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the news of david lynch’s death came to me today through a text message from a friend. i didn’t believe it was true—after all it couldn’t actually be true—so i searched the internet to satisfy my doubts. at first there really was no mention of it, and i smiled. then, slowly, like a polaroid developing, obituary after obituary began to appear as i refreshed and refreshed. immediately, my face now wet with tears, i sent messages to those with whom i’ve shared a great delight in his work. immediately and sweetly each one of them responded.

i have just arrived back in new york for a brief trip. new york is a city i used to call home in a country i was fundamentally drawn to as a teenager. i was pulled here by the allure of artists like david lynch and trent reznor, who were making work (and at that time, together) that felt so unsafe that it excited my young mind. i am sitting at the kitchen table of my friend’s brooklyn apartment working on some film titles. i was sitting here when the news of lynch’s passing came in just hours ago. i was so consumed with tears in that moment that this scene from twin peaks started playing out in my mind. it’s a scene i’ve often thought of when crying, as in some ways it’s always helped me feel okay about crying as much as i do. the scene is from the pilot episode of the TV show. it depicts donna hayward, james hurley and audrey horne—sitting in their high school class room during a roll call—finding out that their classmate laura palmer is dead.

in the scene a policeman enters the class room and asks for a kid called bobby briggs. the cop then whispers words we can’t hear into the teacher’s ear whilst, simultaneously, an unidentified female student runs past the class room outside screaming in tears. then, as the teacher turns to the class and fearfully glances at laura’s empty desk chair, donna and james share a profound sense of what’s happened to their friend. donna then says “laura” out loud and starts to cry, and james uncontrollably snaps the pencil he’s holding as his right hand becomes a fist.

the crying isn’t the whole story here though. there are other reasons this scene returns to me so frequently. first of all: every beat of it exhibits a thing prevalent in lynch’s work; a thing that’s been so important to my work; a thing that has consequently lead me to the work of robert bresson, jean-luc godard and andrei tarkovsky. the scene delivers profoundly accessible feelings with barely a word of dialogue spoken. in fact gone too—just for this scene—is any of angelo badalamenti’s score or lynch’s trademark ambient soundscaping. sure, the policeman’s unintelligible whisperings to the teacher, the inarticulate knife-slash of the student screaming past outside, and donna exhaling “laura”, do of course lead those with eyes closed in a certain direction. however it’s the sequence of images used here that are invaluable to us the audience, as we find our own deeper way to relate to the action: there’s the look on everyone’s faces as the policeman enters the room and then whispers to the teacher. there’s the look on donna and james’ faces as the girl runs past outside and as the teacher glances in the direction of laura’s empty chair. then, finally, there’s the sense of loss expressed by the shot of laura’s empty chair itself, and donna and james’ consequent reactions to that. i have spent much of my life figuring out how to communicate the ineffable effectively with only one or two images, and so i’ve kept returning to this scene, and countless others in lynch’s work, in reassurance of the possibility.

second of all: there’s that eagerness david lynch possessed to let go of the handlebars and order each scene or act in his films such that they connect with those around them more because of a feeling than any clear rationale. he once said, “i don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense,” in response to which the film critic (and champion of jean-luc godard’s work) richard brody excellently quipped: “that’s why.” both men are of course right in some sense, but for me it’s lynch’s view that feels closer to life as i experience it. at my most heartbroken a few years back, weeping alone in my apartment in berlin, a friend whispered to me on the phone: “i know it doesn’t make sense. don’t try to make sense of it. it’s never going to make sense.” it helped me profoundly to hear that, and again i found comfort in thinking of laura palmer’s empty chair in the class room, and the unidentified girl running by outside screaming in tears.

it’s not lost on me that i’m here trying to express with words a feeling that one cannot express with words; moreover a feeling that words are often superfluous in visual artwork. to that end i’ll stop now. in fact all discussion of the unique power of images aside, the following quote from the film critic matt mahler is perhaps a more adept description of why i’m writing any of these words in the first place:

“I understand how strange it might be for a stranger’s passing to have this much of an effect on someone, but that’s just it — when you love an artist’s work, they aren’t a stranger. Their memories become your memories, their best thoughts and days motivate yours. Their sadness is yours, and they share with you the shreds of beauty they’ve discovered.”

i’ve shared a love of david lynch’s work with some of my closest friends, and even my family. earlier today in sharing with him the news, i told my brother that i had been crying. he said, “yeah, of course. it feels like a door has closed.”

again i cried.

and again, as my brother made clear, another image without words sufficed.

caspar

the film stage and MUBI have kindly included our family portrait and april posters in their best movie posters of 2024 lists. whilst MUBI placed dea kulumbegashvili’s april poster in their 2024 runners up, the film stage went as far as to consider our poster for lucy kerr’s family portrait their 7th best poster of the year.

here’s what jared mobarek at the film stage had to say about the family portrait poster:

Much like the film’s commentary on absence versus presence, Caspar Newbolt’s poster for Family Portrait hinges upon the dynamic shared by those two states. Whether the hunt for a mother to take the Christmas card photo she enlisted them to take or pointed words read by the daughter searching for her so she can fly back home (“Where did my mother go when she would leave her empty gaze fixed on me?”), there arrives a shift from opposition to coexistence––we still have presence through absence and can be absent despite our presence. Thus Newbolt cuts the eyes out of Joshua Johnson’s The Westwood Children and places them upon a textured wash of color that thematically erases the bodies while simultaneously promising they’ll exit the fog next. It’s an illusion. Just like the photo. Because a finished product was never the goal; the portrait was simply an excuse to physically reunite one more time… just in case next year proves too late.

a huge thank you again to jared, adrian curry and both of their institutions for the continued support of our work.

caspar was recently interviewed by florence scott-anderton, the film editor of the berliner magazine. the interview can be found in the latest issue of the magazine, which will be on newsstands in berlin for the next month.

here are a few excerpts from the interview:

Tell us a bit about yourself; what’s your relationship to cinema?
I was born in London to two English artists, and grew up in a household where making beautiful things was the most important thing. I always wanted to make films, largely because my father took them so seriously. However, we had very little money, so while I was always writing film scripts, my only real outlet for making images of any kind was with computers handed down to me by friends or family. The moment I could get one of those computers on the internet, I did. It was then I discovered I had a knack for website design and decided to start a company.

How does Version Industries fit in the film landscape?
I co-founded the graphic design company Version Industries in 2003 in London. I moved to New York City in 2005 and opened a studio there. Whilst most of the paid work came from real estate brokers and the like, I was always offering our services to filmmakers and musicians whenever I could. Ten years or so later, we were making film posters and film title sequences for filmmakers such as Chloe Zhao, Tim Sutton, Jane Schoenbrun, Trey Edward Shults, Jonas Carpignano, Adam Pendleton, Cathy Yan and so on. In 2017 we also won a pitch to re-design Filmmaker Magazine. I then continued to co-design every issue from cover to cover until 2021. During this time, certain filmmakers realized it was to their advantage to have me on set as a photographer, and it was there that I learned how to make films properly myself. In 2016, after co-directing several music videos and short films with a friend, I finally wrote and directed my own short film. The 25-minute, black-and-white short, Leaving Hope, was shot by Shabier Kirchner (Small Axe, Past Lives) and produced by Rathaus Films. It came out in 2019. That same year I moved to Berlin.

What made you choose to relocate to Berlin?
I had been staying with friends here since 2016, and in doing so it became clear that Berlin is still affordable enough that a significant proportion of the artistic community can and do still live here. I realized that if I was going to stay in New York I’d have to work on more commercial projects or find a different job in order to be able to afford my rent, and that was out of the question.

What do you find unique about Berlin when it comes to cinema?
Thanks to festivals like the Berlinale and Unknown Pleasures and the city’s central position in Europe, Berlin remains an important hub for art filmmakers. Combine this with the German government’s interest in funding film projects — a concept that doesn’t exist where I come from — it makes for a fertile cinematic landscape.

Congratulations on being recently included in the big film poster retrospective exhibition here in Berlin. Looking at the archive, would you say that Berlin has a specific influence on the art of film poster design?
Thank you. My involvement notwithstanding, there really hasn’t been an exhibition of film posters of that stature before, and to that extent Berlin will, I’m sure, be seen as having a great influence on the making of film posters. I don’t think the city itself has had a particularly great influence on how film posters look aesthetically, but Germany as a country certainly has. Beyond the striking graphic qualities of German art movements such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter or the work coming out of the Bauhaus, the film poster-maker Hans Hillmann is arguably the greatest there has been to date. I look at his work regularly, and I say that as someone who rarely looks at film posters during their working process.

a huge thank you to florence for pitching the interview and for the questions. thank you also to the magazine itself for including caspar and our work in it. we’re very happy to have been included within the pages of such a berlin journalistic institution.

update: you can now read the full interview on the berliner website here.

posteritati and the film stage have kindly included our joyland and falcon lake posters in their best movie posters of 2023 lists. the film stage went as far as to consider our poster for saim sadiq’s joyland their number 1 poster of the year.

here’s what jared mobarek at the film stage had to say about the joyland poster:

There’s so much to talk about with (version_industries) and Caspar Newbolt’s Joyland. The ornately hand-drawn floor tiles (their website always generously explains their process) doubling as a window upon the main characters. The whole’s off-center nature pushing everything into the top-left corner to provide room for text on the outside without sterilizing the composition via more symmetry. The way the three actors feel as though they exist in one scene despite a handful of lotus flowers overlapping their images to prove each has been meticulously layered atop the others. The grain, subdued colors, and blood-smeared title. It’s truly a work of art all its own and a testament to the field’s ability to sell itself as much as the product being sold.

a huge thank you to both institutions for their continued support of our work.

photograph by zsuzsanna kiràly.

our posters for jane schoenbrun’s debut feature film we’re all going to the world’s fair and alexandra stergiou’s hybrid documentary the act of coming out have been selected by adrian curry to be amongst his 10 best movie posters of 2022. adrian wrote the following text for his mubi notebook column to justify his thinking in this regard:

“The posters in my list this year are those that do what any poster worth its salt should do: they stopped me in my tracks. These days those tracks are less and less likely to be along a city street or even inside the lobby of a multiplex and more likely to be on a virtual stroll (or scroll) through a streaming service or social media feed. The received wisdom is that this will result in a dumbing down of poster design, leading to work that is less complex and easier to take in in a one-inch high thumbnail. In other words, more big heads. But the 30 posters below, most of which I likely saw first on a phone screen, give the lie to that doomsday prediction. They are posters that not only work on first glance but reward repeated viewing. In other words, you could hang them on your wall. One footnote: there are a lot of pairs in this year’s collection, partly because I couldn’t fit all my favorites into a top ten, partly because I love graphic coincidences, and partly because two of a kind is sometimes better than one.”

“Another designer I have interviewed recently is Caspar Newbolt of Version Industries who, as I said back in July, has for the past ten years been stealthily creating some of the most adventurous, expressive, and unusual film posters out there. It was this beautiful and unique poster for the short film The Act of Coming Out that prompted me to contact him, but his deceptively lo-fi design for the online horror movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is also one of the year’s very best, especially in its motion version in which the design comes eerily to life.”

you can read the rest of the article here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.

you did so very much for us.

thank you.

our poster for alexandra stergiou’s hybrid documentary, the act of coming out, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the week today. to accompany the selection caspar was interviewed by adrian curry about the making of the poster. you can read an excerpt from the interview here:

NOTEBOOK: As with A Confucian Confusion, your poster feels as if you should be able to step back from it and a face will start to appear, but only a very vague sense of a face forms. Is there an actual face in there or is it a multitude of faces mashed together?

NEWBOLT: There is an actual face there but much like standing very close to a large painting by Seurat, when you are close to the poster you end up seeing only a cloud of colors and thus having the vaguest sense of a face or a multitude of faces as a result. That said if you squint your eyes, even close up, you’ll see the face much more clearly.

It will perhaps remind people of that famous scene in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) where they visit Chicago’s Art Institute and Cameron Frye ends up transfixed in front of Seurat’s painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886). The picture was painted exactly 100 years before the Hughes film came out, and this particular scene in the film hit me very hard when I first saw it.

I am the son of two painters and grew up in museums and art galleries around the world. I knew every word of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by heart by the time I was 14, inspired largely I’m sure by this moment Cameron has with the Seurat. I myself had stared in just such a way at just so many paintings as a kid. I love that in the director’s commentary for the film John Hughes describes Seurat’s pointillistic painting style as being like filmmaking, in that: “You’re very very close to it. You don’t have any idea what you’ve made until you step back from it.” (You can see the scene and hear Hughes’ commentary here.)

It was important to Alexandra and I that, because of the film’s narrative, you could not clearly tell the gender or ethnicity of the person in the poster. The film presents a series of queer and trans actors of various ethnicities exploring what Alexandra describes as “the never ending process of coming out,” and if you look at the LGBTQ flag you can better appreciate the color field we created for the poster. We strove therefore to create an image of a person with a visage comprised of these many shifting colors.

you can read the rest of the interview here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.

our poster for tim sutton’s sixth feature film, the last son, has been acquired by the margaret herrick library of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences. two copies of the poster now exist in their collection in los angeles, california. you can view their digital record of the acquisition here.

after 10 years of working to make the best and most original film posters we can for everyone, we wanted to celebrate by opening a print shop at shop.versionindustries.com to provide physical copies of those posters to anyone anywhere.

our mission is simply to make sure those that want these posters can have them and for the cheapest price possible. during the 2020 global pandemic we worked out a way to print posters “on demand” and deliver them worldwide whilst keeping our overheads very low. as you can see, we’re talking around $25 at most for a full-size 27×40 inch US one-sheet or A0 poster on good paper, plus shipping. what small profit margin there may be will hopefully cover the overheads of running an online store of this kind.

we trust that this offers us a way to make sure the films we have worked on can be remembered beyond the festival and theater releases, on the walls of those who really loved them. the funny thing is this is so often not the case; film posters only get printed a handful of times and then they’re just the result of google image searches and that’s that. this goes against the entire point of making posters of course.

thank you in advance for your continued love and support for independent cinema, and for the work that we do to celebrate the films and filmmakers we’re lucky enough to work with.