Poster for Jules and Jim c1967 Directed by Francois Truffaut
Poster for Vysoka Zed’ (The High Wall) c1964 Directed by Karel Kachyna
Stunning posters from the Czechoslovakian designer Zdenek Ziegler.
The traditionally high standard of Czech visual culture is documented by a spectacular selection of 100 posters for national and foreign films created by Czech graphic designers, painters, sculptors, stage designers and film directors, who applied a variety of artistic styles from Art Nouveau on the beginning of the past century to postmodernism and graphic minimalism today.Posters were selected from the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Exlibris Prague and several private collections.
The first film performances in Prague are documented in 1896 - 1898 by imported artistic posters, either French or American, while the first Czech film advertisements were only typographical. Viktor Ponrepo, who opened the first permanent cinema in Prague in 1910, was a pioneer in using large-size pictorial posters, printed in France, on which he promoted his performances by a Czech text (Imprudence de Jacqueline, 1910). The first preserved Czech film poster is The Idyll from Old Prague (1913-18) created by Josef Wenig, a stage designer, and also specialist for the Czech, often sentimental, films. Other Czech artists also working in the film production, as e.g., Max Fric and Ferdinand Fiala, soon joined him. Their style is more modern, but Vaclav Cutta´s posters are the best example of the 1920s advertisement. He was a specialist in foreign film designs full of sensation and thriller scenes (Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).
Their large size picture affiches were lithographed with minimum text showing dramatic scenery with only the film title.
During the 1930s, there was a short period when film posters were designed by Czech modernists. Among avant-garde artists were Frantisek Zelenka and Antonin Pelc, as well as big Prague advertisement studios such as Rotter, Hofbauer-Pokorny, Heilbrun, Weigelt, Weiss, Vodicka Studios and later on Bruno, Jonas, Burjanek and others.
Beside these, designers from the previous decade like Fiala, Fric, Ottmar and Wenig were still active. The poetism of Frantisek Zelenka was an original achievement, while the use of black and white photographs collage in functionalist posters did not last long, because it did not survive the competition with other painted colorful affiches. In the center of the composition, heads of film stars dominated, complemented with areas of clear flat colors. The film director´s name appeared on the poster together with the names of film stars as a new item. It is evident that posters were painted according to the film photographs, often drawn with hyper-realistic effort, which is most obvious in mainly the posters for foreign films, inspired by American style. Such posters can be called proto pop-art (King Kong, 1933, USA), Tajemstvi vynalezce (The Inventor´s Secret, 1936, UK), San Francisco (1937, USA). Czech world famous film production of director Gustav Machaty is presented by poster Extase (1932), with a stylization of Heda Lamarr´s erotic face profile.
The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 suppressed Czech film production. National films were overrun by foreign, mainly German films, the posters size reduced, titles had to be first in German language and only then in Czech, colors were dark and the general artistic impression poor.
Film industry was among the first enterprises to be nationalized soon after the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945. The newly established Czechoslovak State Film opened its Central Film Distribution Office (UPF – Ustredni pujcovna filmu) at Narodni Street in Prague and produced until 1990 film posters for all national and foreign films in the Czechoslovak state distribution. After the transition period 1945 - 1947, marked by last echoes of Modernism in the posters of Josef Burjanek and Albert Jonas, the following decade of socialist realism affected all fields of visual culture; its Stalinist style examples are preserved mainly in the film posters for schematic Czech and Soviet films, such as Daleko od Moskvy (Far From Moscow).
Czech visual culture of the sixties reached the top of its artistic expression in works created by free-lance painters, graphic artists, sculptors, architects and stage designers who were invited at the beginning of the sixties by UPF editors to increase the Czech film poster artistic level. Under the centralized state film industry, film poster production lost its commercial role and became an important means of cultural education. A new spirit was awakened also by the creativity and artistic quality of the 1960s film. With the liberal atmosphere of political thaw, the highlights of world cinematography were finally shown with several years´ delay in Czechoslovak cinemas (films by Visconti, Pasolini, Fellini, Bergman, Wajda, etc.) and Czech artists were inspired by the individualist spirit of these artistic movies.
The first internationally recognized Czech graphic designers were Karel Teissig (for the French film Stockbrokers, 1961) and Jiri Balcar (Moby Dick, 1962) award winners in the film poster competition for the Toulouse-Lautrec Prize in Paris.
The birth of the Czech creative film poster phenomenon in the early sixties can be credited to Karel Vaca, Karel Teissig, Richard Fremund, Vladimir Tesar, Jiri Balcar, Jaroslav Fiser, Zdenek Ziegler, Milan Grygar, Bedrich Dlouhy, Zdenek Palcr and others. In the late sixties and during the seventies they were joined by Josef Vyletal, Olga Polackova-Vyletalova, Jiri Rathousky, Alexej Jaros, Karel Machalek, Petr Pos, Jiri Salamoun, Vratislav Hlavaty, Zdenek Vlach and Antonin Sladek. In the streets, but soon also at film festival exhibitions, in art galleries and cinema premises, Czech film poster rapidly won the favor of the public for its creative imagination, poetic and lyrical atmosphere. It was characteristic by the use of collage, rollage, photomontage, retouching, striking graphic designs, wity typographic visual puns and surrealist dreamy interpretation. Mass reproductions of works of art flooded the billboards in towns and cities and changed them into sidewalk open air galleries. In the course of the 1960s, Czech film poster designers found inspiration in the informal style, applying its forms of structural abstraction and lettrism, later on in pop-art and op-art, using the then popular psychedelic forms and colors. Artists frequently employed styles inspired by the film forms, such as enlarged close-up, merging of symbolic and metaphoric visual levels and repeated details.
Many Czech poster artists were awarded prizes at poster exhibitions,held at international film festivals in Cannes, Chicago and Hollywood (Olga Polackova-Vyletalova, Karel Vaca, Zdenek Ziegler and Vratislav Hlavaty) and their works appeared in prestigious foreign journals, such as Graphis, Idea and Novum Gebrauchsgraphik.
The most striking images are: Nezna (The Gentle One) by Olga Polackova-Vyletalova, Psycho by Zdenek Ziegler and The Birds by Josef Vyletal, who used a collage of the surrealist painting Attirement of the Bride by Max Ernst to express a mysterious scenery for Alfred Hitchcock´s horror movie. The success of the Czech New Wave was accompanied by striking film poster images:
Valery and Her Week of Wonders, or the Oscar awarded Czech films Shop on the Main Street and Closely Watched Trains.
In the late 1970s and in the 1980s, the Czech film poster was strongly affected by the "normalization" atmosphere, characterized by the return of censorship and self-censorship. Many poster artists emigrated, and two very talented personalities, Richard Fremund and Jiri Balcar, died in tragical car accidents. Posters became more metaphorical in their spirit as shown in surrealist posters by Josef Vyletal and Zdenek Vlach, while many other artists used grotesque drawing (Jiri Salamoun, Petr Pos, Vratislav Hlavaty).
In the early 1990s, the decline of mass film poster production started with the demise of the Central Film Distribution Center, when free market opened again and mainly American film distributors established their branches in the Czech Republic. Together with their films, they have brought also original American poster designs. There was only limited space left for Czech designers.
Nowadays, they only can promote Czech films, and even there the Hollywood style with manipulated photographs affected Czech designs as well. In terms of creative personalities, present-day Czech film poster is predominantly associated with the names of Ales Najbrt and his graphic design studio (Cosy Dens), Eva Svankmajerova´s surrealist style still fascinates viewers in the posters for Jan Svankmajer animated movies and Slovak film director Juraj Jakubisko, who settled his office in Prague, continues in designing posters not only for his own movies, but for instance for Kytice (Wild Flowers).
