The eye of a hurricane will pull you in, the words will shock you, and the meaning will entice you. This is perhaps what the advertiser of the film want. The film is An Inconvenient Truth and what I’m looking at is one of the posters used to bring people into the theater. As a whole the poster is almost threatening. The ominous hurricane eye, filling the top two-thirds of the poster, over takes the hazy blue-grey, evening sky, with a terrifying swirl of white smoke. The smoke is supplied by two of three, tall chimneystacks, centered in the middle of the ad, pulling the eye from the hurricane down. Not all the way down, to the left (the posters’ stage right) is the copy stating, “By far the most terrifying film you will ever see.”
Terror upon terror, your eyes will still follow the smoke stacks down to the main body of the factory they support. Behind the factory you can discern the fading dusk. The eye continues down into a black fade until the bottom fourth of the poster is a black matte designated for the title of the film. An Inconvenient Truth stretches across the blackness in bold lower case lettering larger than any other group of words; they are printed without any more space between the letters than had they been one word. The only way to tell them apart is the fact that the middle word, “inconvenient” is in an eye catching orange-red color. Below the title is the subtitle, slightly smaller yet just as tricky as the words above it. This time the lettering is in all uppercase, still all white yet once again red is used to draw your eye. The subtitle reads, “A Global Warning,” with “warning” slightly crooked and all in red looks as though it had been stamped there with a sure hand leaving the stamps rectangle shape around the words.
Less interesting and common on all American movie posters are the film credits placed at the bottom center in white lettering so they may be seen by curious parties but make no more statement about the film then the "who made it," question only geeks like myself ask.
When I look at the smoke coming from the building on the bottom left I find that the two plumes of smoke present in the middle of the poster is repeated here. This time, it seems, the eye is lifted up in almost a heavenly way back into the haze to be abruptly stopped to read the copy, either for the first time or for a second time. “By far the most terrifying...” Haunting, the way this poster was designed. The “two plume” devise is used again on the bottom right of the page, though only for the purpose of symmetry.
I am left with so many questions I’d like the to ask the advertisers: why is the third and most prominent smoke stack empty; why is it not filling the air with hurricane smoke; why the lower case letters; why the upper case letters?
Why did this poster have so powerful of an impact on me?
When I was a boy, the trip to my grandmothers’ house was always long and boring for a kid in a time predating Gameboy’s and portable DVD players. It would be a trip of car games like finding the alphabet on license plates and Slug Bug. Then of course there was always the inventible punching of the younger brother and the pestering of the older one. My brothers and I would drive my parents crazy. Then about fifteen or twenty minutes away from her house we would see the large chimneys that rising into the sky as if they were built for a giant’s fireplace. We called them “cloud makers.” We knew that as soon as we saw the cloud makers we were almost there. But these great chimneys didn’t make the clouds, as we found out when we hit the fourth grade, they were the smoke stacks for the local factory burning up wood chips to power whatever machines they used behind those sheet metal walls.
To see the cloud makers of my child hood used to strike terror into others, hit me in a way I am still contemplating, then to include the hurricane... Let take you back to when I was in stationed in Iraq, when Hurricane Katrina and her sister Rita hit the Gulf of Mexico and devastated New Orleans and so many towns and cities of our great country. I remember sitting in the cafeteria on our base, barely eating as the reports came in on the big screen TV we had in there. The Fox News reporters telling us of the massive devastation wrought by Katrina and then, so soon afterwards, Rita... Maybe it was the all too familiar image that hit me the most.
“Warning! Danger! Destruction! Disaster!” The poster shouts at us, urging you to see this film and learn what it is that we must avert, avoid. Images of disasters flood my mind and my thoughts are filled with previous knowledge of the consequences we already face from a changing earth. The sands of African dessert pulled off the continent by powerful winds, sweeping them across the Atlantic to settle in the Gulf of Mexico, thousands of miles away. The coral started dying at alarming rates affecting every form of life in the sea. What other horrible things have been happening? Most importantly, is there anything we can do to stop it? Can this destruction be averted? And finally, will this movie tell us?
I found out the answers to my questions when I became an audience member sitting in the theater. I couldn’t believe what was going on. The world is in danger. The advertisers did their job well and I learned something that will challenge me for the rest of my life. I left my seat in that dark theater not only believing the copy on that inspiring poster but today I’ve added my own take on it and tell whom ever will listen: This is the most important film you will ever see!
http://www.climatecrisis.net/downloads/images/poster.jpg
