The war in Afghanistan has been raging for nearly 40 years – a fact that contributes greatly to the indeterminate sense of time present in this and other photographs taken as part of the series. As Norfork explains in the book’s introduction:

‘Afghanistan is unique, unlike any other war-ravaged landscape. In Bosnia, Dresden or the Somme for example, the devastation appears to have taken place within one period, inflicted by a small gamut of weaponry. However, the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan means that the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other.’

Of all the images in the book (a taster of which you can see by visiting Simon Norfolk’s website), it’s this one that I – and perhaps others – can connect with most; simply because we can imagine ourselves sat in that theatre, or one very much like it, watching a dream narrative unfold in the open air.

This familiarity and feeling of connectedness makes the image so haunting because the story it’s telling is just so incongruous; a place of creativity and imagination ravaged by destruction and neglect.

Although a cinema is a place that only really comes to life when people and the film they’re watching ‘fill’ it, there is still a sense of anticipation and promise evoked by an operating but empty cinema similar to that of a notebook page or blank canvas.

The cinema above however fails to evoke that promise because it has been silenced – and unlike a block of flats, house or bridge, the silence is perhaps more pronounced because of what a cinema represents.

Projecting a moving image onto a screen can be likened to the way our mind works; our brain filtering information which is then ‘projected’ through our eyes and formed into an understood narrative. This is why a cinema sometimes feels like a ‘living’ environment – not just because of the collective viewing experience taking place show after show – but the way layers of stories (films) projected onto a screen over time create an odd sense of memory for the building itself.

A Far fetched theory perhaps, but this may be a way of explaining – to myself at least – why Simon Norfolk’s photograph of a bullet scarred cinema in Afghanistan looks more like the corpse of a body than that of a building.

With all the hullabaloo surrounding Pixar’s latest film Up, I got to thinking about other movies that have featured our inflatable friends, and the film that instantly sprung to mind was Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 wonderful short The Red Balloon (la Ballon Rouge).

At just under 34 minutes long, this bittersweet French gem which tells the simple tale of a friendship between a young boy and the titular red balloon manages to pack more emotional depth and heart into its slim running time than most films manage in 2 hours.

Lacking any discernible dialogue and relying on a verite style popular at the time, Lamorisse uses physical comedy, sound effects, score and a slightly beat-up looking Paris backdrop all to great effect, weaving a magical tale that can confidently sit alongside other classic film-fairytales such as The Wizard of Oz, A Christmas Carol and E.T. I’d even go so far as to argue that The Red Balloon is a better film than these others because of its pure storytelling which transcends all boundaries of language.

Lamorisse uses some great trickery to animate the balloon – a clever ploy which enables us to invest some emotional attachment to it before the inevitable denouement, but what really makes this film special is the richness of its themes. The film can, and has, been read in a number of ways – as a social commentary on post war France seeking to escape their wartorn cities, a scathing attack on the oppression of individuality and even as a Christian allegory complete with death and resurrection. I prefer to see it as a buddy movie myself, albeit one with a fairly sombre (but ultimately uplifting) resolution. And on that point I’d guess at a copy of the film lying about Pixar’s HQ when brainstorming meetings for Up were in their infancy.

The film first cast its spell on me some 30 years ago when I saw it as a kid and it’s stayed with me ever since. More than any other film, The Red Balloon transports me back to childhood and the impossible joy of being young. But unlike other films I’d seen as a kid which mean less to me as I get older, The Red Balloonbecomes more important as time goes on. Whether I can attribute this to my now being a dad and at times re-living childhood through my own son or whether it’s a simple case of being able to appreciate the film’s undeniable charm at a deeper level as an adult is anybody’s guess. All I can say is that this small film with non actors, dodgy sound, loose continuity and no dialogue manages to lift me out of my – at times – stifled earthbound existence each and every time I press play.
And isn’t that what films should do?

Watch The Red Balloon in full

A trailer for The Flight of the Red Balloon (inspired by Lamorisse’s original)