FILM POSTERS

FOTOFO in Photograph Gallery Profil, Prepoštská 4,814 99 Bratislava
Opening hours: 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. except Mondays

In the former Czecho-Slovakia the most prestigious event for graphic designers from 1960 on, was the exhibition of topical world production at the Brno Biennials. This simultaneously provided floorspace for the presentation of home poster designing and an opportunity for comparing it with the international development. Among home products, for the most part cultural posters excelled at the Biennials - theater, exhibition and film posters that gradually came to catch up and keep step with the European milieu. In the 60s, a striking phenomenon in this international competition,
often underlined even by experts, came to be precisely Czech film poster. Therefore, it is logically the period to which our exhibition devotes the greatest attention. Such a situation has never recurred. Designers within worldwide
competition came out more prominently only towards the end of the 90s which, alongside a minor poster collection from the 70s, constitute the third key period in the exhibition.
However, the selection is also limited by the range, representation and quality of the archival collection which is managed and preserved by the Slovak Film Institute in Bratislava. A characteristic feature of the Czech film poster
is its taking contact with traditions laid down by the graphic design and typology of the interwar avant-garde which had first began to discover the potentiality of photography in design. The strong cubist, constructivist, but especially surrealist tradition is also legible in the transformation of
the means of expression in posters of the 60s and early 70s through the prism of pop art, informal abstractions or the new figuration. Quotations, collage, montage, manipulation, simulation and intermedium practice have remained the bearing
meaningful and compositional principles of the Czech film poster down to our days. Our poster selection is also about this.

Dagmar Poláčková