SIGNS OF THE TIME

Movies have the capacity to capture the essence of the time in which they were made, but the poster art itself can do the same thing...

Polish movie poster art during the Iron Curtain era breaks convention by not visually connecting to the movie it is referencing. These posters were abstracted, fantastical, and a platform for their creative identity. In his 'Believer' article from March/April 2009, 'Polish Movie Posters: One of the Great Secrets of the Twentieth-Century Pop Art', Michael Atkinson explains their subtext saying, 'the public form reflecting the public sphere, expressing its psychosocial angst in stark ways the state can neither ignore nor mitigate. The posters...came to embrace a kind of ur-Kafka-ness, a lightless Mitteleuropean netherworld stalked by Schulzian figures twisted in all sorts of metaphoric knots by frustration and fear." So this genre of art is an episteme of Post WWII Polish culture as it describes the dominent sentiment of the times through its visual language and in its method of transmission. The artists redefined a commercial form into an aesthetic vehicle for discussing or describing other issues involved in the oppression of communist rule. (I think this is also an interesting topic to compare to the emotional branding discussed in 'The Persuaders' documentary).

This poster was made by Wieslaw Walkuski for the Louis Bunuel movie 'The Phantom of Liberty" from 1974. The movie is a comic satire of bourgeois convention shot in Bunuel's surrealist style using bright daylighting. The poster has nothing to do with it, or as Atkinson describes it, "...Walkuski conjured a second movie from the living brain of the first, and made it completely his own."

Here are some other posters that illustrate the point. I think 'weekend at bernies' is my favorite.



These are posters for 'Terms of Endearment', 'Eyes Wide Shut', 'Lord of the Flies', 'Weekend at Bernies', 'Fatal Attraction', and 'Tootsie'









to see some more images


to find 'Believer' article