The Russ­ian avant-garde film posters of the mid-1920’s to early 1930’s are unlike any film posters ever cre­ated. Although the period of artis­tic free­dom in the Soviet Union was brief, these pow­er­ful, star­tling images remain among the most bril­liant and imag­i­na­tive posters ever con­ceived. The Russ­ian film poster artists exper­i­mented with the same inno­v­a­tive cin­e­matic tech­niques used in the films they were adver­tis­ing, such as extreme close-ups, unusual angles and dra­matic pro­por­tions. They mon­taged dis­parate ele­ments, such as adding pho­tog­ra­phy to lith­o­g­ra­phy, and jux­ta­posed the action from one scene with a char­ac­ter from another. They col­ored human faces with vivid col­ors, elon­gated and dis­torted body shapes, gave ani­mal bod­ies to humans and turned film cred­its into an inte­gral part of the design. There were no rules, except to fol­low one’s imag­i­na­tion.

The 1917 Rev­o­lu­tion changed life in Rus­sia polit­i­cally, socially and artis­ti­cally. Art became regarded as an impor­tant force in shap­ing the future of the new State. Slo­gans such as ‘Art into Life’ and ‘Art into Tech­nol­ogy’ expressed the pop­u­lar belief that art had the power to trans­form lives on every level. It was a time of artis­tic exper­i­men­ta­tion, a kind of spon­ta­neous com­bus­tion caused by the charged atmos­phere and the rad­i­cal changes in art and life. Diverse art styles, such as Con­struc­tivism and Real­ism, Ana­lyt­i­cal Art and Pro­le­tar­ian Art, devel­oped simul­ta­ne­ously and, seem­ingly irrec­on­cil­ably, together. Bold new direc­tions in art, includ­ing supre­ma­tism, non-objectivism and cubo­fu­tur­ism, emerged in this fer­tile period of change.




The pin­na­cle of the Russ­ian avant-garde film poster occurred between 1925 and 1929. After 1930, artists faced increas­ing pres­sure to con­form to gov­ern­men­tal stan­dards of accept­able art. The rise of Stal­in­ism meant the demise of free­dom of expres­sion. To Stalin, all the arts, includ­ing film, had the sole func­tion of deliv­er­ing the offi­cial Party line.

In con­trast to most film posters, which con­cen­trate on a film’s stars, the star of a Russ­ian avant-garde film poster is the artist’s cre­ativ­ity and imag­i­na­tion. Although some of these posters depict famous Amer­i­can film stars, such as Mary Pick­ford, Dou­glas Fair­banks, Buster Keaton or Glo­ria Swan­son, their pres­ence is sec­ondary; the poster’s value is deter­mined by the qual­ity of its graphic design. Some Russ­ian film posters depict­ing famous film stars are worth rel­a­tively lit­tle because the posters are unin­ter­est­ing artis­ti­cally. More­over, some of the most valu­able Russ­ian film posters depict obscure films fea­tur­ing no known stars. As with all works of art, rar­ity and con­di­tion affect a poster’s value, how­ever, the rarer a poster, the less con­di­tion is a fac­tor. Although the artists knew these posters were ephemeral, meant to be plas­tered on build­ing walls for only a few weeks, they nev­er­the­less designed them with great style and imag­i­na­tion.

Many peo­ple do not under­stand how a poster, of which tens of thou­sands were printed, could be rare or valu­able. The issue, how­ever, is not how many posters were printed, but how many sur­vived. We know that 8,000 to 20,000 copies were printed of most posters in this book because the size of the print run is often stated in the bot­tom bor­der of the poster. Yet today, these posters are extremely rare. The num­ber of known copies for most of the posters in this book can be counted on one hand. This can be attrib­uted to sev­eral fac­tors. First, posters were not meant to be saved. They were adver­tise­ments, not “works of art”. As soon as a film was to be shown in a the­ater, posters from the pre­vi­ous film were dis­carded. Also, the posters were printed on poor-quality paper, which could not stand the test of time. Fur­ther, because paper was in short sup­ply, a sheet con­tain­ing unim­por­tant or out­dated infor­ma­tion was often used again for other pur­poses. If you look care­fully at The Unwill­ing Twin (p. 27I) and Up on Kholt (p. 275), you will see that each has an entirely dif­fer­ent poster printed on its back.

The first motion pic­tures to be seen in Rus­sia were the pio­neer­ing works of the Lumiere broth­ers, imported from France in 1894, as a part of many fes­tiv­i­ties fol­low­ing the coro­na­tion of Tsar Nicholas II. The first film posters were purely typo­graph­i­cal announce­ments, but profit-motivated film pro­mot­ers soon added illus­tra­tions to their posters to lure more view­ers. Within lit­tle more than a decade, a thriv­ing film indus­try was estab­lished. How­ever, World War I and the tur­moil of the 1917 Rev­o­lu­tion made film pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion increas­ingly dif­fi­cult. Famine, civil war and a for­eign block­ade pre­vented the impor­ta­tion of for­eign films, raw film, and equip­ment. The film indus­try came to a vir­tual halt.
In an attempt to aid the ail­ing film indus­try, Lenin nation­al­ized it on August 27,1919, plac­ing the indus­try under the con­trol of Ana­toly Lunacharsky, head of the People’s Com­mis­sariat of Enlight­en­ment. Lunacharsky prop­a­gated the pro­duc­tion of agi­ta­tional films (known as ‘agit films’) in the form of short (one reel) doc­u­men­taries or rehearsed scenes intended to glo­rify the 1917 Rev­o­lu­tion and pro­mote the advan­tages of com­mu­nism. The gen­eral belief was that the film indus­try had been the tool of profit-hungry cap­i­tal­ists before the Rev­o­lu­tion; now it was to be a source of edu­ca­tion and inspi­ra­tion for the masses.

In 1921, short­ages of film mate­r­ial and equip­ment were eased by a par­tial return to pri­vate enter­prise (New Eco­nomic Pol­icy, NEP) in order to avert eco­nomic col­lapse, and in 1922 the gov­ern­ment cen­tral­ized con­trol of the film indus­try by cre­at­ing Goskino – the State Cin­ema Enter­prise. In 1926, Goskino was renamed Sovkino. It was the most pow­er­ful of the national film orga­ni­za­tions, con­trol­ling the dis­tri­b­u­tion of all for­eign films and using the prof­its to sub­si­dize domes­tic film-making. It usu­ally took between one and five years for a for­eign film to be released in Soviet the­aters, as you will see from the dis­crep­ancy between the orig­i­nal release date of a for­eign film and the poster date. One rea­son was that the Soviet cen­sors often made changes to for­eign films. The Russ­ian film titles were rarely sim­ple trans­la­tions; the Amer­i­can film Dol­lar Down became Bride of the Sun (p. 238), Thee Live Ghosts became In the Lon­don Twi­light (p.110, 111) and Beasts of Par­adise became Cut off from the World (pp.44,45)· Also, film dia­logue was often changed to reflect a more polit­i­cally cor­rect view­point. Because the films were silent, the cen­sors could sim­ply alter the titles which sub­sti­tuted for spo­ken dia­logue. Sud­denly, a sui­cide could become a mur­der or, as in the dras­tic case of Dr. Mabuse (pp. 246, 247) a street fight could become a work­ers’ revolt against cap­i­tal­ist oppres­sion. As a result, film sum­maries from dif­fer­ent sources can dif­fer widely, depend­ing on which ver­sion the source viewed.

It is inter­est­ing to dis­cover which Amer­i­can actors became big stars in the Soviet Union. From the num­ber of Russ­ian film posters fea­tur­ing Richard Tal­madge, one would think that he was the great­est star of all. The rea­son for Talmadge’s dom­i­nant pres­ence was largely a result of the mar­ket­ing strate­gies of the dis­trib­u­tors. Films made by inde­pen­dent Amer­i­can pro­duc­ers like Richard Tal­madge, Charles Ray and Monty Banks, which played only in mar­ginal the­aters in the United States (due to the tight con­trol of major the­ater chains by the large pro­duc­ers), enjoyed dis­pro­por­tion­ate suc­cess in the Soviet Union, espe­cially since they were also quite shal­low stan­dard fare guar­an­teed to have no polit­i­cal mes­sage. As a result, some films that were barely noticed in their home coun­try occa­sioned the cre­ation of supe­rior Russ­ian posters, often at odds with their cin­e­matic value.

Like every­thing else in the Soviet sys­tem, poster pro­duc­tion was cen­tral­ized and state-controlled. Reklam Film was the Sovidno depart­ment which over­saw the pro­duc­tion of all film posters. Sovidno oper­ated four movie stu­dios and twenty-two dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tion units, many of which had their own film poster depart­ments. Some of the pro­duc­tion units, espe­cially those in the out­ly­ing republics like Uzbek­istan and Geor­gia, had their own poster design­ers or employed their set design­ers to cre­ate posters. How­ever, all posters had to be approved by Reklam Film.

Yakov Rukievsky (whose posters you will see in this book) was appointed to head Reklam Film. He hired a group of excep­tion­ally tal­ented and imag­i­na­tive young poster artists, many of whom were recent grad­u­ates of VKHUTEMAS, the Higher State Artis­tic and Tech­ni­cal Work­shops. This group of cre­ative young tal­ent included Georgii and Vladimir Sten­berg, Niko­lai Prusakov, Grig­ori Borisov, Mikhail Dlu­gach, Alexan­der Nau­mov, Leonid Voronov, and Iosif Gerasi­movich.

From the very begin­ning, these young Soviet poster artists threw them­selves into their work with the same exu­ber­ant verve with which the young Soviet direc­tors approached their film assign­ments. Boldly, they evolved their own paths, syn­the­siz­ing the preva­lent art trends of their day into a style pecu­liarly their own, vibrant and pro­found, com­bin­ing the depth of their Russ­ian her­itage with their new-found Soviet fer­vor. They refused to suc­cumb to the easy glam­our of Hollywood-style poster mak­ing in which almost all films were adver­tised by show­ing an embrace between the hero and the hero­ine. Instead they searched for inno­v­a­tive solu­tions which resulted in unique mon­tages of images designed to cap­ture the atten­tion and fire the imag­i­na­tion: bold lines, inter­sect­ing planes, dis­em­bod­ied heads float­ing in space, split images, com­po­si­tions and col­lages, pho­tomon­tage, eccen­tric col­ors, super­im­po­si­tions, unusual back­ground pat­terns and more.
One of the great inno­va­tions in Soviet film-making dur­ing this period was the con­cept of mon­tage. The French word “mon­tage” sim­ply means edit­ing. How­ever, Soviet direc­tor Lev Kuleshov (The Happy Canary, pp. I46, I47, By the Law, p. 222, The Death Ray, pp. 164·, 165) showed that pieces of film could be cut and edited in such a way as to cre­ate a mean­ing not present in any of the frames alone. Direc­tor Dziga Ver­tov pio­neered the the­ory of doc­u­men­tary mon­tage. His first feature-length film, Kino-Glaz (Film Eye, p. 34). made in 1924 had no actors, sets or scripts. Ver­tov filmed ordi­nary peo­ple and unre­hearsed events (often using hid­den cam­eras), then manip­u­lated the footage in such an extra­or­di­nary way (using mul­ti­ple expo­sures, fore­short­en­ing, reverse motion, high-speed pho­tog­ra­phy, microcin­e­matog­ra­phy etc.) that the final film bore lit­tle resem­blance to the orig­i­nal footage. The heroes of Vertov’s films were not the actors but the film-making machin­ery and tech­niques. At the end of his land­mark film The Man with the Movie Cam­era, 1928 (pp. 193–195), the true star of the film, the cam­era, gets off its tri­pod and takes a bow.

The mid-to late-1920’s were a period of extremely suc­cess­ful film-making in the USSR. A num­ber of Soviet film-makers and their films gained inter­na­tional fame: Sergei Eisen­stein for his Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (pp. 166–171) and Octo­ber (pp. 103–107), Dziga Ver­tov for Kino-Glaz and One Sixth of the World (pp. 202, 203), Alexan­der Dovzhenko for The Earth (p. 257) and Arse­nal (pp. 60, 61), Vsevolod Pudovidn for Mother (pp. 62, 63) and Storm over Asia (The Heir of Genghis Khan, p. 278) and Friedrich Ermler for Katka, the Paper Reinette (p. 285) and Frag­ment of an Empire (pp. I42-I45). All these films were pow­er­ful por­traits of the Rev­o­lu­tion or of the prob­lems fac­ing the young repub­lic. How­ever, the posters adver­tis­ing these films were vir­tu­ally unknown out­side the USSR.

The best-known and most cel­e­brated of the early Soviet films was Eisenstein’s Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (1925). Cen­tral to the film was the use of mon­tage, but Eisenstein’s the­o­ries dif­fered from Vertov’s. Eisen­stein believed in the prin­ci­ple of mon­tage of attrac­tions, mean­ing that every moment the spec­ta­tor spends in the the­ater should be filled with the max­i­mum shock and inten­sity. In dis­cov­er­ing new ways to achieve Eisenstein’s vision, his cam­era­man, Edouard Tisse, lit­er­ally turned the tra­di­tional world of film-making upside down. To film the famous slaugh­ter on the Odessa steps, Tisse used sev­eral cam­eras simul­ta­ne­ously. He strapped a hand-held cam­era to the waist of a circus-trained assis­tant, then instructed him to run, jump and fall down the steps. Tra­di­tional film-making tech­niques could not have achieved such a sense of fear, panic and hor­ror.

The finan­cially suc­cess­ful Russ­ian films were not the great epics like Bat­tle­ship Potemkin. In fact, Com­mis­sar Lunacharsky recounted that when he entered the the­ater for the first run of Potemkin, he found the the­ater half-empty. The most suc­cess­ful Russ­ian films were American-style come­dies like Miss Mend (pp. 80–83), The Three Mil­lions Trial (pp.190–191) and The Love Tri­an­gle (pp. 188, 189)). Although viewed with con­tempt by the Soviet gov­ern­ment, Amer­i­can come­dies, adven­ture films, west­erns and seri­als were tol­er­ated because of their pop­u­lar­ity with the pub­lic. It was the huge prof­its from for­eign films that financed Soviet film pro­duc­tion. Names like Chap­lin, Fair­banks, Pick­ford and Lloyd were far more famil­iar to Soviet audi­ences than the great­est Soviet cin­ema pio­neers.

Any film made in the Soviet Union had to appease seem­ingly irrec­on­cil­able inter­ests. The gov­ern­ment wanted films to edu­cate the audi­ence about Com­mu­nist ideals, the direc­tors wanted to pur­sue their artis­tic visions, the audi­ence wanted enter­tain­ment and the film indus­try wanted a profit so that it could make more films. In 1923, only twelve Soviet films were released and in the next year, forty-one. How­ever, by 1924 there were approx­i­mately 2,700 movie the­aters in the Soviet Union. Within the next three years, the total reached 7500 movie the­aters. To fill the ever-growing need for new films, news­reel pro­duc­tion increased dra­mat­i­cally. Every sig­nif­i­cant event was filmed. As the British film his­to­rian Paul Rotha noted in The Film till Now (1930): “There is prac­ti­cally no sub­ject, whether sci­en­tific, geo­graph­i­cal, eth­no­log­i­cal, indus­trial, mil­i­tary, naval, aero­nau­ti­cal or med­ical which has not been approached by Soviet direc­tors” (p. 173). What is fas­ci­nat­ing is that the poster artists gave as much time and atten­tion to posters for these doc­u­men­taries, such as The Pen­cil (p. 12), as they gave to the posters for fea­ture productions.

The most famous Soviet poster artists were Georgii and Vladimir Sten­berg. One could not walk down the streets of Moscow in the late 1920’s with­out see­ing film posters bear­ing the ubiq­ui­tous sig­na­ture “2 Sten­berg 2.” As col­lab­o­ra­tors, the two broth­ers cre­ated about 300 film posters. In “A con­ver­sa­tion with Vladimir Sten­berg”, (Art Jour­nal, Fall 1981, p. 229) Vladimir Sten­berg explained to Alma Law that their first film poster, The Eyes of Love, had only the sig­na­ture ‘Sten’ because the two broth­ers did not know if they would make any more film posters. They signed their sec­ond poster ‘Sten­berg’ and from then on they always used ‘2 Sten­berg 2’. Vladimir Sten­berg stated: “We always worked together, begin­ning in 1907. We did every­thing together. It was this way from child­hood… We ate alike and fol­lowed the same work rou­tine. If… I caught a cold, he caught a cold too… When my brother and I were work­ing together, we even made a test. What color should we paint the back­ground? We would do it like this: he would write a note and I would write one. I had no idea what he had writ­ten and he didn’t know what I had writ­ten. So we would write these notes and then look, and they coin­cided! You think maybe one was giv­ing in to the other? No… there was no bar­gain­ing, noth­ing”. Georgii Sten­berg died in a car acci­dent in 1933. The posters that Vladimir designed after Georgii’s death were never able to match the bril­liance of their work as a team.

The Sten­berg broth­ers had exten­sive knowl­edge of lith­o­graphic tech­nique. Due to the inabil­ity of print­ing facil­i­ties to ensure qual­ity dupli­ca­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy or film stills for use in the posters, the Sten­bergs devised a way to sim­u­late pho­to­graphic like­nesses. One often has to look very care­fully at their posters to deter­mine whether an image is hand-drawn or pho­to­graphic. Even though the Sten­bergs may have pre­ferred their own method of cre­at­ing photo-like images, they were also very tal­ented at pho­tomon­tage. It is hard to imag­ine a more effec­tive use of pho­tomon­tage than their poster for The Eleventh, in which the Com­mu­nist achieve­ments of a decade are reflected in a pair of glasses (pp. 124, 125).

Con­tin­u­ally they dis­cov­ered new ways to cap­ture the dynam­ics of film on paper. In order to con­vey the drama of the box­ing ring, they show a boxer fight­ing upside down in The Pounded Cut­let (pp. 226, 227), draw con­cen­tric cir­cles that sim­u­late the rever­ber­a­tions of a blow to the head in The Boxer’s Bride (p. 224), and use such sharp angles and con­trast­ing pro­por­tions in The Punch (p. 223) that the viewer feels dis­ori­ented, almost as if he had been punched. As Vladimir Sten­berg stated dur­ing his con­ver­sa­tion with Alma Law, “When we made posters for the movies, every­thing was in motion because in films, every­thing moves. Other artists worked in the cen­ter, they put some­thing there and around it was an empty mar­gin. But with us, every­thing seems to be going some­where” (pp. 229, 230). The broth­ers par­tic­u­larly liked exper­i­ment­ing with unusual color com­bi­na­tions. Their choice of color is thought-provoking when one con­sid­ers that they were adver­tis­ing black and white films.

The Sten­berg broth­ers often cre­ated two dif­fer­ent posters for the same film. Their two posters for The Three Mil­lions Trial (pp. I90,191) could not be more dif­fer­ent in color and com­po­si­tion, yet both are very effec­tive. The hor­i­zon­tal ver­sion (p. I90), with its image bro­ken up into many parts, cre­ates the impres­sion of watch­ing a film strip, while the close-up of the woman’s face loom­ing over the small car­toon images in the ver­ti­cal poster (p. I9I) cat­a­pults the viewer into the cen­ter of the action. Both of the Sten­bergs’ posters for the film Moulin Rouge fea­ture a woman’s face. One poster (p. 160) is clas­si­cally sim­ple, all we see is the woman’s veiled face in dark­ness; the other (p. 161) places the viewer into the midst of Paris’ night life with a seduc­tive woman, fancy night club and neon lights. The typog­ra­phy par­al­lels the design: beau­ti­fully sim­ple in the first poster, and in the sec­ond poster the mix­ture of let­ters in dif­fer­ent type­faces and sizes cre­ates the impres­sion of walk­ing down a Paris street and being con­fronted by the flash­ing lights of a nightclub’s sign. At a time when peo­ple were accus­tomed to see­ing a tra­di­tional white back­ground on posters, the dark blue/black back­ground of these two Moulin Rouge posters must have been par­tic­u­larly strik­ing.

Some of the most imag­i­na­tive and unusual film posters were cre­ated by Niko­lai Prusakov. In his bril­liant poster for The Big Sor­row of a Small Woman (p. I48, 149), Prusakov mon­tages the face of a woman and the hat of an invis­i­ble man over an impos­ing city scene. The man and woman are careen­ing hap­pily in space, seated in a car miss­ing most of its parts. Their car has eyes inside its head­lights, but it still runs over the title of the film, slightly scat­ter­ing the typog­ra­phy. In The Glass Eye (pp. 36, 37) Prusakov wreaks havoc on the pro­por­tions of the cou­ple. The man and woman seem to be danc­ing cheek to cheek until one notices that the trun­cated man is actu­ally dan­gling in mid-air, his legs not long enough to reach the lap of his seated com­pan­ion. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of their bod­ies bears an amus­ing resem­blance to a ven­tril­o­quist hold­ing a dummy. The pho­tog­ra­pher in the poster does not just take a pic­ture; his body has become a camera.

The inte­gra­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy into the lith­o­graphic design, or pho­tomon­tage, is one of the hall­marks of Russ­ian avant-garde posters. One of the wit­ti­est exam­ples of pho­tomon­tage is a poster Prusakov designed with Grig­ori Borisov, enti­tled Khaz-Push (p. 48). The man rac­ing on his bicy­cle is say­ing “I am rush­ing to see the film Khaz-Push,” while scenes from the film are already being shown on his body and in the spokes of his bicycle’s wheels.

Prusakov cre­ated some of his zani­est posters with Borisov. The Unwill­ing Twin (p. 271) is sim­i­lar to the psy­che­delic San Fran­cisco ‘rock’ posters of the 1960’s. The artists cre­ate an incred­i­ble elec­tric­ity between the seated twins, graph­i­cally por­trayed by simul­ta­ne­ously break­ing up and over­lap­ping the lines that form their bod­ies. The result is that one feels their indi­vis­i­ble close­ness as well as their inevitable split. Law and Duty/Amok (pp. 216, 217) may seem at first to be a poster gone amok, but Prusakov and Borisov have cre­ated an effec­tive bal­ance between the swirling lines, extrav­a­gant col­ors and black-and-white inset pho­tog­ra­phy. Borisov also col­lab­o­rated with another artist, Pyotr Zhukov, to cre­ate spec­tac­u­lar posters. In The Liv­ing Corpse (pp. 140, 141) Borisov and Zhukov use the pat­tern formed by the rep­e­ti­tion of the film title to weave the fab­ric of this man’s life, from his suit to the court­room scene (pic­tured in the film still) in which he appears. The artists cre­ate a haunt­ing image of a ‘corpse’ whose only liv­ing’, or non-typographical, parts are his head and hand. His hand points accus­ingly at the viewer, emerg­ing from the typog­ra­phy with three-dimensional force. In The Doll with Mil­lions (pp. 120, 121), Borisov and Zhukov mes­mer­ize the viewer with over­lap­ping designs that change their pat­tern wher­ever they come in con­tact with other shapes. Try­ing to deter­mine which designs are part of which peo­ple is sim­i­lar to solv­ing a jig­saw puz­zle.

Like Prusakov and Borisov, Alexan­der Nau­mov exper­i­mented with break­ing down the poster’s sur­face into grids or ver­ti­cal lines in order to cre­ate a three-dimensional effect. He had already cap­tured the glam­orous, hyp­notic, larger-than-life qual­ity of the sil­ver screen in such posters as Bella Donna (pp. 94, 95) and The Stolen Bride (p. 172) by the time he died in a drown­ing acci­dent at the age of 20.

Although Alexan­der Rod­chenko designed com­par­a­tively few film posters, this artist and pho­tog­ra­pher made an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion with his unique design sense and inno­v­a­tive use of pho­tomon­tage. In Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (pp. 166–171), Rod­chenko lets the viewer spy on the action through a pair of binoc­u­lars that form an ele­gant Con­struc­tivist design. Rodchenko’s use of lime green and pink for a bat­tle­ship poster is unusual, as is his depic­tion of two events, one in each binoc­u­lar lens, which do not occur simul­ta­ne­ously in the film.

An impor­tant artist who pre­ferred to con­cen­trate on one cen­tral image was Ana­toly Bel­sky. He strived for max­i­mum emo­tional impact. It is hard to for­get the ter­ror on the face of the indi­vid­ual in The Gad­fly (p. 233) or The Pri­vate Life of Peter Vino­grad (p. 159). Belsky’s depic­tion of a young boy smok­ing a pipe in The Communard’s Pipe (p. 122, 123) is not only attention-grabbing, it is also a very effec­tive use of pho­tomon­tage, with var­i­ous scenes from the film form­ing the pipe’s smoke.

The most pro­lific of the film-poster artists was Mikhail Dlu­gach, who designed over five hun­dred posters dur­ing his career. His split image of the judge and the pris­oner in Judge Rei­tan (p. 200) simul­ta­ne­ously por­trays the two men as ‘two sides of the same coin’ and ‘dif­fer­ent as night and day’. Dlugach’s excel­lent color sense is par­tic­u­larly evi­dent in his poster for Cement (pp. 118, 119). For many who have so far seen this poster repro­duced only in black and white, the rich red color of the man’s face is as unex­pected as it is pow­er­ful.

Some truly great posters of this period were cre­ated by artists whose names we do not know. In the anony­mous poster for Enthu­si­asm (pp. 260, 261 ) the typog­ra­phy does not only add to the design, it becomes the design. Enthu­si­asm was Dziga Vertov’s first film with sound. He told the story of the coal min­ers of the Don Basin accom­pa­nied by the nat­ural sounds of the mines, such as the clash­ing ham­mers and train whis­tles. The poster beau­ti­fully evokes these rever­ber­at­ing sounds with its typog­ra­phy. The name of the film emanates out­ward like a sound wave, in ever-increasing size.

Like the rev­o­lu­tion­ary films they adver­tised, the film posters of this period devel­oped into a new form of art. The poster artists used ele­ments of graphic design in rad­i­cal new ways. They exper­i­mented with color, per­spec­tive and pro­por­tion, jux­ta­pos­ing images in star­tling ways, bear­ing no rela­tion to phys­i­cal real­ity. Even film cred­its take on a new life. In both Niniche (p. 279) and The Man with the Movie Cam­era (pp. I93-195), the Sten­bergs do not place the film cred­its unob­tru­sively on the side, but instead, make them an inte­gral part of the design, boldly encir­cling the main image.

The posters became a kind of ‘mov­ing pic­ture’. In Smolyakovsky’s The Con­veyor of Death (p. 96) one can almost feel the ra-ta-tat-tat of the machine gun. In Dlugach’s poster for The Elec­tric Chair (p. 57), the zig-zag line cut­ting through the character’s neck could not be more “elec­tric”, par­tic­u­larly when jux­ta­posed with the volt­age meter and the woman’s shocked expres­sion. The spi­ral­ing woman in the Sten­bergs’ The Man with the Movie Cam­era is so effec­tive, the viewer feels dizzy.

The qual­ity of the posters is remark­able in view of the fact that the artists often had to rush to meet nearly impos­si­ble dead­lines. Both Vladimir Sten­berg and Mikhail Dlu­gach recalled that it was not unusual for them to see a film at three o’clock in the after­noon and be required to present the com­pleted poster by ten o’clock the next morn­ing. Fur­ther, the equip­ment for print­ing the posters was falling apart and the tech­nol­ogy was prim­i­tive. The only print­ing presses avail­able pre-dated the 1917 Rev­o­lu­tion. Vladimir Sten­berg recalled that some of the presses were so shaky that prac­ti­cally every­thing was held together by string.

Many times the artists had to cre­ate the posters with­out ever hav­ing seen the film. Espe­cially with for­eign films, the artists often had to work from only a brief sum­mary of the film and pub­lic­ity shots or a press kit from Hol­ly­wood. When one con­sid­ers that the poster artists assumed their work would be torn down and thrown away after a few weeks, it is aston­ish­ing that they con­tin­ued to strive to main­tain such a high stan­dard. Clearly, these inno­v­a­tive flights of the imag­i­na­tion do not deserve to be con­signed to obliv­ion.

In 1932, eight years after Lenin’s death, Stalin decreed that the only offi­cially sanc­tioned type of art would be ‘Social­ist Real­ism’. Both the sub­ject and the artis­tic method were required to depict a real­is­tic (we might call it an ide­al­is­tic) por­trayal of Soviet life con­sis­tent with Com­mu­nist val­ues. Stalin’s decree marked the end of the period of avant-garde exper­i­men­ta­tion rep­re­sented by the posters in this book. He may have closed the win­dow of cre­ativ­ity, but not before it had illu­mi­nated his­tory with some of the most bril­liant posters ever cre­ated. The imag­i­na­tion, wit and cre­ativ­ity exhib­ited in these film posters have yet to be rivaled any­where in the world.

As you exam­ine the film posters in this book, try to imag­ine Moscow or Leningrad in the 1920’s, the streets filled with peo­ple attend­ing to their daily affairs. Imag­ine work­ers leav­ing their jobs at the end of the day, run­ning to catch their street­cars. They would glance up and be con­fronted by these star­tling posters loom­ing over­head. For a few brief moments they would escape their every­day rou­tine, lured into the excit­ing world of the cin­ema. It is my hope that as you look at these film posters today, you, too, will be fas­ci­nated by their imag­i­na­tion and power.

Susan Pack / 1995 / Taschen / ISBN 3–8228-8928–8