The star of this year's Carmel International Film Festival, which runs October 1st to the 4th, may well be the poster rather than a group of special guests that includes Ed Burns, Frank Darabont, Eric Roberts and Frances Fisher.
The Carmel-by-the-Sea event was launched in the summer of 1929 by Mildred Taylor, the wife of artist James Blanding Sloan, who together had a summer home there, with a pair of silent films. The following spring, future Carmel mayor Clint Eastwood was born in San Francisco on May 30th.
One of the launch-year silent films, The Light of Asia (a.k.a. Prem Sanyas), was a 1925 Germany-India co-production about the life of Buddhism founder Prince Siddhartha Gauthama. Starring Indian actors and shot by a pair of German cinematographers, the movie gave the inaugural Carmel event its international flavor and as such, technically qualifies it as the oldest international film festival in the world. Three years ahead of Venice.
The image for this year's stunning poster was created by Carmel artist Jason Fosler using the surrealist “fumage” technique. Among those who used the method were Salvador Dali, who lived in Carmel from 1940 to 1948.
Furthermore, the image of Elizabeth Taylor from the 1963 Hollywood big-budget production directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz features a Cleopatra headdress designed by Wah Ming Chang. Chang was the adopted son of the aforementioned event founders Taylor and Sloan, who took him in at age 12 in 1927 after his mother died.
Chang, who moved to Carmel in 1970 and lived in the area until his death in 2003, also contributed a range of stop-motion work to the original Star Trek TV series. Among his creations were the famous Tribbles and a Vulcan harp.
The Carmel festival poster also stands as a perfect prelude to artist Fosler's upcoming 2027 spring exhibition “Goddess of 10,000 Names.” The previews of the exhibition shared on his website are astounding.
'Fumage, the use of smoke to create art, is extraordinarily delicate,' Fosler explains. 'Anything that touches the surface leaves a permanent mark. Event a moth landing on the drawing will leave a trace. The medium demands extreme care when working, handling, storing and framing, but the effect is like no other.'
P.S. Another artist who specializes in fumage is Adam Blakemore, based in Cornwall, U.K. His series of Hollywood portraits includes one of... you guessed it... Clint Eastwood.
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