Yesterday I saw the award-winning film The Reader and – without giving away too much of the film – in one of the most pivotal scenes I couldn't help but find myself jumping into font-identification-mode. Sans...geometric...the ascender of the lowercase 'h' sitting just above cap-line of the 'T'... it's an easy one...Futura. Futura Medium(1927) for the title and I'm guessing the lighter weight body-text is perhaps Futura Book (1932)?
The novel is Anton Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog (referred to in the film as The Lady with the Little Dog). It was published in 1899 with the first translation from Russian to English published in 1903. So obviously it's not intended to be the original English version (pre-Futura-era!) but one between this and the latest editions released in the Penguin Classics series. Anyone have more insight?
The book covers (Michael's and Hanna's copy each slightly different) may have been made as a variation of the actual copies, specifically for the film?
It is an amazing film but I think I can safely say that for the five minutes following this scene, my mind was occupied elsewhere.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Reading into The Reader
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3 comments:
I remember sitting in a cinema with John Hudson and Ross Mills (Tiro Typeworks) and watching Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Enemy at the Gates”, a film about the Stalingrad battle. At some point, the film showed Soviet soldiers distributing flyers, which were set in... ITC Bookman Cyrillic (on top of that, squeezed electronically). The Cyrillic version of ITC Bookman was designed at ParaType in 1993 by Lyubov Kuznetsova and Tagir Safayev. I voiced my dismay to John and Ross, and they were both very amused — but not with the fact that the film used a completely anachronistic type; rather, they made fun of me that I cannot just turn off my typographic nitpicking when watch a movie :)
Cheers,
Adam
Amazing movie, and surprisingly this slight error didn't bother me at all (much like Adam I'm usually unable to turn off my typographic nitpicking when watching movies).
I believe it is never stated that this should be the first edition and then it should be a German edition anyway. So we are looking at a book that would be out of place anyway. There is no good way to fix this, only suspense of disbelief. Actors speaking English with a fake German accent is just as silly as a complete Hollywood movie in German with english subtitles.
' the lady and the dog.' is not a novel but a short story. And a luscious one at that (i might add superfluously)
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