CzechFilmPosters.com

Czech Film Posters is an internet shop dedicated to film posters designed in Czechoslovakia between the years 1950 and 1990. In this period the design of Czech film posters developed into a unique art in its own right and has won international respect.

Following a communist take-over in 1948, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a totalitarian regime for over forty years. The level of oppression varied throughout the period – the stifling Stalinist practices of the 1950s gradually gave way to a more liberal rule in the 1960s. But the 1968 Prague Spring movement to break free from the leash held by the Kremlin was brutally supressed by the Red Army in August. The following period of darkness – referred to by the regime as “the process of normalisation” – gradually lightened with the onset of Gorbachev’s Perestrojka in the mid 1980s. Like most other Central European communist regimes the Czech one fell in 1989 during the wave of changes set off by the powerfully symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall.

The decision on which foreign films could be approved for cinema distribution and which local artists could be allowed to make Czech and Slovak films was totally up to the authorities.

The attitudes of the censors rode the same waves as the regime in general. After the 1950s‘ overkill of Russian WWII pictures, local as well as imported heroic worker epics and other “ideologically sound” films came the more liberal 1960s with their French and Italian new wave films. This opened doors for a new, soon to be internationally acclaimed, generation of local directors such as Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel and Vera Chytilova.

Following the Russian invasion in 1968 and the subsequent occupation, the 1970s saw a new tightening of the censorship screw, but it largely concentrated on the local scene and foreign films continued to slip through the iron curtain. Czechoslovak film-goers could see a number of European club movies (Bergman, Fellini, Visconti), more than a few US blockbusters (The Sting, Jaws, Marathon Man, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer v. Kramer, Alien and others) and a good crop of conspiracy theory thrillers (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men). The communist authorities liked the latter for their exposure of the rot in the Western world.

The same trend continued and even strengthened in the 1980s when the Czechs could see every single Academy Awards winner as well as gems such as Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo and the European historical hit The Name of the Rose.

But it took until the early 1990s for the Czechoslovak screens to finally see the light shining through such seminal rolls of celluloid such as Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Wings of Desire not to mention any of the James Bond movies or any other film with Russian baddies.

From the beginning of movies, the poster has been the main promotional tool. Though moving pictures came to the Czech lands as early as 1896 and the first brick-and-mortar cinema was built in 1907 it wasn’t until the 1920s that films became part of everyday life.

Huge crowds poured into the newly built luxury cinemas and film posters became a fixture on every corner. Due to the high cost, film posters were rarely imported with the film – a smaller number of French film posters being the exception – and so from the early days it was the local artists who were given the task of creating images to get bums on cinema seats. The Czech film poster of the 1920s and 1930s almost exclusively used realistically painted characters and scenes from the film and screamed the names of its stars often in letters larger than those of the film’s title. Notable exceptions to the rule were Atelier Rotter’s Art Deco works and Frantisek Zelenka’s Modernist designs for the Werich & Voskovec films.

Towards the end of the 1930s, photos of the main character started appearing in the film poster design – usually on a painted background, complemented by lettering created by the poster’s designer. The film poster art lost most of its bite and glamour during the Nazi occupation when the film industry was under the complete control of the German authorities and films in the cinemas were either German or heavily censored Czech productions.

The Czech film industry was nationalised as early as August 1945 – two and half years before the Communist takeover in February 1948. The period between the end of the war and the beginning of communist rule saw a mixed bag of mostly fully painted posters promoting foreign as well as Czech mostly historical or wartime dramas and adaptations of big literary works. There was a Czech poster designed for Casablanca, released in 1947, but no copy has been found in the Czech Republic although one is believed to exist in the US.

The second wave of nationalisation brought an end to the independent graphic design studios. The state film monopoly created a promotional department which employed artists full time. From 1951 posters were also commissioned from a co-operative Propagacni tvorba (Promotional Design) that provided a legal platform for a large number of graphic artists who would otherwise work independently.

The decade between 1948 and 1958 was dominated by communist propaganda in all aspects of life and film was one of its main tools. The two main cracks in the uniform surface of socialist realism in both film and the accompanying film poster were the exhibition in 1954 of Polish film posters and Khrushchev’s criticism in 1956 of Stalin’s cult and methods of governance. The Czechoslovak artists were impressed by the originality and creativity apparent in the work of their Polish colleagues and envied them the greater artistic freedom they enjoyed. The loosening of the regime’s grip after 1956 enabled artists to organise themselves into groups that provided them with a theoretical and legal base from which they could work more freely in both an artistic and a practical sense in that they were no longer obliged to do their job as employees of the film distribution company from 9 to 5, Monday to Saturday. After years of creating propagandist posters for communist films and realistically illustrative ones for historical, children’s and documentary films a new modern style sneaked onto Czech film posters in 1958. Black and white photographs of main characters appear on strikingly modern painted backgrounds or the whole artwork is painted in a style that would now generally be called Mid-Century Modern. (The Czechs named it Brusel after the aesthetic that emerged around the EXPO exhibition of 1958.)

Having seen a couple more exhibitions of Polish film posters and a number of foreign film posters exhibited during the Karlovy Vary international film festival, the commissioning editors at the state film distribution company UPF (Ustredni pujcovna filmu – Central film distribution agency) became aware of the need to make Czech film posters more attractive and started shifting the majority of poster commissions from designers employed full time in their promotions departments to painters and graphic artists who freelanced under the auspices of various artists’ associations. Modern Czech film poster art was born.

The 1960s became the golden age of the Czech film poster. It was a period in which the relative artistic freedom enjoyed by the artists gelled with a range of other factors such as a unique concentration of talent, a wave of new and inspirational films coming from both home and abroad and closer links with the international art world. This cocktail of ability, inspiration and attractive topics to work on gave birth to a collection of hundreds of highly original and inovative film posters that stand apart from the main stream of the genre. While the American and Western European film poster primarily served the film, in Czech and Polish film poster art it was – with a bit of exaggeration – the film that served the poster in the sense that the poster developed into an art form in its own right. It was still used to promote the film but the art of the poster went far beyond the mere capture of the public’s attention. Another factor that enhanced the perception of the Czech film poster as a work of art rather than a purely promotional vehicle was the fact that the text on the poster was usually limited to the film title, name of director and the leading actors – no logos of film distributors and sponsors, quotes lifted from reviews, studio information etc.

While the Polish film poster was predominantly painted, albeit in a multitude of styles, the palette of techniques utilised by the Czechs was wider and included, alongside full scale painting, also artistic typography and print, photo-montage, image manipulation and collage – often combined with or superimposed on painted backround. It was because of the artistic approach and techniques used that the art work not only presented the film but also interpreted its meaning – or at least the artist’s understanding of it. Of no lesser importance was also the fact that the posters were created with no participation of the film director or any other creative element from the production team. The artists were usually shown the film in an advance screening but sometimes all they had to work from was a couple of photos and sometimes only a synopsis. Among the leading poster artists of the 1960s were Jiri Balcar (La Strada), Bedrich Dlouhy (8 ½), Milan Grygar (Blow-Up), Karel Vaca (La Dolce Vita), Zdenek Ziegler (Psycho), Karel Teissig (Les Grandes Familles), Josef Vyletal (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo), Olga Vyletalova-Polackova (Une Femme Douce) a Karel Machalek (Oidipo Re).

The decade of hope ended with the Russian invasion in August 1968. The newly appointed pro-Kremlin government turned one of its searchlights on the arts and entertainment. Paranoid aparatchiks searched for anti-communist propaganda where there was none – film poster designs submitted by artists were often rejected or had to be reworked for bizarre reasons. In her article “Czech Film Poster from 1945 until today” published in the book Czech Film Poster of the 20th century, Marta Sylvestrova writes about a commissioning editor getting fired because of a claim by a communist official that the space between the legs of elephants pictured on a poster for the film “Surrounded by Elephants” looked like a swastika. According to Sylvestrova Zdenek Ziegler was interviewed by the secret police about where he got the 100 USD banknote he used in his design for the 100 Rifles poster and Josef Vyletal had to obscure the US flag on the back of Henry Fonda’s jacket with smoke from one of the passing motorbikes on his poster for Easy Rider.

Despite this bad turn of events, a number of decent films continued to be shown in cinemas and posters were designed for them. Most of the important designers of the 1960s remain on the scene (Karel Teissig, Zdenek Ziegler, Karel Vaca, Milan Grygar, Josef Vyletal, Karel Machalek) while new artists come into the film poster fold. Newcomers worthy of note are the slightly surrealist Zdenek Vlach and the comic artist Kaja Saudek who had a number of commissions at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s.

Although many posters designed in the 1970s and 1980s are very good, they do not break new ground. Like most Czech people the artists spent the 1970s and 1980s running on batteries charged in the 1960s and it wasn’t until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that the country and its creative element got a new lease of life.

Czech Film Posters is proud to be able to offer works from all the great Czech designers of film posters. We are very interested in extending our collection of Czech film posters so if you happen to have any that you would like to sell or trade please do not hesitate to contact us.