Polish poster for Paper Moon. Art by Jerzy Flisak.Looking through the posters for the films of Peter Bogdanovich, who died last week at the age of 82, it is clear that the best posters for his films were from 1970s Poland. This will be no surprise to readers of this column. While 1970s movie poster design in America was doing some interesting things with type size and negative space, most studio poster design by that time was photography-based. Some of Bogdanovich’s US posters combined photography and graphics in interesting ways but they can’t compare to the quirky, colorful and arresting posters created by Polish masters like Jerzy Flisak, Eryk Lipinski, Jan Mlodozeniec, and Maria Ihnatowicz. To be fair, I wouldn’t say the Polish posters sell the films better than their American counterparts—which benefit from their star power—but as works of art, as something you might...
- 1/10/2022
- MUBI
Above: detail from the Argentinian poster for Magnet of Doom. Artist unknown.Jean-Paul Belmondo, the great French movie star who died last week at the age of 88, had a marvelous face. He wasn’t a classic matinee idol like his friend and compatriot Alain Delon but with the combination of his soulful puppy-dog eyes, lopsided boxer’s nose, and luscious feminine lips he could play both hoodlums or heartthrobs (and in Breathless he played both at the same time). A classic tough guy best known outside France for art movies, he was initially synonymous with the angry alienation of the French New Wave and starred in films by Godard, Truffaut, Melville, Malle and Lelouch. But he could play comedy as well as action (he was renowned for doing his own stunts) and was for a while promoted as a French James Bond. By the ’70s and ’80s—when he was...
- 9/16/2021
- MUBI
Above: French poster for Ossessione (1943). Artist: Boris Grinsson.To commemorate the complete retrospective of the films of Luchino Visconti starting today at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, I decided to choose my favorite poster for each film in Visconti’s titanic body of work (including the three portmanteau films to which he contributed episodes). For many of his films the range of posters are an embarrassment of riches ranging from tempestuous Italian romanticism and beautifully executed French realism to stark German stylization and wry Polish surrealism. Although I think that Italian romanticism certainly suits Visconti best of all in terms of really representing his work—Averardo Ciriello’s stirring portrait of storm-lashed fishermen for La terra trema being a case in point—it is the more gnomic Polish films that I seem to have gravitated to most. There are eight Polish posters here and what is remarkable is...
- 6/8/2018
- MUBI
Above: Polish poster for Loves of a Blonde by Hannah Bodnar and a Hungarian poster for The Firemen’s Ball by Peter Merczel.Milos Forman, who passed away last week at the age of 86, was best known as the Academy Award-winning director of those ’70s and ’80s classics One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, but he was a sensation before he left his native Czechoslovakia in 1968. His first feature, Black Peter (1964), was well received (it took the top prize at Locarno) but it was his two subsequent features, Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967), which made his name both at home and abroad and which remain two of the great fire-bursts of the Czech New Wave. Both are social satires set in small Czech towns, filmed on location, using mostly non-professional casts, in a distinctly cinema vérité style. Both were nominated for Oscars for...
- 4/20/2018
- MUBI
Above: 1960 Us first release one sheet for A Lesson in Love (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1954).Starting on February 7, The Best Show in Town may well be Film Forum’s Centennial Retrospective of the gargantuan six-decade oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman. 47 films over five weeks, 40 of them brand new digital restorations. Usually in these circumstances I gather as many posters as I can find from a filmmaker's career, but collecting posters for all of Bergman’s work would be a monumental task. And so I’ve decided to cut to the chase and select my ten favorite posters for his films.Most American posters for Bergman’s films—especially those from the 60s and 70s—are unusually wordy and quote-heavy, relying on critical acclaim to sell the latest product from the master. But, as much a visual stylist as a cerebral provocateur, Bergman has inspired many poster artists to great heights over the years.
- 2/2/2018
- MUBI
Above: Polish poster for The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965). Designer: Jerzy Flisak.As the 55th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I thought I’d look back half a century at the films of the 5th edition. That 1967 festival, programmed by Amos Vogel, Richard Roud, Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag, featured 21 new films, all but three of which were from Europe (six of them from France, 2 and 1/7 of them directed by Godard), all of which showed at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. (They also programmed Gance’s Napoleon, Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Show People in the retrospective slots). The only director to have a film in both the 1967 festival and the 2017 edition is Agnès Varda, who was one of the directors of the omnibus Far From Vietnam and was then already 12 years into her filmmaking career.It will come as...
- 10/13/2017
- MUBI
Above: Italian 2-foglio for Loves of a Blonde (Miloš Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1965).As the 54th New York Film Festival winds to a close this weekend I thought it would be instructive to look back at its counterpart of 50 years ago. Sadly, for the sake of symmetry, there are no filmmakers straddling both the 1966 and the 2016 editions, though Agnès Varda (88 years old), Jean-Luc Godard (85), Carlos Saura (84) and Jirí Menzel (78)—all of whom had films in the 1966 Nyff—are all still making films, and Milos Forman (84), Ivan Passer (83) and Peter Watkins (80) are all still with us. There are only two filmmakers in the current Nyff who could potentially have been in the 1966 edition and they are Ken Loach (80) and Paul Verhoeven (78). The current Nyff is remarkably youthful—half the filmmakers weren’t even born in 1966 and, with the exception of Loach and Verhoeven, the old guard is now represented by Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar,...
- 10/15/2016
- MUBI
Above: 1965 Czech poster for Three Fables of Love (Blasetti, Bromberger, Clair, Berlanga, Italy/Spain, 1962). Designer: Karel Teissig.Two events provoked this article. First of all, last week I saw the wonderful 1963 Czech fable The Cassandra Cat (a.k.a. When the Cat Comes) at New York’s newest cinephile hotspot, the Metrograph. In this charming New Wave satire a cat wearing dark glasses is brought into a small town by a circus troupe and, when his glasses are removed, the townspeople are revealed in their true colors: namely neon shades of purple, yellow and pink, each representing their vices or virtues. The highlight of the film for me, aside from a psychedelic freak-out dance party in the middle of the film, comes when all the children of the town march through the street bearing large drawings of cats. Chris Marker would have loved this film.The second event was the...
- 3/30/2016
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
1961 Spanish poster for Funny Face (Stanley Donen, USA, 1957). Artists: “McP” (Ramon Marti, Joseph Clave, Hernan Pico).Of all the posters I’ve selected for Movie Poster of the Day over the past three months, I would not have expected this Spanish Funny Face to be the most reblogged and “liked” of all, but I am pleasantly surprised that it is. A gorgeous poster, credited to a triumvirate of artists, that repaints photographic images from the Us half-sheet in unexpected shades of purple and orange, it somehow caught Tumblr’s attention. Or maybe it was just those eyes.It tends to be true that the posters that catch fire the most are unusual and striking designs for well known films, like the Japanese Beetlejuice, the Polish Ran, the British Breathless, and the French On the Waterfront. Which makes it all the more heartening that the fourth most popular poster was a...
- 10/23/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Above: Jerzy Flisak’s 1972 poster for The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Sam Peckinpah, USA, 1970)To coincide with the complete retrospective of the films of Sam Peckinpah currently running at the Locarno Film Festival, I thought I might try to select the best posters of one of my favorite directors. But when I looked at all the posters for Peckinpah’s films it was clear that the best Peckinpah posters were made in Poland. There are a couple of great American one sheets from the 1970s—those stark black and white photographs for Straw Dogs and The Getaway—but nothing quite matches these six Polish designs for visual panache. Jerzy Flisak’s typically witty and playful poster for the most light-hearted of Peckinpah Westerns, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, is one of Flisak’s greatest designs and one that beautifully encapsulates the story of an old prospector exploiting a well in the Arizona desert.
- 8/9/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
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