As the drop by drop continues to come, today fest organizers released the graphic identity for the 69th Festival de Cannes and believe the word that describes it best is: colorful! Yellow, red and purple will grace the streets of tiny Cannes next May; but the pièce de résistance is the poster that comes with a tone (filter) that leans to the yellow orange-tinted/saturated in the very hot side color-scale.
Poster was designed by Hervé Chigioni and his graphic designer Gilles Frappier and uses stills from 1963 Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt) starring none other than Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli.
Here is the story behind the design or what is called the graphic identity rationale.
It’s all there. The steps, the sea, the horizon: a man’s ascent towards his dream, in a warm Mediterranean light that turns to gold. As an image it is reminiscent of a timeless quote by Michel Mourlet used at the beginning of Contempt: “Cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires”.
And so it is Michel Piccoli who in 2016, from the roof of the famous villa designed by the writer Curzio Malaparte, will open the red carpet for the 69th Festival de Cannes. It’s a symbolic choice, since this film about the making of a film – regarded by many as one of the finest ever made in CinemaScope (the Piccoli/Bardot pairing along with Fritz Lang, Raoul Coutard’s cinematography, Georges Delerue’s music, and so on and so forth) – had such a considerable impact on the history of film and cinephilia.
On the eve of its 70th anniversary, by choosing to represent itself under the symbol of this simultaneously palimpsest and unambiguous film, the Festival is reiterating its founding commitment: to pay tribute to the history of film, and to welcome new ways of creating and seeing. The steps represent a kind of ascension towards the infinite horizon of a cinema screen.
The 2016 visual identity has been created by Philippe Savoir (Filifox) and I will be introducing the pieces to you in the many posts that will come, but here is a small sample.