The winner of our Julian Schnabel Poster Contest is Ed Howard. Ed’s contest entry is posted after the jump; you can also check out his extended thoughts on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at his blog. Congratulations, Ed––and please contact us with your mailing address at karina AT spout DOT com so we can get the poster out to you.

I love Diving Bell because it is one of the most wonderfully sustained exercises in empathy I can remember encountering in the cinema. Its first-person opening half-hour is claustrophobic, but is probably the only way that Schnabel can effectively communicate some sense of what his film’s protagonist must be experiencing. The film takes a potentially melodramatic and tear-jerking story, its subject readymade for a Hallmark movie of the week or an Oscar-bait prestige picture, and instead has made a work of stunning visual ingenuity and intellectual introspection. Like the diving helmet of the title, a metaphor for the hero’s sensations of entrapment and suffocation, the film submerges the viewer in a strictly internal world, examining ideas of sensation/mind interaction, creativity, and communication. This is a striking, sensual, genuinely moving work of art.

If I win the poster, I’ll be getting it framed and hanging it in a place of honor right above my bed. Many of the film’s images have haunted my dreams anyway since I saw it, so I might as well commemorate its evocative impact with a tangible signifier.