Above: 1999 Japanese poster for La jetée (Chris Marker, France, 1962). Designer: unknown.
This Sunday I will be posting my 366th post on my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr, meaning that I have managed to keep up this endeavor for an entire year, not yet skipping a day. Back in early July I wrote about the blog and posted the 20 most popular (most liked and reblogged) posters to date. With the year anniversary approaching I thought I would do the same thing, tallying the 20 most popular posters of the past four months. Movie Poster of the Day’s viewership has grown exponentially in the interim and as of writing it has 56,964 followers, which blows my mind. You can scroll through the entire archive here.
The most popular poster of the past four months, and the second most popular of the entire year, was this Japanese B1 for La jetée, which I posted two days after Chris Marker’s passing. When I found it on the estimable blog Film on Paper, on which British collector Eddie Shannon archives posters that he actually owns (rather than just trawling through the web as I do), I took it on trust that it was a Japanese poster of unknown date and provenance, even though all the text on the poster is in French. But, digging deeper for this piece I followed the one clue on the poster which was the name of the distributor, Zazie Films Inc. Zazie, it turns out, is a Japanese distribution company founded in 1989 and they released La jetée in 1999, its first release in Japan. The poster seems to be in stock on their site for 1200 Yen (about $15) but I couldn’t find any link to actually purchase it.
I’m pleased that the second most popular poster—that gorgeous Art Nouveau concoction for The Abyss below—is from as early as 1917, since the popularity of posters on the blog skews more towards the 1960s. But I also like that almost all the posters here—and this may be representative of my choices as a whole—are foreign posters in the true sense—made in a different country from the film’s origin. So there is a Japanese Hitchcock, a German Kurosawa, a Polish Chabrol, a Spanish Powell & Pressburger, an Italian Chaplin, an Argentinian Polanski and so on.
I think my favorite discovery of all these, aside from The Abyss, would have to be the delightfully eccentric Hungarian poster for The Fireman’s Ball. I should also note that two of these posters, Serengeti Shall Not Die and White Light/Black Rain, are currently on display—and on sale—at Posteritati in New York, as part of their Doc/NYC exhibition.
I’ll be continuing to post once a day for as long as I continue to dig up great posters, so please follow me on Tumblr, or just check in on the archive every now and then. If you’re not on Tumblr you can follow me on Twitter and get daily updates there. And every Friday I post a link back to my more in-depth pieces here on MUBI.
Above: Russian poster for Topiel/The Abyss (Wladyslaw Lenczewski, Poland, 1917). Artist: Mikhail Kalmanson.
Above: Japanese speed for Playtime (Jacques Tati, France, 1967). Designer: unknown.
Above: 1962 German poster for Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1954). Designer: Hans Hillmann (b. 1925).
Above: 1964 Polish poster for Ophélia (Claude Chabrol, France, 1963). Artist: Witold Janowski (1926-2006).
Above: 2011 French grande re-release poster for Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1962). Designer: uncredited.
Above: 2012 US re-release poster for The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, West Germany, 1979). Designer: David Plunkert.
Above: Spanish one sheet for The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1948). Artist: Anselmo Ballester (1897-1974).
Above: Indian poster for Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India, 1964). Artist: Satyajit Ray (1921-1992).
Above: Japanese poster for Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958). Designer: uncredited.
Above: 1960s Italian 2-foglio for The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1940). Artist: Renato Casaro (b. 1935).
Above: 1968 Polish poster for Everything for Sale (Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 1968). Designer: Franciszek Starowieyski (1930-2009).
Above: French grande poster for The Unholy Wife (John Farrow, USA, 1957). Artist: Roger Soubie (1898-1984).
Above: 1963 Polish poster for Serengeti Shall Not Die (Bernhard Grzimek, West Germany, 1959). Designer: Roman Opalka (1931-2011).
Above: UK quad poster for The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2011). Designer: Sam Ashby.
Above: 1963 Argentinian poster for Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, Poland, 1962). Artist: uncredited.
Above: Hungarian poster for The Firemen’s Ball (Milos Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1967). Artist: R. Merczel.
Above: Festival poster for The Capsule (Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 2012). Artist: Aleksandra Waliszewska; Designer: Ania Goszczynska.
Above: Japanese poster for White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Steven Okazaki, USA, 2007). Designer: Yuji Kimura (b. 1947)
Above: 1959 Polish poster for Roman Holiday (William Wyler, USA, 1953). Artist: Jerzy Flisak (1930-2008).
Poster sources are all credited on Movie Poster of the Day; click on the titles for more information.