American car films of the early 1970s made the road an escape route and the automobile an outlaw’s accomplice. Le Mans closes that road into a circuit leading nowhere except back through darkness and fatigue. Steve McQueen spent the authority he earned with Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair on a film that stripped back dialogue and plot until Porsche 917s and Ferrari 512s carried the drama. Shot partly during the 1970 Le Mans race, it follows the exhausted tempo of endurance competition with near-documentary devotion.

That devotion found an ideal interpreter in René Ferracci, one of the most prolific poster artists of postwar French cinema, whose thousands of designs helped bring photographic montage into the country’s lithographic tradition. For Le Mans, he made McQueen’s helmeted face bear the psychological weight of the film. It fills the sky above the circuit, scorched by concentration, while the cars appear to run across his thoughts. 

As Le Mans passed from costly disappointment to cult object, this image became one of its most durable expressions. It leaves McQueen where the film wanted him, absorbed beyond celebrity into the closed world of the race.