52 Episodes to Science Fiction Film Literacy - The Rocketeer

Yup, I'm talking about the Rocketeer, but let me give a longer thing about movie posters. 

You see, The Rocketeer has the most beautiful movie poster ever made. It does all the work a movie poster has to do. It gives you the genre of the film (because a guy flying through the air like that in a weird helmet means Science Fiction) and a period (1930s like) and an idea of the aesthetic values of the film. It gives all of that, but there's more if you're like me and dig into these things. 

The design is reminiscent of the Art Deco movement, in full flower by 1925, with the design of the helmet and the uniform he's wearing. It's not only calling back to Robert Stackpole's statues of the 1930s, the trains of the 1930s, specifically those from the 1939 World's Fair, or the thing that always comes to mind when I get to The V&A in London, Ronson's desk lighters. It's gorgeous, and it communicates so much. In the background, there's a globe and a few spires that seem to be piercing the sky. To me, they all back to the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 Fair, or to the kleidascopic images used in The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra or the trippier dance numbers of Busby Berkley. 

To give the illusion of the rush of flight, The illustrator, John Mattos, went with a Futurist technique. Futurism pre-dated Art Deco, flourishing up through World War 1, and the paintings of Joseph Stella or Natalia Gonchorova and the statuary works of Boccinoni are certainly influencing here, allowing the Rocketeer to appear to powering through the field, as if we're experiencing the sensation of his flight in a single static moment.