Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
Excerpts from Martin Scorsese’s storyboards for the climactic scene in Taxi Driver (1976) (via)
Above: Lon Chaney & Mary Philbin in The Phantom of the Opera (1925, dir. Rupert Julian)
Below: A production sketch from the film
(via)
1-3: Fritz Lang (right) directs Peter Lorre (left) on the set of M (1931), 4: Production sketch by M art director Emil Hasler
(via)
Above: Salvador Dali’s design for the deleted ballroom scene in the dream sequence from Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Below: Gregory Peck & Ingrid Bergman in the ballroom scene
“In order to create this impression [of oppressiveness and unease], I will have to hang fifteen of the heaviest and most lavish pianos possible from the ceiling of the ballroom, swinging very low over the heads of the dancers. These would be in exalted dance poses, but they would not move at all, they would only be diminishing silhouettes in a very accelerated perspective, losing themselves in infinite darkness.”
[Spellbound producer David O. Selznick, worried about costs, decided to suspend miniature pianos from the ceiling. To correct the consequent problems with perspective, the studio employed forty dwarfs to dance in the scene]
“The miniature pianos didn’t at all give the impression of real pianos suspended from ropes ready to crack and casting sinister shadows on the ground…and the dwarfs, one saw, simply, that they were dwarfs. Neither Hitchcock nor I liked the result and we decided to eliminate this scene. In truth, the imagination of Hollywood experts will be the one thing that will ever have surpassed me.”
-Salvador Dali, Dali News, 20 Nov. 1945
(via)
Sylvia come Via Lattea (“Sylvia as the Milky Way”): One of Fellini’s preparatory sketches of Anita Ekberg as La Dolce Vita’s Sylvia
(via)
Storyboards drawn up by an 11-year-old Martin Scorsese for The Eternal City, an imaginary widescreen Roman epic he dreamed of making. His “cast” included Marlon Brando, Virginia Mayo, Alec Guinness, and Richard Burton. (via)
Production sketch by art director/architect Walter Reimann for The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene)
(via)
One of Federico Fellini’s initial sketches of La Strada’s Gelsomina
(via)
![Salvador Dali’s proposed poster design for his unrealized film project, The Surrealist Mystery of New York (1935) [1]
“Dali adopted the violence, sexuality and criminality of popular gangster movies for his project, although - like so many of his scenarios - it remains fragmentary in nature. Scenes [are] located across the city…including Fifth Avenue, Radio City, and the Museum of Natural History, but begin in Harlem, possibly as a deliberate evocation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1930).
Brief numbered and titled scenes then follow, including The Adorers of the New Fear, The Aging of New York, in which a Surrealist monument to the end of prohibition is erected, & The Cannibalism of American Films, in which a ‘severed arm pursues its cannibalistic desires.’” [2]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnd2ttn7tY1qzdvhio1_r4_500.jpg)
Salvador Dali’s proposed poster design for his unrealized film project, The Surrealist Mystery of New York (1935) [1]
“Dali adopted the violence, sexuality and criminality of popular gangster movies for his project, although - like so many of his scenarios - it remains fragmentary in nature. Scenes [are] located across the city…including Fifth Avenue, Radio City, and the Museum of Natural History, but begin in Harlem, possibly as a deliberate evocation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1930).
Brief numbered and titled scenes then follow, including The Adorers of the New Fear, The Aging of New York, in which a Surrealist monument to the end of prohibition is erected, & The Cannibalism of American Films, in which a ‘severed arm pursues its cannibalistic desires.’” [2]
Salvador Dali - Study for the Scenario for The Surrealist Mystery of New York (1935)
“Outside his window, an anthropomorphic skyscraper is used for breeding hysterical mediums. One of these mediums escapes from the glacier and enters the head’s room and rushes towards him threateningly.
He prudently flees, but in her fury, the medium shuts the door, ripping off his hand. The medium is terrified to discover the horrible hole at the centre of the hand through which thousands of ants begin to emerge.
The hand writhes in agony and now becomes a horrible ball crawling with ants and a swarm of bees that have also come out of the hole.”
-excerpt from the prologue of Salvador Dali’s unrealized film script for The Surrealist Mystery of New York
(via)
Production sketch by set designer/architect Walter Reimann for The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene) (via)
Dinner in the desert lit by giraffes on fire, Salvador Dalí’s design for Giraffes on Horseback Salad, his proposed Marx Brothers film (1937)
