Focusing on the Look
If “eyes are the window into the soul” then two recent and similar one-sheets are out there doing some soul searching. Or at least striving for a visually interesting image of the film’s star… with a close crop of a face making eye contact… and tinting of the eye color. (Now we are just rambling… Must be lost in their eyes.)
“Eye” cliches aside, this type of close-up key art often centers around female actors, in this case Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld: Evolution movie poster and Ziyi Zhang in the Memoirs of a Geisha movie poster.
In both cases their eye color is altered to make them pop. (Since Beckinsale plays a vampire in Underworld: Evolution, the look may reflect the way she appears in the film. But I don’t think Ziyi Zhang was wearing glowing tinted contacts as a 1930s era Japanese prostitute in Memoirs of a Geisha.) While it’s common for a bit of eye tinting for effect in one-sheets, it does risk looking distracting, even a bit unnatural, like color contact lenses.
Since eyes are literally the focus of many poster images, they are also a favorite visual device for horror films, such as the movie poster for the recent film The Skeleton Key or even a B-movie like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein.
I believe that the character in Memoirs of a Geisha doe have blue/gray eyes — it’s one of the things labels her as “special” in the novel. Also, a geisha is not the same thing as a prostitute (though some geishas were also prostitutes).
Nice Post !!!!