The movie posters that made movie history
From the first French posters of the late 19th century to the present, the history of the movie poster is intertwined with that of the film industry and the visual arts in general. Until World War II, posters were one of the main vehicles for publicizing films and were a major contributor to their success. As time went on, posters became coveted collector’s items.
The origins of the movie poster
The first film posters appeared in France in the late 19th century, with the birth of cinema itself. Jules Chéret and Marcellin Auzolle began to publicize the invention of the Lumière brothers using the typical Art Nouveau style, characterized by lithographs rich in bright colors and characters illustrated in minute detail.
The so-called “cinema painters” were tasked with depicting the film through eye-catching illustration that would attract the attention of people passing by cinemas or near billboards. The detailed description of the viewers and scenes of the film served to let the audience know whether or not the film was suitable for the whole family, and the genre to which it belonged (comic, adventurous, etc.).
During this period the stock poster, a poster that could be used for multiple events in which information about the show was added from time to time, was often used. An example of this is the poster below by Adrien Barrère, in which the white space of the screen was replaced with a scene from the film.
The spread of the movie poster in the U.S.
With the rise of Hollywood after the end of World War I and the spread of the first feature films, the movie poster began to depict the cast (or lead actor), the director’s name, the title of the film, and a plot summary. Color lithography continued to be used to produce it, the only printing technique that, while expensive, allowed for high-quality illustrations. Posters often featured portraits of the various actors, but in the case of stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Marylin Monroe or Audrey Hepburn the entire space was reserved for their portrait, fueling the phenomenon of film stardom.
Playbills that made movie history
In 1950s America, directors such as Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock began to produce and promote their films independently, relying on the work of Saul Bass. This American designer began to design the entire visual identity of their films, from the creation of the opening and closing credits to the posters, introducing a completely new style, characterized by a minimalist and highly evocative design. For the first time in the history of film posters, Bass succeeded in summarizing the meaning of the films through a symbolic language of primary colors and bold geometric shapes.
One of his most famous works was the introductory sequence of Otto Preminger’s 1959 film “Anatomy of a Murder.” In it, the pieces that made up the outline of a corpse began to slide in and out of the screen, highlighting the titles that alternated to the beat of jazz. Bass used the same graphic concept for the film’s poster.
Equally famous were the introductory sequences and related posters for Hitchcock’s films “The Woman Who Lived Twice,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho.” The original and impactful graphics created by Bass undoubtedly helped increase the notoriety of these filmmakers.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the neorealist movement took hold in Italy: directors such as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini were inspired by contemporary stories to depict the lives of ordinary people in post-World War II Italy. For these films, Italian poster artists mostly chose watercolor portraits depicting a scene from the film, or reworked the plot more freely. Anselmo Ballester and Ercole Brini signed some of the most famous posters of the time. In the poster for “Bicycle Thieves,” Brini deliberately chose a “sweet” image with delicate colors, as if to soften the stark reality depicted in the film.
Beginning in the 1960s, the spread of television prompted Hollywood filmmakers to devote themselves to ambitious film productions, investing very large economic resources to be able to attract as many viewers as possible to the theaters. During this period, English artist Philip Castle introduced a completely new technique to the world of poster design: the airbrush. This tool made it possible to create very sharp and detailed images, perfect for the stark realism of such films as “A Clockwork Orange” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” Castle signed some of the most iconic posters in film history.
Around the same time, U.S. illustrator Bob Peak also began using the airbrush to depict some of the most famous films of the 1960s and 1970s, from “Apocalypse Now” to “Star Trek.”
The advent of the photographic poster
The invention of VCRs in the early 1980s and the subsequent advent of the Internet and pay TV in the 1990s pushed the movie poster to new standards. With the arrival of digital image reprocessing programs, photography completely replaced illustration, and a standardized composition began to be used for movie posters, characterized by the faces of the main characters (or the main star) and a few frames taken from the film, with an often colder and more aseptic result. There are some notable examples, however, including the poster for “Kill Bill” from 2003, with its somewhat retro-flavored illustration, and that for “Moon,” Duncan Jones’s science fiction film released in 2009, which uses a very successful mix of graphics and photography.
