Art of the Modern Movie Poster

Below is the introduction from one of my most treasured books; 'The Art of the Modern Movie Poster'. It discusses the development of the Movie Poster post World War II in several parts of the world. It's a fascinating read and details several key moments of the process.

The world changed in 1945, and so did the film industry. In Hollywood the golden years were over. Americans would never again attend the movies in such high percentages or with such passionate regularity. The wartime need for escape had come to an end: there were families to be reunited, and lives to be reformed. Also, a new medium - television - was about to do to movies what the internet would do to television fifty years later. Studios cut back on the budgets for their films, as well as the promotional campaigns that accompanied them. After the Hollywood Anti-Trust case of 1948 which separated the studios from theater chains they owned, the film business broke wide open, allowing a new wave of independent producers and distributors to enter the market. With little motivation to continue to produce the expensive advertising material they had issued in the 20's and 30's, the studios eventually all closed their in-house poster distribution operations, turning that job over to an independent company, the National Screen Service, which would handle posters for the majors and most if the minors until it went out of business in 2000. During the war, most of the studios had also abandoned the expensive stone lithograph process that produced the sharp, deeply saturated colours of the 20's and 30's movie posters, turning instead to the far less costly process of offset printing. Taken together, all of these changes meant a new kind of movie for a new kind of audience.

In Europe and Asia, of course, the situation was far more dire. Filmmaking had simply ceased  in some countries, and when it picked up again, the going was slow and investors were hard to come by. The first post war posters were from Europe were often cheap two or three colour affairs printed on flimsy paper - poor substitutes for the huge, colourful posters that had once covered walls in Paris, Rome and Berlin. These countries, too, would see new, independent producers enter the industry, and eventually the movie poster returned, enjoying a particular renaissance (appropriately) in Italy. In Communist Eastern Europe, film production and distribution became largely the business of the state. This worked to the advantage of poster artists, particularly in Poland, where the next generation of designers learned to work brilliantly within the new limitations, helping to give birth to a modernist movement in poster design that would prove to be hugely influential. Free of commercial constraints, these designers considered themselves artists, and the government ministers, happy to have "people's art" they could point to with pride, supported them in their endeavours, holding exhibitions, founding schools, and establishing prizes. These posters caught the eyes of collectors and dealers, and an old profession acquired a new prestige.

In devastated Japan, it was the U.S. government that put the movie business back on its feet. Operating at first under the strict control of American censors, the old studios reorganized, and a fresh generation of talent emerged - led most famously by Akira Kurosawa, whose Rashomon (1950) introduced Japanese cinema to much of the Western World when it won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Also, old masters like Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizogucki, and Mikio Naruse entered their most profound periods. But most beneficial for the movie poster, Japan witnessed an explosion of popular genres, as new legions of sword wielding samurai, city stomping monsters and tattooed gangsters took over the screen. These busy, lurid, energetic films required a busy, lurid, energetic style of poster making, and the Japanese found it in the art of photomontage, which the studio artists elevated to new heights of baroque insanity.

On the downside, the rise of photo-based posters meant the decline of hand-painted posters. Photomontage posters were inexpensive to create, well-suited to the modern offset printing methods, and pleased actors and agents with their emphasis on star presence. Though it would take another twenty or thirty years, photomontage eventually became the accepted standard in most of the world, gaining a final advantage in the 1990's as computer applications such as Photoshop entered the picture.

Today, the poster is no longer the centre of film promotion. Television advertising has taken over that role, and the one-sheet poster, once ubiquitous in America, is now produced mainly for lightbox display in theatre lobbies, carrying the same "key art" designed to be used in platforms from bus panels to Internet banners. The hand-painted poster has become rare, a prestige item that only a few privileged filmmakers are allowed to commission. There are, of course, many examples of dazzling photographic posters, but most poster aficionados will agree that something went out of the art form when Photoshop came in. The emphasis now is not on execution, but on concept and communication. A person flipping through a magazine, surfing the Internet, or driving past a billboard may not have the time or training to appreciate Peter Strausfeld's woodcuts or Zdenek Ziegler's selection of typefaces. The message must be fast and hard: who's in it, and what it's about.

Still, it would be foolish to declare that the movie poster is dead. As a form of street art, film posters retain an appeal and mystique that no advertisement for fruit-flavoured vodka or cell phone services will ever be able to capture. For the stroller through Tokyo, Paris, New York and other great cities that support a street-level public, movie posters continue to jump out from the indiscriminate jumble of advertsing messages. The promises they make are almost invariably broken by the films they promote, but as you pass them you cannot help but feel a certain frisson, a leap of the mind toward new people and places, toward stories other than our own. More than just marketing, these posters are invitations to the imagination, forever beckoning us to join new worlds.

By Dave Kehr