



If Times Square grindhouses still existed, the films of Nicolas Winding Refn would be right at home projected on their faded and tattered screens. With films like Drive, The Pusher Trilogy and Only God Forgives, Refn has proven to be a worthy heir to the mantle worn by film makers such as Mario Bava, Tobe Hooper, Enzo G. Castellari, Seijun Suzuki and Bo Arne Vibenius . Refn’s films are beautifully shot, brutally violent and possessed of a certain dark poetry that is very easy to appreciate but hard as fuck to create.

We can now add curator of trash cinema movie posters to Refn’s ever-expanding resume. In collaboration with author Alan Jones (whose bibliography is as hip as it gets), Refn has unleashed one of the most impressive coffee table books to come out in many moons. The Act Of Seeing (Fab Press) is a hardbound collection of several hundred beautifully reproduced exploitation posters from the heyday of truly independent cinema. The Act Of Seeing is a doorway into a lost world that is gone forever. While Tarantino, Rodriguez and Refn himself may honor the grindhouse aesthetic in their own movies, the era in which these kinds of dirt cheap DIY assaults on good taste is behind us. Filmmakers may try to replicate them but irony is no substitute for genuine unselfconscious badness.







Act Of Seeing is available for purchase here. It’s a limited edition and my gut feeling is it will sell out soon. $80 is not too much to pay for a book of this scope. It weighs eight pounds so figure it’s costing you ten bucks a pound. If you’ve got an Amazon Prime account and you want to get the book fast, click here.

Here are a few of my favorites from The Act Of Seeing:



































This short interview with Nicolas Winding Refn and Alan Jones was conducted during this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin.





Photo:Mirgun Akyavas

