In Warsaw during the iron curtain years, a young artist is shown into an unfussy private screening room and offered a cup of tea. Then, the latest Hollywood blockbuster begins to play for an audience of one – sometimes with subtitles included, sometimes with an official reading over the dialogue from a translated script.
When the artist emerges into the light, they have only one brief: to produce a poster for the film that they have just watched, but in a style that bears no resemblance whatsoever to typical western film posters. “We relied on visual metaphors, symbols, to produce cultural statements,” says Andrzej Klimowski, one of the art school graduates who produced work for the communist government’s centralised film distributors. Ironically, given the circumstances, he says, “There was a great deal of freedom – freedom for self-expression.”
Klimowski’s work forms part of a remarkable exhibition of Polish film posters currently running at London’s Coal Drops Yard as part of Kinoteka, the Polish film festival. Made from the postwar period to the present day, they present unique and unsettling visions of cinema and the world forged in what literally was an alternate reality.
1979 sci-fi horror Alien, designed by Jakub Erol
poster for Down By Law
(1986)
The Shining as designed by Leszek Żebrowski
Klimowski, born to Polish parents in London, chose to return to a Soviet-era Warsaw after an undergraduate degree at St Martin’s, London. The lure was the art being produced there – impressionistic images that are occasionally playful, occasionally paranoid, deeply political without overtly criticising the regime.
He says: “After the second world war there was a big surge of rebuilding, and while you may have disagreed with the ideology, there was a recognition that culture would be at the heart of this. There was a certain pride in Poland’s artistic past, our heritage. To produce posters for film and theatre, the ministry of culture set up a panel of experts, one of whom was Henryk Tomaszewski, who was later my tutor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.
“His condition was that there would be no insistence on copying American posters, with a picture of the biggest star in the centre of the frame and the actors’ names in size of their supposed importance. These would be statements in their own right.
“There was no commercial pressure for us, or the distributors – the cinemas and theatres were always full anyway. The work had to be approved, but largely we could do what we liked. The posters appeared on the cinemas and the streets and I saw that they would prolong the power of the film, not just promoting it but giving the audience something else to think about when it was over.”
Similar posters were made in other eastern bloc countries, but Klimowski says, “We did it better, and I don’t say that because of national pride. After the war Poland was not as strong in material goods as, say, East Germany or Czechoslovakia but artistically and intellectually I think we set the trends that the others followed. We had the most artistic freedom and we could take more chances.”
Klimowski returned to London in the late 1980s and later became head of Illustration at the Royal College of Art, continuing to design posters and book jackets. He was once praised by Harold Pinter, a man who did not offer praise readily, in glowing terms: “He is a free man and you’ll never catch him… He leads the field by a long furlong, out on his own, making his own weather.”
Now 75, Klimowski is enthused by the work of younger artists in the exhibition and notes that in the digital age, reimagining posters for classic and cult films has become a cottage industry thanks to websites like Etsy. But, he says, “It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable for the people that create them. The thrill of it for me, for us, was that our work wasn’t on the wall in a private home, or a private gallery. Our gallery was the streets.
We were on every corner.”
Familiar Strangers is at Kiosk N1C, Lower Stable Street, King’s Cross until April 2. Kinoteka, the Polish film festival, runs across London and the UK until April 29; details at kinoteka.org.uk Edifice, a new graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski, is published by Self-Made Hero
