Above: 2019 art poster by Maks Bereski aka Plakiat for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (David Yates, UK/USA, 2016).
The artist known as Plakiat, real name Maks Bereski, is one of a couple of incredibly talented poster designers currently spearheading a revival in the art of the Polish movie poster. The heyday of the Polish poster was from the early 1950s through the late 1980s, but the demise of Communism and the opening of borders brought about the end of a movement that used metaphor and surrealism as a form of subversion. In the age of the internet, however, appreciation of classic mid- to late-century Polish movie posters has only increased and there seems to have been a revival of the art form within Poland itself.
Bereski, who has a Master of Fine Arts from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, began in 2010 making his own fan art posters and is now much in demand as a commercial graphic designer. On his website, he diligently numbers and catalogues all his posters, whether commissioned or self-generated (he still creates his own art posters for everything from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962] to Ridley Scott’s yet to be released Napoleon). Incredibly prolific, he is already at number 297.
Above: Plakiat’s cover for the May-June 2023 edition of Le Septieme Obsession magazine, and his self-generated poster for The Fabelmans.
As was the vogue in the early 2010s, Bereski started out making clever minimalist movie posters using vector art, but in the years since his work has become much more painterly, richer, and more diverse, using both illustration and photography. His own design for Spielberg’s The Fabelmans last year was, in my opinion, far superior in both concept and execution to the official studio release poster for that film, and other recent highlights include the official 2021 poster for Escape to the Silver Globe, a documentary feature about Andrzej Żuławski, done very much in the style of Polish Poster School artists like Andrzej Pągowski and Franciszek Starowieyski.
Above: posters by Plakiat for Escape to the Silver Globe (2021) and a festival hommage to Krzysztof Kieślowski (2023).
Bereski is an avid cinephile as well as a brilliant designer, and his artistic influences seem to come from many different sources. I asked him if he would share his ten favorite movie posters and he generously obliged.
As an introduction, here’s what he wrote about his brand, his work, and selecting his favorites:
“Plakiat” is a play on words (a Polish pun). “Plakat” means poster, “plagiat” means plagiarism. So “Plakiat” is a clash of those 2 words: it means that my posters are connected to the past, not directly through plagiarism but through paying homage to all those poster styles, both old and new. One of my main principles of the Plakiat brand is to make each poster different, but what sums up all of them is the use of metaphor and an intellectual approach to each movie's theme. For me, creating art is my way of life—I’m a huge movie enthusiast, watching and reading about the film production and behind-the-scenes materials often years before a movie comes out. Plakiat is a place where I honor the movie industry and film posters and I do it with a passion and emotion I find lacking from corporations. It’s a homage to the authors and creators of the Polish School of Posters too. The Polish School of Posters is really important for me, but it is not the spark that created my Plakiat poster archive. I was born in 1989 and grew up in the Poland of the ’90s where there was a huge Americanization of pop culture. Everywhere I saw Disney, Robin Willams, Coke, Cartoon Network, Harry Potter, and other things that really brought me close to American and English culture. But in the generation of my grandparents—living inside a Communist government and closed borders—tried to hide metaphors everywhere in their art to show the middle finger to Big Brother, and there was a lot of talent there—in music, theatre, art, cinema. There were also elements of 1940s post-concentration camps melancholia in the older generations, which is in part why Polish creators often thought much about reality, God, and existence. The movies of Kieślowski, Wajda, and Polanski often ask about big things. They didn't make Transformers; they made an elegy or a really thoughtful statement. There is a reason why many great cinematographers are Polish (Idziak, Edelman, Kamiński, Wolski). The Polish School of Posters used handmade techniques—that’s why I often draw and paint. It’s more gutsy, there are interpretations there. It’s more human than digital tablets or other people’s Photoshopped faces, there is that feeling of carbon in the pencil that leaves the mark. It’s like reading a real book versus reading a Kindle—I always pick the real thing. It’s funny, because when I started out I mostly did really minimalistic-vector things, conceptual posters; that handmade touch came a little later.
Above: Plakiat’s first poster, for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, made in 2010, and his 251st poster, for Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, made in 2022.
I watch a ton of movies. I’m kind of a Quentin Tarantino-type of a man who just enjoys movie quotes, knows each scene, knows the roots, the classics. Working in the movie business and making posters means so much to me—I remember in The Pixar Story when John Lasseter mentions the first moment when he realized that drawing cartoons could be an actual job. I had the same thing with movie posters. Growing up, when I read the alternative movie poster column in Empire magazine, I saw that completely new way of making minimalistic and utterly noncommercial art movie posters. For years I planned to make movie posters under a made-up brand name, each with the ideas, metaphors, different techniques, and nods to classic poster-making artists. That plan started fourteen years ago, when I was a fine art student. That’s why I picked some of the official Polish posters from another era for my list of favorite movie posters—there was such a creativity there, such intellect; each author has something to offer. It was not ten purple Marvel posters looking the same way. It was handmade, there was sense of visual art, creativity, new way of thinking, and cleverness. Art posters are treated better and better now—after the 1990s there was a huge gap for the Polish School of Posters. I really didn’t want to look at those absolutely horrible poster attempts from distributors at the time and because I’m a rebel, I want to take matters into my own hands. It’s an impossible task to pick only ten of the best movie posters of all time. It's the same with the best movies. As a movie poster designer who has given his life to poster-making for the last fourteen years and is considered an heir to the Polish School of Posters movement, I tried my best to bear in mind all currents of art and time periods. The order doesn’t matter.
PLAKIAT’S TOP TEN FAVORITE MOVIE POSTERS
1. Festival poster by Vasilis Marmatakis for The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/Greece, 2015).
2. Polish poster by Wiesław Wałkuski for Danton (Andrzej Wajda, France/Poland, 1983).
3. US poster by Philip Gips for Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, USA, 1968).
4. US title lobby card by Saul Bass for The Man With The Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, USA, 1955).
5. Polish poster by Jakub Erol for Weekend at Bernie’s (Ted Kotcheff, USA, 1989).
6. German poster by Albin Grau for Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1922).
7. Polish poster by Waldemar Świerzy for Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, USA, 1989).
8. US teaser poster for Space Jam (Joe Pytka, USA, 1996). Designer unknown.
9. Polish poster by Wiktor Sadowski for Picnic At Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, Australia, 1975).
10. French version of the British poster for Days Of Heaven (Terrence Malick, USA, 1978). Artist/designer unknown.
You can see all of Plakiat’s work on his website. And in the Movie Poster of the Week archives, you can find previous top ten selections from Scott Bendall, Nathan Gelgud, Midnight Marauder, Vasilis Marmatakis, Jay Shaw, Sam Smith, Akiko Stehrenberger, and Antonio Stella.