A survey of Central and Eastern European cinema
Thursday November 21st 2024

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Polish Posters revisited

One of the first posts I ever made on this blog enthused about Polish posters (one of the most underrated authentically great art forms of the last century), so I’m delighted to see that Andrew Lindstrom’s design resource Well Medicated is hosting a superb online exhibition of fifty Polish film posters, plus the option to leave comments.

And I see some people have been taking advantage:

I don’t like any of them. (Osama)

These are pretty crap like. (xxxxxx)

i thought some of these were really good,but most of them were just disgusting (Atama)

i am on lsd currently and this shit makes sense (Sok)

I don’t find posters great or amazing. All of them are kid’s posters. Poor stuff. (Virte)

pretty depressing lot. some frustrated soul working on them. didnt like any. morose and not really communicative. (abcd)

More detailed technical criticism:

Are u ppl blind? These are garbage. It looks like they were drawn with pencil crayons and markers by a ten year old. We live in a world of photoshop now. These poters look to be drawn in Microsoft Paint. Get with the times man. I like vintage design just as much as anyone else but these are just terrible excuses for art. Very lazy designs here that seem to be whipped up in minutes by whoever created them. If this is what it looks like throughout Poland, then they are missing out big time. (Bukator)

And, the most heartfelt:

Many of you may call these “art”, but maybe you are just giving them too much credit because they are old. To me, they just remind me of all those dirty, boring, drab things from decades ago. Like watching TV shows from the early 90’s. I love good art, and don’t get me wrong. The modern hollywood posters are not that great, but at least they have some vibrant color! Nowadays, all that these posters would do is depress people and make them think that the films were boring! I’m surprised that so many people like these. It just gives me a sinking feeling in my gut. Uggh! (jkillah1)

…though a rather more constructive comment links to a similar collection of Czech posters.

(Hat tip)

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3 Responses to “Polish Posters revisited”

  1. arvid says:

    is it just for me the images doesn’t work?

  2. There aren’t any images in my post – are you talking about the site I linked to?

  3. paulwjm says:

    Those are truly striking poster designs – I’ve always liked the vintage style of poster design that many of us around here are probably already familiar with but I wasn’t aware that the Polish had such an innovative approach to movie marketing. Thanks for the link.

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