Rhys Cooper's "A Clockwork Orange" Movie Posters

Alright, alright, so I guess I lied when I said no more Kubrick posters this week, but this is kind of a big deal and I just found out about it today. Tommy Good, the fine folks who handle all of the poster releases for Melbourne's Astor Theatre, have just announced their next release - A Clockwork Orange print by Rhys Cooper. Is your heart racing yet? I've already briefly (very briefly) explained my love for Kubrick's dystopian tour de force, so I won't delve to deeply into that this time around, but I did want to comment on the astonishing level of detail and complexity present in these prints. This design is just dripping with Cooper's trademark bloodletting splatter style artwork and can be a bit frightening to take in, but then again so can A Clockwork Orange.

A Clockwork Orange - Regular Edition

A Clockwork Orange - Variant Edition (Printed on Gold Foil Stock)

Is that Beethoven with a rather phallic looking mask? Yep. In case you couldn't tell just by looking at these posters, A Clockwork Orange is kind of a strange / brilliant / amazing movie. And as is often the case with his art, Rhys has packed a ton of stuff into this striking image, including a snake, a glass of milk laced with narcotics (no doubt from the Karova Milk Bar), a silhouette of the gang, and of course the aforementioned Beethoven bust, all set against a colorful page of sheet music. These posters seem to really capture the manic "ultra-violence" that is Alex's primary drug of choice. I'm really not sure which version I like better, the regular or the variant printed on gold foil stock. On the one hand, I tend to go with the less showy (and always cheaper) edition, but on the other hand, the garishness of the gold variant perfectly reflects Alex's bombastic personality. I'm also loving the title work Rhys did here. I especially appreciate the cog-within-a-cog transition he used to connect the "K" and the "O."

I highly recommend visiting Tommy Good, where you can find an excellent interview with the artist, but I wanted to excerpt the bit of the conversation that focused on his inspiration.

"[I've] always been a fan of Clockwork and one of the parts that fascinated me was Alex's relationship with his parents and how they had no idea what he was really like. How could you not be suss of a kid who has a combination lock on his bedroom door? He has a record player, images of Beethoven and his python under his bed, it is the real Alex who lives in there and kinda like his trophy room so that is the approach I took with the poster. Like a bedroom shelf."

Both 18" x 24" Clockwork Orange posters will be available for purchase at some point next week through the Tommy Good website / storefront. The gold foil variant is limited to an edition of 50, while the regular edition will be limited to 200, and both posters are signed and numbered. Be sure to sign up for their newsletter as well as follow @ThisIsTommyGood to get the exact date and time of the drop. Since these posters were printed by Tim Doyle's Nakatomi Inc. there's a good chance that they'll be available at some point down the road through Nakatomi, but you probably don't want to risk losing out. For additional Rhys Cooper artwork head over to his Studio Seppuku store. Finally, the only way I could properly end this post is with a quote from the film.

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milk Bar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova Milk Bar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence." - Alex