Tim Maddison, who is both my friend and a film poster expert from our new sponsor, The Movie Poster Art Gallery, has written a superb post on the genius of Polish film posters.

Over to Tim:

Imagine you’re a designer of film posters. Today. Now. On your desk (or desktop) arrives a commission to create a poster for the latest big release. Great! Wrong. Because create doesn’t really come into it any more. Beneath your fingertips, through a simple keyboard, lies the greatest capacity for graphic creativity known to man, an ability to meld colour and shape not just into every conceivable form, but to explore beyond the conceivable into an abstract kingdom of limitless potential. Ready to dive in? Well you’d better keep your towel on, because you won’t be making any waves. Instead, just get busy grouping those generic star’s photographic headshots, give them a nice simple over-tone, vaguely metallic, slightly gloomy (or a white background, if the client is bold); make sure you check the parts that touch-in is oh-so very definitely required by you…I mean, why am I even saying this, you know what to do…make it like all the others.

You, the designer, might at this point drift off over your coffee and dream of an Oz-like land where the executives, agents and stars had no say over how you sold their product, where the posters created to accompany Hollywood’s biggest releases were the creations solely of your unbound imagination; no tick-list, no formula. Your name, signed at the bottom. This Oz-like land, this designer’s nirvana?

Well that would be Poland.

For nearly 30 years, Poland was home to the most unchained school of nominally commercial graphic design ever seen. The country had a respectable existing history of poster design, but the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent cultural thaw saw Socialist Realism give way to something without precedent.

Unlike the pure abstraction and optimism of the Constructivist movement, that earlier great moment of freedom in revolutionary art before Stalin’s 19^th c. conservatism closed its fist, Polish artists surrendered to the dark currents of the unconscious, to the surreal, even to the nightmarish; natural responses to the intervening experience of apocalyptic war and brutal Soviet repression. Humour is certainly present, but often with an unsettling edge. The diversity and sheer freedom and invention in the Polish school is shocking to anyone raised on the restrictions of western commercial art. And yet, of course, the greatest Polish film posters are those where the boldest designs are underpinned by the artist’s inspired grasp of something essential about that movie, or its star, or its tradition.

One tradition that Polish artists grasped better than any was that of the Western. Westerns were hugely popular in Poland, and artists like Flisak and Gorka created their own hazily surreal images of Western myth, semi-abstract figures with over-size wide brimmed hats, set in dusty hues of desert orange and red, fingers trigger-ready. See above for a great example; Jerzy Flisak’s 1966 poster for Howard Hawk’s classic ‘El Dorado’.

The great years of Polish poster design run roughly from Stalin’s death to the end of the 1980s, with perhaps the 1950s – 1970s marking the true high point. Highly collectible, these affordable classics have found an eager audience, not least in Britain.

Ironically, political freedom coincided with what many people feel to be the Polish school’s decline into decadence, a hyper-real nightmarish surrealism that rapidly became a cliché of its own, cold and lifeless, devoid of the freedom and wit that had been its singular flag.

Will we see their like again?

Come the revolution!