{ feuilleton } » Franciszek Starowieyski

Polish posters: Freedom on the Fence

John — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:49:34 +0000

Poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, designed by Bronisław Zelek (1965).

Freedom on the Fence is a 40-minute documentary film by Andrea Marks about the history of the Polish poster which includes a look at the many unique cinema and theatre designs produced in the 1960s and ’70s. Marks spent ten years working on this short film, interviewing many of the artists responsible for designs such as the one above. While searching around for links I came across a brief interview with {feuilleton} favourite Franciszek Starowieyski who died in February.

As to the current state of the art form in Poland, Marks has this unsurprising but still dispiriting note:

The Polish government no longer finances most cultural events; theatres cannot afford to publish artistic posters, and the idea of a film as an excuse to make a poster has vanished. Ironically, although the climate of Communism was a good ground for creating posters, the freedom of a free market society has resulted in a more restrictive climate for the creation of powerful posters. The art form is forever changed. A few concerned collectors and publishers, such as Krzysztof Dydo and Edmund Lewandowski, are attempting to keep the art form alive by commissioning and publishing new works, but their efforts alone will not overcome the situation. It is hoped that an outside appreciation of pre-1980s poster design history in Poland will ultimately help to encourage the government and private interests to commission more posters from Polish artists.

Freedom on the Fence is due to be released on DVD later this year.

• An interview with the director

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters

Kaleidoscope: the switched-on thriller

John — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:40:34 +0000

I’ve not seen Jack Smight’s 1966 caper movie for years, and don’t remember much about it beyond Maurice Binder’s kaleidoscopic title sequence. But I like this collage poster, a suitably frenetic piece for one of Hollywood’s many attempts throughout the 1960s to capitalise on modish fashion. I can’t find a credit for the designer so if anyone knows who was responsible, please leave a comment.

This Polish poster, on the other hand, is the work of Witold Janowski who successfully combines the film’s title with its playing card theme. Too arty and cerebral for Hollywood (No girls!…no guns!) but that’s how it is with all those great Polish poster artists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Dallamano’s Dorian Gray
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

The Robing of The Birds

John — Sat, 16 May 2009 01:52:46 +0000

Yet another of those curious Eastern European film posters which, to our Hollywood-colonised eyes, seem to violate all the conventions of cinema marketing. This example is a painting by Josef Vyletal for a 1970 Czech release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Surrealist art enthusiasts will immediately identify the floating figures as being cut loose from Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride (1940). Compared to some Czech and Polish posters, the associations here aren’t so surprising; Ernst identified his alter-ego as a bird-headed individual named Loplop. Birds and bird-headed humans recur throughout his work. Hitchcock, meanwhile, famously commissioned Salvador Dalí to design the dream sequences in Spellbound (1945). One of Ernst’s few appearances as an actor is in Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) a very Surrealist film which also features scenes informed by Ernst’s work. It’s a shame more directors didn’t take the opportunity to employ these talents while they were still alive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard and the painters
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• Hitchcock on film
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film

Vintage movie posters

John — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:57:56 +0000

An example from this Flickr set.

Hell is a City is a Hammer melodrama from 1960 directed by Val Guest, mentioned here recently for his earlier The Day the Earth Caught Fire. This one doesn’t succeed quite as well, being a misguided attempt to do a film noir in Manchester. The poster tries to disguise the mundane reality by showing a city which looks more like New York than our small northern metropolis. But it’s worth watching for the great Stanley Baker and, like A Taste of Honey and other films with Manchester settings, you can have fun spotting familiar places in the background. If it’s Brit film noir you want, there’s only one place to go: Jules Dassin’s marvellous Night and the City.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edward Judd, 1932–2009
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009

John — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:02:43 +0000

Not only Philip José Farmer but Polish poster artist Franciszek Starowieyski also died this week, something I probably wouldn’t have known had it not been for the indefatigable Jahsonic. I mentioned Starowieyski’s stunning work earlier this month since he produced the poster for Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has. There’s a further link to Bruno Schulz with another of his posters appearing very briefly at the beginning of Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay.

• Starowieyski poster galleries I | II

• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has
• Czech film posters
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

The Hour-Glass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has

John — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:51:22 +0000

The original Polish poster by the incredible Franciszek Starowieyski.

The shrinking pool of films still unavailable on DVD contracted by at least one title recently with the surprise appearance in the UK of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydra; 1973) from the distinctively-named Mr Bongo Films. I’ve been waiting to see this for at least twenty years so being able to walk into Fopp and buy a copy for a mere £12 strikes me as one of those small but rarely acknowledged miracles of contemporary existence.

Director Wojciech Has is more well-known for his long and weird 1965 adaptation of the equally long and weird Saragossa Manuscript, a rambling semi-fantastical novel by Jan Potocki from around 1805. David Lynch described Saragossa as “Simultaneously horrific, erotic and funny…this is one mother of a film,” and the same description could be applied to The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, as far as I’m aware the only other excursion Has made into full-on strangeness. If anything, Sanatorium outdoes his earlier work on just about every level. Readers familiar with the writings of Bruno Schulz will already have recognised the title as being a truncated variant of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the second and final collection of Schulz’s unique and very strange stories.

“Very strange” is the key here and Has’s film resists easy summary as much as Schulz’s mercurial fiction. Rather than attempt a description myself it’s easier to borrow one from the Mr Bongo site:

The film depicts its protagonist, Joseph (Jan Nowicki), traveling through a dream-like world, taking a dilapidated train to visit his dying father in a sanatorium. When he arrives at the hospital, he finds the entire facility is going to ruin and no one seems to be in charge, or even caring for the patients. Time appears to behave in unpredictable ways, reanimating the past in an elaborate artificial caprice. The many occurrences in this visually potent phantasmagoria include Joseph re-entering childhood episodes with his eccentric father (who lives with birds), being arrested by a mysterious unit of soldiers, reflecting on a girl he knew in his boyhood and bringing historic wax figures to life with names from a postage stamp album. Throughout his strange journey, an ominous blind train conductor reappears like a death figure. Has also adds a series of reflections on the Holocaust that were not present in the original novel, reading Schulz’s prose through the prism of the author’s tragic death during World War II and the demise of the world he described.

That’s an adequate description of the narrative but how and why one scene links to the next and what it all means is anybody’s guess. This isn’t a complaint; I seek out these unusual works, after all, and we’re overburdened with films whose every last plot detail is spoon-fed to lazy audiences. Schulz readers will at least recognise the territory, especially the recurrent scenes with aged Jews and garment traders, but one has to wonder how this would strike an unprepared viewer. Is Schulz’s work so familiar in Poland that there was a ready audience for this? Or was the director taking advantage of Film Polski’s funding to make something closer to poetry than narrative cinema? Whatever the answer, the film is beautifully lit and photographed and the continual procession of bizarre scenes and surprising images means that it doesn’t tax your patience even if you remain bewildered much of the time.

Hour-Glass Sanatorium is another of those oddities that seems to owe its existence almost solely to the economics of the Iron Curtain countries which (often reluctantly) provided financing for works that the more nakedly commercial “freedom” of the West would never support. This isn’t to say the Communist system was better—Andrei Tarkovsky went into exile and Sergei Paradjanov was put into prison—but its probable that without the Cold War we wouldn’t have had Stalker or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or a wealth of imaginative animation from Yuri Norstein, Jan Svankmajer, Karel Zeman, Jiri Barta and others. I’m certain we wouldn’t have had Wojciech Has’s unique fantasies. And now I really have to watch this film again.

• Franciszek Starowieyski poster galleries here and here
• The Art of Bruno Schulz
• Saragossa Manuscript film site

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Karel Zeman
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• The Stalker meme
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• The Cracow Klezmer Band, John Zorn and Bruno Schulz
• Barta’s Golem

Czech film posters

John — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:44:12 +0000

I wouldn’t be surprised if these have been linked all over but I hadn’t come across this site before, Czech posters from the Cold War period when promotional material for Hollywood films was home-produced. This makes for some surprising results as with the psychedelic confection for Dumbo shown above. Elsewhere there’s a Piranesian collage for Raiders of the Lost Ark, a peculiar mangling of Richard Amsel’s poster for Hello Dolly, something for Death in Venice which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the film, and plenty of good solid design such as this piece for Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex.

In a similar vein there’s the extensive Polish Posters site which features some really great work from artists like Franciszek Starowieyski.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters
• Czech book covers