GRAPHIC DETAIL

A FILMMAKER, NOVELIST, SCREENWRITER, title designer, children’s book illustrator, art director, and teacher, Everett Aison has worn many hats in his 83 years. In the early ’60s, he created a handful of posters for the burgeoning foreign film scene that were as bracingly. Kronick was a partner in the new distribution firm Seneca Productions, one of whose first releases was Akira Kurosawa’s , and he hired Aison to design not only the iconic three-color silkscreened poster for the film (only 12 were screen-printed by hand and Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune each owned one), but also a whole raft of flyers, cards, ads, and letterheads using his strikingly austere yet wonderfully expressive design. He created similarly emblematic posters for Louis Malle’s and Roman Polanski’s , and he designed the film titles for the American versions of many of these imports. He and Milton Glaser were flown out to L.A. together to be the first to screen (in Antonioni’s presence), and both designed posters that were never used. (Aison considers his, for which he photographed burning dollar bills soaked in gasoline, to be his finest poster work.) What makes Aison’s early ’60s designs so notable, and so different from American movie posters of the time, is the way they presage the minimalist fan art that has come into vogue in the past decade without being as coyly inside-baseball as many of those pieces can be. With nods to Polish graphics and to Saul Bass, Aison created posters that spoke directly to what was so exciting and novel about the foreign film scene in early ’60s New York. He directed short films himself, and one of these, , played for more than two years in front of in the early ’70s.