Object of the week: The retro-futuristic poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth

In a career that generated so many fascinating images, this particular vision of David Bowie – created for the poster for his 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth – has to rank among the most compelling. 

Bowie had frequently fashioned himself as an unearthly creature in his music career, his lyrics and appearance invoking space travel and alien visitation, stardust and life on Mars. He therefore made an inspired choice for the role of humanoid extraterrestrial Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s disconcerting film. Although Bowie had never acted in a feature film before, when Roeg saw him in the BBC documentary Cracked Actor in January 1975, he became convinced that the pale, fragile but incredibly charismatic rock star would be perfect casting for the lead character in his next film. 

This rectangular quad format poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth – an original copy of which is preserved in the BFI National Archive – superbly suggests both the enigma of Newton (and Bowie) as alien visitor and the reason for his visit to planet earth, which is to seek new sources of water for his own dehydrated, dying  planet. 

Like many cultural texts of the 1970s, it combines the nostalgic with the futuristic. The thin white prism in which Newton’s face is suspended looks both space-age and like an art deco throwback; and certainly other elements of the design, from the typeface used for the credits below the title, white on a black background, and the Clarice Cliff-styled mountain landscape viewed through a circular porthole that bisects the triangle, feel highly redolent of the 1930s. 

The angular typeface used for the star’s name and the film’s title (incidentally, a font later borrowed by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden to forge their own visual identity) resembles both modern digital display and ancient runic lettering. Its ambiguous sense of time and space was the perfect aesthetic match for a film centred on alien and alienation. 

The poster was designed by Vic Fair, “generally recognised today as probably the most brilliant designer to have worked on British film posters since the war”, according to poster connoisseur and expert Sim Branaghan. Fair took a highly inventive approach to illustration, experimenting with different materials, from magic markers to watercolours, and even reflective silver foil for his poster for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967). 

But he recognised above all the importance of bold composition, which can be seen across his career, from his early award-winning poster for La Vérité (1962) which just picked out in blue tones the anguished but lusciously pouting face of the star Brigitte Bardot against a deep black background, as if illuminated by moonlight, to his very delicate design for the period romance The Hireling (1974), capturing both chauffeur and passenger in the car’s mirror. He did more rambunctious but equally graphically strong work for the Confessions films and Hammer horrors (Fair was certainly versatile).  

In this interview, Fair recounts that, pressed for time, he “didn’t really like” the figure at the bottom of the triangle and felt he “should have improved on that”, but was nonetheless still fond of its simplicity of concept. It stands today as a classic of British poster design: evocative, enigmatic and otherworldly. 

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.