Movie Poster of the Week: The Posters of the 5th New York Film Festival

Fifty years ago in New York: Godard, Skolimowski, Kobayashi and more.
Adrian Curry

Above: Polish poster for The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965). Designer: Jerzy Flisak.

As the 55th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I thought I’d look back half a century at the films of the 5th edition. That 1967 festival, programmed by Amos Vogel, Richard Roud, Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag, featured 21 new films, all but three of which were from Europe (six of them from France, 2 and 1/7 of them directed by Godard), all of which showed at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. (They also programmed Gance’s Napoleon, Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Show People in the retrospective slots). The only director to have a film in both the 1967 festival and the 2017 edition is Agnès Varda, who was one of the directors of the omnibus Far From Vietnam and was then already 12 years into her filmmaking career.

It will come as no surprise that the posters of 1967 put the posters of 2017 to shame. Illustration was still much in vogue in the late 60s, and many of these films were shown in Eastern Europe and thus have brilliant Czech or Polish designs to boot. Jerzy Flisak’s poster for The Battle of Algiers, the opening night film (for which “add $1.00 to all prices” the ad above says), Zdenek Kaplan’s for Yesterday Girl, and Karel Teissig’s for Young Törless are the definite standouts. I’m also a big fan of the clean design for John Korty’s forgotten American indie Funny Man and the stunning Romanian Samurai Rebellion. I’ve tried to find original posters from the era for each film, but in a couple of places (namely Jean Rouch’s The Lion Hunters and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason) I’ve had to substitute more recent re-release designs, both very fine. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

Above: Polish poster for Barrier (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland, 1966).

Above: French poster for Les Carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1962).

Above: French poster for Le Départ (Jerzy Skolimowski, Belgium, 1967).

Above: US poster for Elvira Madigan (Bo Widerberg, Sweden, 1967).

Above: 1973 Cuban poster for Far from Vietnam (Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda, France, 1967). Designer: Oscar Diaz.

Above: Hungarian poster for Father (István Szábo, Hungary, 1966).

Above: Yugoslavian poster for The Feverish Years (Dragoslav Lazic, Yugoslavia, 1966) and French poster for The Other One (René Allio , France, 1967).

Above: US poster for Funnyman (John Korty, USA, 1967).

Above: Swedish poster for Hugs and Kisses (Jonas Cornell, Sweden, 1967).

Above: French re-release poster for The Lion Hunters (Jean Rouch, France, 1965).

Above: Czech poster for Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, aka An Affair of the Heart (Dusan Makavejev, Yugoslavia, 1967). Designer: Eva Galova-Vodrazkova.

Above: Spanish poster for Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966).

Above: 2013 re-release poster for Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, USA, 1967). Designer: Adrian Rothschild.

Above: Romanian poster for Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi, Japan, 1967).

Above: Russian poster for Sons and Mothers (Mark Donskoi. USSR, 1966).

Above: Italian poster for The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, France, 1966).

Above: UK quad poster for Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (Peter Whitehead, UK, 1967). 

Above: Czech poster for Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, West Germany, 1966). Designer: Zdenek Kaplan.

Above: 1967 Czech poster for Young Törless (Volker Schlöndorff, West Germany, 1966). Designer: Karel Teissig.

Mark Harris has a great article on the films of the 1967 festival in his Cinema ’67 Revisited series at Film Comment, and you can read my other New York Film Festival flashback posts here: 1988, 1965  and 1963.

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