CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/8/2024

The World of Tim Burton in rare, archival materials

“Untitled (Vincent)” (1982) is reproduced from Silvana new release, The World of Tim Burton, featuring 200 color reproductions of rarely or never-before-seen materials—including early sketches from Burton’s childhood, paintings, drawings, photographs, concept art, storyboards, costumes, moving-image works, maquettes, puppets and life-size sculptural installations. “There are directors who build filmographies and others who create worlds,” Giona A. Nazzaro writes. “And others still who consciously, like architects, build cathedrals over time. Among the latter are the likes of Claude Chabrol or Fassbinder. Poetics is the product of a set of recurring signs, obsessions and refrains that enables in its accumulation of evidence a conversation with a filmmaker. Creators of worlds work differently. Poetics—which usually emerges midway through the career of a director, if the premise of the early works is retained—is already all there in that first image, in the first sign (in this sense Bertrand Mandico is the closest director to Tim Burton today). The world itself is motive force to the very existence of their filmmaking. Tim Burton is a creator of worlds.”