Above: 1963 German re-release poster by Heinz Edelmann for Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, UK, 1949).
If you are near Berlin during the next four months there is a movie poster exhibition that you must not miss. It opens today at the Kulturforum and it is called Grosses Kino: Filmplakate aller Zeiten, which translates as The Big Screen: Film Posters of All Time.
Grosses Kino has been curated by Dr. Christina Thomson and Christina Dembny of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (the Art Library at the Berlin State Museum) in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival and the Deutsche Kinemathek.
The Kunstbibliothek has an extraordinary collection of over 5,000 film posters, 300 of which—dating from 1905 to 2023—have been selected for the exhibition. Earlier this year I was asked to be one of 26 “film industry experts” from the fields of acting, directing, cinema management, film studies, art, and graphic design selected to choose one poster from the collection for inclusion in the exhibition. (Other guests include filmmakers Helke Misselwitz and Ulrike Ottinger, video artist Douglas Gordon, movie poster designer Vasilis Marmatakis, and Berlin Film Festival executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek.) We were given a catalogue with about 1,700 posters to choose from and it was staggeringly difficult to select just one design. As soon as I settled on one I would discover another that was equally alluring. I have been looking at movie posters obsessively for almost twenty years and it was mind-blowing to come across so many beautiful posters that I had never seen before and which have probably never been digitized and shared online.
I could easily have just chosen one of my all-time favorite posters (something by Hans Hillmann, maybe), but since the brief was to choose a poster that I would want to see in the exhibition, I decided that I wanted it to be a poster I was previously unfamiliar with.
In order to narrow down my choices I set myself certain criteria: ideally it would be a German poster since this is a German archive (the majority of posters in the archive are German, but not all). I wanted to choose it more for the design and the designer than for the film and the filmmaker, though preferably for a film that I knew. And—this was the clincher—I was also looking for especially large posters. These days we mostly see posters on computer screens and phones, where everything is reduced to the same height. But movie posters come in all shapes and sizes and one of the beauties of an exhibition of physical posters is to see them as they were originally printed. Unusually large posters (French grandes, Italian 4-foglios, American 3-sheets) are so rare to see in person these days that I wanted to give one of them pride of place. The exhibition is called Grosses Kino, after all, and one of its absolute highlights is the only extant original full-size copy of Boris Belinski’s 1927 French poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which is twelve feet wide.
Above: 1927 French poster by Boris Bilinsky for Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927).
The poster I ultimately chose, as seen at the top of this page, is a 1963 re-release German A00 size poster for the British 1949 Ealing Studios classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. Back in 2018 I wrote about this film and featured all the different international posters I could find but never came across this one, although I did include another version by the same designer. That designer is Heinz Edelmann (1934-2009), who went on to international fame as the art director and character designer for the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (1968).
There are eleven posters by Edelmann in the Kunstbibliothek collection (all from the early 1960s), including both of his designs for Kind Hearts and Coronets. The poster I selected is 46" x 66", which is more than twice the size of a 27" x 40" American movie poster and was printed as two panels. His other Kind Hearts poster is less than half the size at 23" x 33."
Above: the poster in situ in the Grosses Kino exhibition.
What I love about this poster is its unusual and striking combination of multicolored lettering and black and white imagery, mixing the modern with the antique, Grand Guignol with whimsy. Edelmann’s use of montage, incorporating both found photography and bold typography is reminiscent of mid-century Czech graphic design. Though he lived most of his life in Germany he was in fact born in Czechoslovakia.
There are two more Edelmann posters are in the exhibition but since I’ve never written about him before I wanted to include some of my favorite designs of his in this piece. Most of the below are in the Kunstbibliothek collection.
Above: Early ’60s German re-release posters by Edelmann for Secrets of Women (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1952) and Too Bad She’s Bad (Alessandro Blasetti, Italy, 1954).
Above: German posters by Edelmann for Five Golden Hours (Mario Zampi, UK/Italy, 1961) and All About Loving (Jean Aurel, France/Italy, 1964).
Above: German posters by Edelmann for The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, Spain, 1962) and Hallelujah the Hills (Adolfas Mekas, USA, 1963).
Above: German poster for Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, UK, 1968) with artwork by Edelmann.
There is so much more to see in this exhibition, which is probably one of the most comprehensive movie poster collections that I have seen displayed since I’ve been writing on the subject. The beautifully illustrated 240-page exhibition catalogue is also extraordinary, containing essays in both German and English on “the expressive power of colour in film posters,” “fragmented bodies of women in film posters,” “posters within posters,” and an interview with designers and distributors (including MUBI’s own Lysann Windisch) on “film posters today.” There are also double spreads with full-page reproductions of the 26 posters selected by the special guests, a lovely section called “Stories” that delves deeper into individual posters, and a detailed glossary of film poster terms.
Many thanks to Dr. Christina Thomson and Christina Dembny for including me in this exhibition. It runs until March 3, 2024. Find out more here.