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Polish Movie Posters Privilege Art Over Commerce
In the foreground: Wieslaw Walkuski horrifying poster art for Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou.
The quality of movie posters has been suffering in recent years. As the products of Hollywood studios come closer to resembling indiscernible mass entertainments, their posters have assumed the dubious instrumental function of falsely distinguishing them. Contemporary posters focus on a film’s star power (“STALLONE. STATHAM. LI. LUNDGREN.”), connection to other film properties (“From the Director of The Dark Knight“), or other relevant selling points.
Where the one sheets and lobby cards of yesteryear may have taken a more minimalist style, designed to hint at a film’s emotional or thematic landscape (such as Saul Bass’s designs for Vertigo and The Shining) or exhibit a vibrant aesthetic on par, or even surpassing, that of the film they advertise (Frank McCarthy’s realist bills for Once Upon A Time in the West and several Bond movies), rendering them artifacts suitable for framing and home display, most contemporary movie posters are of interest to collectors only in their kitschy function as corporate detritus or as dorm room wallpaper. The influence of globalization has compounded the problem to a macro level, with film posters being more-or-less indistinguishable from country to country. Just look at the posters for David Twohy’s wonderful 2009 thriller A Perfect Getaway, which are virtually identical in their American, German, Vietnamese, and Brazilian iterations. But of course this wasn’t always the case.
Plakat: World Cinema Through the Eyes of Polish Graphic Artists is the unwieldy name for a new exhibition at the Steam Whistle Brewery showcasing—wait for it—Polish movie posters.
The crowd at the Steamwhistle Gallery on the opening night of the exhibit.
Just in time for TIFF 2010, and (speaking of unwieldy names) the TIFF Bell Lightbox’s Essential Cinema exhibition, Plakat (Polish for “poster”) gathers scores of high-quality replicas on loan from the Poster Museum at Wilanów in Warsaw, all of which radically eschew the prevailing logic of movie posters as little more than glossy adverts. Presented by You Nxt, a program dedicated to promoting Polish-Canadian talent, and the Polish Consulate, the exhibition also serves to usher Polish cultural events out of church basements and combatants halls and into galleries and other trendy spaces around Toronto.
For exhibition curator and You Nxt co-founder and director Filip Terlecki, these posters represent the days when movie adverts pulled double-duty as art. “A bunch of critically acclaimed graphic artists where approached by studios to do advertisements for major international films screening in Poland,” he explains. “And rather than have the poster be a simple advertisement, it was more an artistic expression that tried to convey the essence of the film in one archetypal image. At the same time, some of these artists tried to include a political message about the situation of that time. The golden age for these posters was the ‘50s and ‘60s, which was when the Communist influence in Poland is rising.”
The political tensions in many of these posters are apparent, though not just in their tendency towards emotional intensity and personal expression. Many implicitly stage a tension between Soviet and Western ideology, such as Waldeman Świerzy’s poster for John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which captures the spirit of an American motion picture in a style recalling Russian avant-gardists like Kandinsky.
These posters, many by award-winning artists such as Wiktor Gorka, Jan Lenica, and Wlademar Swierzy, are highly expressionistic, privileging vivid affect over a focus on star power or saleability. “Nowadays, there are great artists making great works of art. And they can make great posters ,” says Terlecki. “But this commercial system we have doesn’t give them any room to be creative. It’s very constrictive.” But the Polish posters on display at the Palak exhibition display no such constraint.
Take for example, Rosław Szaybo’s poster for Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which has a hissing snake coiled around a pink orb, representing Mia Farrow’s impregnation by Satan in the film. Likewise, the intense poster for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (another design of Świerzy’s), which has the face of Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz being stretched and scratched in all directions, an external realization of the character’s psychotic interior state.
The aesthetics of film advertising may seem to be of limited interest, especially in a culture that no longer values them. But these posters hearken back to the golden age of global cinephilia, where film-goers were more genuinely interested in emotion and ideas, and where audiences valued the names of auteurs over posters promising another dopey cinematic outing “From the Guys That Brought You Superbad.”
And speaking of Superbad, anyone looking to explain why Scott Pilgrim vs. the World flopped at the box office need look no further than its poster. It’s proof that an advert boasting no major director’s name and hiding its star’s face will not put asses in the seats for an exceptionally enjoyable movie.
Plakat: World Cinema Through the Eyes of Polish Graphic Artists runs at the Steam Whistle Brewery (255 Bremner Boulevard) until September 11. It then moves to the Metro Hall Rotunda (55 John Street) from September 13 to 18. Admission is free. More information is here.
Photos by Joel Charlebois/Torontoist.
Poster art courtesy of the Steam Whistle Brewery.
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