Bottom Billing

This is the billing block found on “Girls of The Sun” by Eva Husson. A billing block is a list of people and companies that contributed in producing the movie. Usually, the font used for the billing block is Gothic, sans-serif and is rather condensed.

Movie posters such as this one are marketing tools designed to attract attention and inspire curiosity for the movie. This one for example, shows Golshifteh Farahani dressed in a Kurdish costume. Her face is very expressive, and the audience wonders whether to read sadness or tiredness in her expression. Below her, silhouettes of fighters armed with machine guns sets the tone of the film: a war drama.

The principal information is shown clearly on the poster. The title, the director’s name and the main cast are set in legible fonts. However, it is another story for the billing block. It is very small proportionally to the poster, and so condensed that it is illegible from a reasonable distance. One can’t help but wonder why it is there in the first place. It turns out that as a result of complex contracts, movie studios are legally required to credit some people and companies in their promotion materials such as posters. For example, many actors might require that their name be on the poster. However, there isn’t that much space on the poster, and the only way to include these names are to present them in this reduced form.

Despite its illegibility, the billing block still offers us some information.  On another level, I think the billing block, because the text is so condensed and the letters indistinguishable from each other, it is taken in as a single visual element by the audience. As such, it has become a sort of linguistic marker by which we can recognize a movie poster, in the same way that we can recognize a folk’s tale by “Once upon a time.”

Billing blocks exemplify the compromises designers must make between purely functional/aesthetic concerns and legal obligations. Billing blocks also show the graphic conventions put in place as solutions to these obligations. I wonder if there is a better way to do this.