1996 Mill Valley Film Festival Poster Series

The Mill Valley Film Festival is an annual event held seven miles north of San Francisco. Although Mill Valley is a small town, the festival is well respected and draws an international audience.

The English word “cinema” is related to the Greek word “kinesis,” which means motion. Movie, motion picture—film is a kinetic art form. The festival posters seek to create a sense of movement by juxtaposing two photographs in a target formation. The images move between the foreground and background; similarly, the viewer’s eyes travel across the target’s rings in an attempt to reconstruct missing elements from the photographs.

Another property of film—narrative—is suggested by the pairing of two oblique images. As viewers we seem to have a natural tendency to construct narratives to explain the relationship between the photographs on the poster.