film plagats

FOTOFO
Galéria Profil,
Prepoštská 4,
Bratislava

in Photograph Gallery Profil, Prepoštská 4,814 99 Bratislava

 

Opening hours: 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. except Mondays

It is quite natural for the film poster, serving to propagate and promote a film, to consider its own closest kindred medium - photography - as its principal means of expression. Appearing most often on the poster as photo-portrait of the principal hero, is a double portrait or a shot of the crucial dramatic situation. In such a case, the author of the poster works with film photography as with "a document". However, it constitutes but one of several combinatory elements and possibilities. Poster-makers show the same engrossment when working with extra-film photography, illustration, montage of several photographs and ultimately it is quite natural for them to combine photography with painting techniques, graphics, drawing, typography... all that goes to form the subject-matter of interest in the present exhibition of posters to Slovak films. The Slovak Film Institute which has provided the posters from its archives, puts on view here a countless collection so designed as to introduce this specific domain of poster production to the general public in a chronological order and a practically didactic manner.
It starts with placards made in the mid-fifties up to the
most recent ones, those few posters to accompany Slovak films turned after 1989. The visual transformations in this discipline depend, as also evidenced by the period material, primarily on the pictorial qualities of photography and the ability or otherwise of the graphic designer to conceive the poster as an authentic and
professionally mastered testimony. Posters of the fifties are typical of a painter-like comprehension of photography. It is not clear whether these are coloured photographs, or pictures painted on, or according to a photograph - Drevená dedina, The Wooden Village - (B.Slávik, 1955) ... Their naiveness, narration and coloration form the undeniable source of their hidden charm. In relation to the visuality of the sixties, radical changes also affected the film  poster. "The golden sixties" took contact with both modernist principles and likewise also the contemporary trends in the development of fine arts and photography. Typography came to be applied more conspicuously as an element of expression. Writing, simultaneously functioning as an artistic element of pictorial composition, is evident in numerous works of this period - exemplarily for instance, in M.Čunderlík (Senzi mama, Fantastic Mum, 1964). Articulated graphic photography, exploiting diverse new and varied technological procedures, repeatedly appears with the same frequency in poster work not
only during the 60s, but also the 70s (R. Altrichter,
Námestie Sv. Alžbety, St Elizabeth's Square, 1965, but also
M.Veselý, Nevesta hôl, Bride from the Uplands, 1971) and many others. The obsession with structures of art in photography also appeared in the film poster. We often notice in them, as a basic compositional element, diverse variants of photo-structure, photo-structural fragments in collage or montage combinations, with photography of figural details. Pop art trends were admirably transferred by Ivan Štepán through photographs off his own lens, from free production into poster work (Sladký čas Kalimagdory, Kalimagdora's Sweet Time, 1967). J. Meisner placed a sculptural male nude in the centre of an immaculate white background and let it appear as a meaningfully thematized sign (322, 1969). A different, though seemingly similar approach in terms of technique, was chosen by E. Havetta in his idylically conceived tableau vivant of a group photograph of representatives in the film Ĺalie poľné, Field Lilies. He thereby symbolically defined - perhaps on design - the true feeling of his contemporaries as an epilogue - a parting with the "Golden 60s" in 1972. If
the 60s foreshadowed a promising union between photography,
typography and a compositional concept of the poster, the
dominant poster line towards Slovak film in the 70s is
primarily Zuzana Mináčová's photography, sometimes poetic, at other times "documentary" - typically visualized in the
ensuing period by her close associates, poster-makers
- primarily D.Orvanová, V. Polák... That gave rise to
a poster not dissimilar from, and evidently also directly
inspired by typology and also the poster iconography of the
couple Vyleťal, the Finnish photographic poster of the
60s... In the Slovak edition this brought in a series of
posters in the form of "surrealistic" collages, collections,assemblages - (Prípad krásnej nerestnice, The Case of the Beautiful Profligate, 1973...). Differing from the prevailing trend is Grygar's civilistically simple poster to the film Ružové sny, Rosy Dreams (1976), set in an atmosphere of full-surface photography, and Písecký's poster Postav dom, zasaď strom, Build a House, Plant a Tree (1979), set, on the contrary, on the emphasized easthetics of colour photography. The 80s did not bring in any striking changes and accomplishments in poster making. We might solely speak of individual achievements. There are several noteworthy posters designed by Sväťo Mydlo, the well-known author of the visual "image" of the Radošina Naive Theatre - (Ja milujem, ty miluješ, I love, You love, 1980) where, in a playfully ironizing gesture he combined photo-portrait with painting. It would be difficult to speak of posters to Slovak films of the 90s, for there exist but a few samples. Perhaps, of interest might be Štrba's photograph from the poster Neha, Tenderness (1991) and Stano's paraphrasing "the Great-Hollywoodian love story films" in Vášnivý bozk - Passionate Kiss, that might help to fill the gap.

Dagmar Poláčková