OWFs Archive of The Greatest & Our Favourite Movie Posters Of All Time The 'in the moment' laugh of
Jeanne Moreau perfectly captures the free spirited nature of her character in
Jules et Jim, the inspiring French New Wave film from the great
Francois Truffaut about the reckless power of love and how it can divide even the strongest of friendships. A film that in the early 60's broke all the stilted conventions of filmmaking, throwing out the rule book (it was called the 'New Wave' after all) in a uninhibited and fast-moving fashion - utilising newsreels, film stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots - to tell his story of two tragic brothers and the dangerous woman they both fall in love with. But oh how alluring the women in these movies were - like Jean Seberg in
A Bout De Souffle or Brigitte Bardot in
Le Mepris. You might say they were to die for. These were powerful post-WWII woman, a new kind of femme fatale who were extremely intelligent and they were creating their own alternative fashion sense and style. They were happy to sleep around and break hearts. The critic
Ginette Vincindeau called them;
"beautiful, but in a kind of natural way; sexy, but intellectual at the same time, a kind of cerebral sexuality, this was the hallmark of the nouvelle vague woman".
Truffaut was inventing his own language of cinema with Jules et Jim, and the poster (which barely features Jules et Jim... and so prominently and ground-breakingly promotes it's main female character at the forefront) is my personal favourite of all time and is unlike anything designed before or since.
It's currently hung proudly on my wall (albeit a small version) and is unusually colourful, using brash greens, yellow and oranges to evoke the full of life feeling that Moreau has in the film. A risque touch indeed for a black and white film to have so much colour in the poster and I often wonder what it must have been like in the 1960's to see this hung from a French cinema lobby - how it must have attracted the eye of everyone who walked by. This is a beautiful and iconic poster. It was highly influential on the future of French film, most obviously in
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's popular 21st century film
Amelie which carries much of the same free-spirited nature in it's lead character portrayed by Audrey Tautou and of course in the poster itself...
And if you are on the lookout for an original.... GOOD LUCK! It will cost you around £2,500 these days. I know, because I've tried on many occasions to hunt one down.