Painting in Cinema: Posters Exhibition
Old Customs Building and Thessaloniki Cinema Musem
23 November - 19 December
Many times, the need to say certain things leads to
situations which go beyond the initial need and the means of expression
are transformed into a new and different product. The giant painted
poster genre which developed from 1950 to 1970 aimed, on the one
hand, to promote the film of the week and, on the other, to match
the spectacle with the screening venue.
In a time when the glut of information offered by the printed and
electronic press did not exist, these paintings wanted to tell a
story, to provoke, to motivate the potential filmgoer. The poster
did not only bear the indelible image and title of a film, but also
illustrated the history of visual communication, taste and of artistic
aesthetics of our recent history. It is no accident that major painters,
most of them graduates of the School of Fine Arts, worked in this
field in conjunction with their personal oeuvre. The photographs
they had at their disposal were the pretext for the creation of a
painting, the size of which was often over twenty-seven square meters.
But the atmosphere of the weekÕs film had to be evoked in such a
way that the passerby who saw the poster, either in the light of
day or under the nighttime spotlights, would feel the magic of the
fiction film. The fact that the complexity of the narrative and the
illusion of movement was successfully illustrated in a single painting
is undoubtedly a major accomplishment.
The exhibition consists of works by Yorgos Vakirtzis, Stefanos Almaliotis,
Nikos Andreakos, Vangelis Fainos, Costas Grigoriadis, Costas and
George Kouzounis, Nikos Nikolaidis, Manolis Panayotopoulos, Haralambos
Serassis, Gerassimos Touliatos, and Andreas Vazopoulos.
Besides the giant posters, the exhibition will include lithographs
and sketches of the final works.
Yorgos Katsangelos
Associate Professor, Aristotle University
Director of the Film Museum
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