Bizarre Film Posters From Communist Poland
The story of postwar Polish film posters is a strange footnote in the history of Communism. In 1947, J Arthur Rank, flour magnate and film mogul, signed a treaty with Poland to distribute British films there. Polish filmgoers were eager for escapist entertainment, while the British were looking for new markets after the United States placed a ban on the import of British films.
Along with the films came the posters and with their arrival a new front was opened up in the ideological war with the West: poster design. ‘In the Polish film magazines there were articles about how bad Western posters were, covered in guns and naked women,’ says Polish curator Ewa Reeves, co-editor of a new book that lines Polish posters up against their British equivalents. ‘So communist Poland decided to create something that would defeat Western posters.’
Above is the British poster of the 1966 prehistoric romp ‘One Million Years B.C.’ and below is the the Polish version, by Bohdan Butenko (1969), which ignored Raquel Welch’s charms in favour of a more surreal take.
At the time there was a single state film distributor in Poland, the Centralna Wynajma Filmow (CWF). The director of CWF, a woman named Anna Prawinowa, decided to invite Polish artists to film screenings and encourage them to improve upon the inferior Western efforts in poster design.
Unconstrained by commercial concerns and motivated by one key dictum – ‘let’s do things differently from the West’ – the artists produced richly symbolic and deeply peculiar posters.
‘You look at them and you cannot associate them with the film,’ Reeves says. ‘When they were made, people complained about them: “What are they about?” But once you’ve watched the film, looking at the poster is like prolonging the film experience, because there’s so much fossilised in it.’
Above is the British poster for the 1967 film based on Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ and below is Bronislaw Zelek’s 1970 Polish poster for the same film.
Printed on extremely thin paper, the fragile posters were none the less coveted by forward-thinking aesthetes in Poland and beyond.
Of a print run of 3,000, 1,500 were immediately exported for sale and these thoroughly uncommercial productions soon acquired the seriousness of hard cash.
When one of Reeves’s friends was leaving Poland in 1981, he wasn’t allowed to carry any foreign currency with him, so he simply took a tube of posters instead.
The British film poster for the award-winning Mona Lisa of 1986 and Kakub Erol’s 1987 Polish poster for the same film.
In Poland, the men who pasted up the posters in the early hours of the morning were trailed by film fans who either peeled the posters off the walls before the glue had time to set, or tried to bribe the pasters with food or drink in exchange for their flimsy wares. ‘It’s a Polish myth that all those things that are created abroad are better than what we make at home,’ Reeves says. ‘I hope with these posters we can change that a little bit.
The British poster for the cult sci-fi thriller The Quartermass Xperiment, released in 1955, and Polish artist Marian Stachurski, who emphasised the bizarre in her 1959 poster for the film.
The British poster for the 1966 film ‘Deadlier Than The Male’, which featured female assassins who lured men to their deaths, and Wiktor Gorka’s 1969 poster for the film, which presents woman as snake.
The original poster for ‘Ann Of The Thousand Days’ about the love affair between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, which starred Richard Burton, and the surreal 1972 Polish version, by Jerzy Flisak.
‘77 Posters’ is available from www.twarda-sztuka.pl or at Koenig Books (80 Charing Cross Road, London WC2, 020 7240 8190). For more information on the project, contact Grazia Giuliani Draper on ggd14@mac.com
Posted on August 5, 2010 | Filed Under Movies
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