Designer's Picks: The Creative Vision of Vasilis Marmatakis.
Today our designer Martu takes over our blogs. Let's join Martu as she goes deep into the captivating world of Vasilis Marmatakis' iconic designs, responsible for bringing Yorgos Lanthimos' films to life through captivating posters
In this era of social media, it's easy to find out about the latest movies that are in theaters. Usually, you can see them on Twitter, or Instagram or wait for them to appear on some platform with the label "Oscar-nominated film" to pay them some attention.
However, today, in this new blog, we want to talk not only about the old art of poster design, but also about one of our favorite designers, Vasilis Marmatakis. He's responsible for the posters of each of Yorgos Lanthimos' films, breaking into a sea where only the faces of famous actors predominate with designs that communicate the soul of the film.
Vasilis Marmatakis, after graduating as a graphic designer from the Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art in the 90s, began working at an advertising agency where he met Yorgos Lanthimos. In 2005, they made their first collaboration together with the film "Dogtooth," which gave the director international claim. In this design, three intersecting lines can be seen, representing the distorted lives of the protagonists with plenty of negative space.
The designer is known not only for his strenuous work on each of his posters, which appear in print ads and cinema billboards and have become an integral part of his visual identity but also for his trademark use of ample air and white space, which both distinguishes him and brings him problems with distributors who contractually require big stars to appear on the poster.
Fortunately for him, Yorgos fights hard to ensure he has creative freedom when designing. Few poster designers today exercise more creative control than Marmatakis, known for his bold use of impressionist typography and wonderfully strange collages that place you in the right mental frame to watch the film. For "Nimic" in 2019, a comedic and eerie story about identity theft, Marmatakis executed a graphic image that would encapsulate the entire movie: a thick black brushstroke representing the body of a man merging and connecting with another brushstroke of the body of a woman, the two lines forming a small portal.
Returning to his use of negative space or white space, we can discuss how he used this strategy in the film "The Lobster," where we see the main actors Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz embracing an empty silhouette, hitting the nail on the head with the complexity of the plot that speaks of loneliness and love.
Also in "The Favourite," set at the end of the 18th century, he showcased his skills in typography. Reinforcing the anachronisms of the plot, he used a typeface called Village, originally used in the early 20th century. "The typographic composition is strange. The longest word dictates the spacing of all other words, resulting in extremely spaced kerning. It's inspired by the typographic typography of that era and comments on the exaggerated visual elements of the film."
One of our favorite posters that left us amazed is his latest collaboration with Yorgos in the film "Poor Things," where Bella Baxter is rescued and surgically intervened by a scientist who implants the brain of a baby, making her have to learn to live again. Here are the words of the designer about his work:
"(...) The first poster published was the one showing an extreme close-up of Bella's face with smeared makeup. If you look closely, this is not eyeshadow or lipstick. These are the shapes of the three main male characters of the film. Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef are placed on each of Bella's eyelids, and Mark Ruffalo is above her lips. There are three brushstrokes composed of three male figures, but these brushstrokes are smudged, so, in a way, these standards of beauty and femininity are distorted. Actually, that's my favorite poster." – Marmatakis for The Credits.
Obviously, we could spend hours unraveling each of the posters designed by Marmatakis, but we prefer that you invest that time in watching "Poor Things," recently nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Actress, Best Direction, and Best Picture.
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