Book "L'art du Regard"

A little history of operating cinema in 316 posters through the collection of Nicolas Winding Refn. It's big, it's beautiful, and it weighs heavily.

PRODUCT DETAILS:

• Texts by Alan Jones (film critic at "Radio Times")
• French translation by Philippe Garnier
• Edition limited to 1500 copies
• Dimensions: 34.5 cm x 31.5 cm x 3.5 cm

Through the eyes of an intrepid dreamer, decades of a dubious business that the film industry would have preferred to forget ... And the harsh beauty and the visual discoveries that it conceals. 

For the first time, Nicolas Winding Refn combs through his unique collection of American cinema posters, and looks at how the viewer overlaps and justifies certain key images in his own reality. Going from vintage posters like Spike Heels and Black Nylons, Obscene houseand Alice in Acidland, To those of The Twisted Sex, Torture me Kiss meor Zero in and Scream- to cite only a few of the intriguing titles presented -, Winding Refn, rather fond of controversy, is devising a new way of looking at the shameless artefacts and hyperbolas concocted in the ill-famed alleys of the operating cinema industry.

This very particular art of the poster broke the rules and exceeded all limits, a little like Winding Refn does it in his career of scenario writer. Because these promises inflated with a master's hand and these damn noisy catchphrases were there to make you lose your head and lead, against all reason, rather normal people to go and sit in a dark room to watch unfolding shocking, exciting lives and sometimes unimaginable, experienced by others. The filmmaker in turn makes us accomplices and voyeurs by his way of arranging and juxtaposing the posters of his exceptional collection - ephemeral baits of cardboard and paper exhibited at the entrance of cinemas, little seen in their time and even less remembered - creating at the same time a spectacle with several dimensions which matches those which he explored in his work for the big screen.

The historical context has been meticulously, and sometimes with humor, documented for each poster, and Winding Refn has meticulously supervised each phase of production of this work which summarizes for him everything he has learned, not only from this little known part of the history of cinema, but also of what a witness directly confronted with this almost parallel world, can draw from it with a simple glance - an act which can also be an art.