Color Poster Triptych 07: Space Balls

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Most of us have probably encountered that design a few years ago when Sam Rockwell made an unsettling discovery in MOON. Spheres against a dark background as symbols for planets, the moon or other objects in outer space are quite common, though. What strikes me about these three posters is how similar they are in the use of composition and especially the black and white illustration style not uncommon in Eastern European movie posters during the 1960s and 70s.

The initial enigma of MOON did in fact remind me of Tarkovsky's SOLYARIS (which I wasn't really able to appreciate at the time I saw it). But seeing the poster next to COLOSSUS: THE FORBIDDEN PROJECT, it is hard not to see that as a major influence on the graphic design even though that sci-fi-thriller does take place on earth.

The uniformly distributed white lines look like outward radiation in COLOSSUS, self-contained circles in MOON and combined like the grid on a spherical map in SOLYARIS. Apart from the faint blue in MOON, the only major color to balance the black and white is red. I could add one of the fan posters with the reddish eye of HAL from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Kubrick, 1968) which probably served as an inspiration for the SOLYARIS poster. I do not believe, however, that there was a HAL's-eye poster during the initial theatrical release.

Note: the moiree effect is due to resizing the pixel images and did not appear in the original printed artwork.