Monday, December 7, 2009

sliding titles

Another gem: the cover of Lloyd C. Douglas's 1929 novel Magnificent Obsession, which was later adapted for two films. For an intro to cinema course, I recently assigned the 1954 Douglas Sirk version as part of a study on "surgical melodrama" (the other film was Kim Ki-Duk's Time, from 2006). I think the steep incline of the letters in this title design points to how quickly things can come undone in that sharp-edged subgenre. It's like a door half-open, words spilling out before the story's even begun.