COP - Study Task 4

This poster is an officially licensed poster for the latest batman film, the dark knight rises, designed by Olly Moss, which he uploaded to his blog on Sunday the 15^th of July, 2012.

Batman himself is denoted by the traditional black cape, the hood partially covering his head, and the bat shaped hole over the eyes. Without the text on the poster, these denotations make it fairly obvious that he is batman to anyone who has heard of him, despite how his depiction has changed through the years, as these are key signifiers of his appearance. Another key denotation is the use of black. Many other traditional superheroes are denoted by bright colours, whereas batman has always worn black.

The connotations of batman are generally things like darkness, shadows, stealth, coldness, speed, power and strength. This is reflected in the colour scheme, the black and white blurred background gives connotations of a lack of emotion, which also has connotations of coldness, relating to the cold nature of batman himself. The next is slightly shadowed by the cape not only adds another connotation to the poster, but also makes the cape look as if it’s set forward a bit, which is coherent with the 3 dimensional shading of the hood. The imagery in general is very effective, as a simple iconic sign on a poster for such a well-known franchise is often the most impacting way to get across a message.

The main code in the poster is that within our culture and most other cultures around the world, black is symbolic of the night, and anything shining in the darkness is a signifier of good. This in itself positions batman to be a “goody” in this poster, without us physically having to see an image of him beating up a villain. Another, more subtle, code that’s used is the stereotypical use of tall, narrow text as body copy in context of a movie poster, which is something that is very much an indexical sign of a movie poster, especially when used in conjunction with a much larger font that’s used for the title text.

These two codes alone come together to make a text that is clear in its message without losing any of the edginess that movie posters require. This is why to me, this movie poster is effective in both its aesthetics and its suitability.