City of Signs 4

The recent advert for Sky Movies is beautifully shot across the Brazilian city of São Paulo, that recently decreed to remove all billboards. It is inspired by Tony de Marco's São Paulo No Logo photographs, (Flickr set here), as previously written about here.

It is an advert celebrating non-advertising.

The imagery of the city scape presented is depicted as a purer, simpler urban realm, a rather surreal landscape of blank spaces and empty billboards.

As Ads without products points out, this could be the opening sequence to a psychological thriller much more interesting than 90% of the films Sky Movies show.

"And even better, way better, is that the damned thing looks like the opening sequence of an absolutely incredible (and a good deal more horrifying, to many in the wider audience, than Cloverfields, which isn’t very horrifying at all) of a very different sort of speculative fiction, one about a specter lurching back from the place where dismissed specters go in order to decapitate the idols of the era, break open the walls of the buildings in the expensive neighborhoods, and leave most bedazzled and exhilarated at the sweep of violence that has rubbled so many things we thought could never go, that we believed, despite ourselves, that the world simply couldn't live without."


Previously: