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Last weekend (2 August 2026) marked the first of three sessions for "The Ultimate Trip: 2001: A Space Odyssey in Posters" at Capitol Theatre, and I am still processing what it meant to see my little personal project step into public view. This was my first public exhibition, and to have it take place in a historic venue of cinema made it feel especially meaningful. These posters have spent decades folded and stored, and to now have them shipped, conversed and displayed is a d

Over the next few months, I will be taking part in several events exploring film posters not simply as publicity materials, but as cultural objects that preserve the memory and rituals of cinema. The first is The Ultimate Trip: 2001: A Space Odyssey in Posters, held at Capitol Theatre, Singapore, alongside three screenings of Stanley Kubrick’s film under the Classics at Capitol programme. The exhibition will feature six original posters from my collection, most of which are b

What first drew me to these French grande posters for Patrouille de Choc (1957) and Les Centurions (1960) was not simply their artwork, but the weight of emotional atmosphere. Even before knowing the films in detail, I felt that both posters were trying to process something larger than conflict itself. They feel haunted by the end of empire. As a historian, I have long been interested in decolonisation—not only as a political process, but as a cultural and psychological one.

This month’s posters return me to a question I’ve been circling for some time: why do certain films earn the afterlife of a 4K restoration? On the surface, restoration is technical — a matter of scanning negatives, cleaning frames, sharpening sound. But in practice, it is an act of curation. To restore is to decide that a film still matters, that it continues to hold a measure of significance. In that sense, restoration is less about resolution and more about relevance. That’

I’ve been spending time with this STB poster for Rashomon (it's been hanging on my wall since December) — not the full composition, just the bandit and the woman, isolated as individual images in a fascinating observation of artistic intertextuality. What compels my attention is how immediately dramatic both figures are. The bandit, played by Toshirō Mifune, lunges forward with a raw, almost feral energy. Meanwhile, the woman, portrayed by Machiko Kyō, is rendered in a comple

Last Sunday afternoon, about twenty people gathered for the first edition of Reel Connections. It wasn’t a screening, and it wasn’t quite a talk either. Instead, it was an experiment — one that brought together film posters, movies, and conversation in a shared space, with the simple intention of helping people connect more naturally. The premise was straightforward. Guests arrived, picked a postcard-sized film image that resonated with them, and used it as a starting point f

What draws me again and again to painted film posters is their old-world charm — not in a nostalgic sense, but in how they belong to a lineage of image-making where storytelling comes first. These posters don’t hint; they perform . They gather scenes, emotions, and outcomes into a single charged surface, heavy with colour and drama. You can trace their ancestry back through theatre backdrops, pulp illustration, religious murals, and vernacular advertising. Each brushstroke fe

The Future of Film Is History When I first settled on the title The Future of Film Is History , I knew it carried two meanings, and I wanted to sit with both. The first is a quieter, more pessimistic reading. It reflects a feeling many of us share — that cinema, as we once knew it, is receding. The closing of old theatres, the shrinking of communal spaces, the shift toward solitary and algorithm-driven viewing all suggest a future where film lives mostly in memory. In this se

The first thing I noticed about this 1970s East German poster for Battleship Potemkin wasn’t the design, but the paper itself. The surface feels slightly coarse, fibrous, almost matte in a way that Western posters of the same era rarely are. It carries a muted fragility, but it is clear that the material remembers the world from which it came — a command economy where paper was rationed, production was centralised, and artistic output had to negotiate its place within the li

The first poster I ever bought seriously was the 1968 U.S. One-Sheet for 2001: A Space Odyssey — the Style A design created by Robert McCall. It is an image that many people recognise instinctively: the vast orbital “Space Wheel” gliding above the curve of the Earth, a vision rendered with the crisp futurism and optimism that defined the late 1960s. McCall produced two posters for the film, but this one became the definitive visual language of 2001 : a quiet promise that tec