Movie posters
design under different cultural backgrounds (Part 2)
The second
aspect is the development of technology
in movie productions. The design of movie posters was born along with the world
films from black and white to colors, from the simple introducing the content
of the movie to a kind of graphic designs in art works. From the perspective of
poster design, the world movie posters have been through two stages,
hand-painted posters and computer design posters. [1] In the 1920s,
hand-painted posters first appeared to the audience. Till 1950s, the Chinese
movie posters were made in the form of hand-painted. This form of painting
emphasizes the initiative of the graphic designers who can use bold and
exaggerated shapes and bright colors to express the cultural interpretation of
movies’ contents. At that time the design concentrated efforts on depicting the
film contents and describing the realistic such as the main characters and
important scenes of the movies that were all painted by hands.
For
example, the movie “Gone with the wind” directed in 1939 has become a classical
film. The movie poster of it used Atlanta ablaze with red warm color as
background to exaggeratedly express the beautiful and strong love of the hero
and beauty. The big director Steven Spielberg’s classic movie “Alien E.T” is a
science fiction movie. The poster of it uses moon as the background and a little
boy wearing a raincoat is riding a bicycle to the moon. In the front of the
picture, the boy and the alien are interlinked with the index finger. The
warmth friendship becomes the emotional tone of this science fiction film. The
poster selects blue hue to symbolize the quest of the unknown world. The
content of the movie also pays attention to the use of computer effects. The
poster design uses fantasy visual languages to give the audience a beautiful
dream of the children.
In the 1990s, with the development of large-scale
photographic equipments and widely used computer synthesis technologies, the
world film posters gradually became the era of computer designs. Designers used advanced
computer synthesis technologies to break through the traditional realistic
depiction so as to enrich the symbolic meanings and cultural ambiguities of the
movie. [2] It became a bright spot in the movie commercial operation. For example, the movie “American beauty”
is a family ethical film. The movie poster uses a girl’s sexy belly as the
background. A rose in her hand shows the sweet youth beauty. The poster has a delicate
pink tonal with a warm and bright color and it shows strong contrast with the
profound and complicated story. It doesn’t have any realistic depictions of the
contents, but it uses the skin of the human body to express the ambiguous theme of
the movie implicitly and profoundly.
Since the founding of New
China, the Chinese movie posters design became mature along with the development
of Chinese films and gradually formed its own national styles. In the early
thirties, Chinese movie posters had appeared, but they had not formed a scale.
There was a large gap compared to the west. [3] After the founding of New
China, the movie poster designers used a variety of artistic expressions.
During the hand-painted period, they used liquid powder, sketching,
photography, sculpture, printmaking, comic books, paper-cutting and other art
forms.
In the seventies and
eighties century, the traditional Chinese painting, arts and crafts as well as minorities’
decorative arts had a great influence on Chinese movie posters. The traditional
Chinese paintings are divided into two kinds, freehand paintings and meticulous
paintings. The former focuses on mood that it uses brief outlines to depict the
figures and expressions. The latter uses neat, careful, meticulous techniques to
describe the images. The movie produced in 1959, “Lin”
invited traditional Chinese famous painter Shifa Cheng to design the poster.
He used the technique of Chinese ink to shape a hero momentum of Zexun Lin and
the poster became a rare boutique of hand painted posters. The role of movie
posters is to attract audiences’ attention and transfer the information with an
artistic aesthetic. [4] The Chinese freehand brushwork uses simple strokes
to depict the form, spirit as well as the images' characteristics and on-site
atmosphere conditions. At the same time, this traditional way of painting is
easy to narrow the distance with the Chinese audience. The audience can quickly
accept the content because of the aesthetic resonance. Paper-cut as one of the most ancient
folk art forms in China still has a great influence.
Early paper-cut was
prevalent in the funeral ritual and became a widespread folk art. The movie
posters also borrow this kind of art forms. Till the nineties century, the design of
movie posters began to use the combination of computer 3D technologies and
photography. The designer are still exploring in this era.
Throughout the development
of movie posters from the hand-painted stage to the computer design era, this
form of art needs more and more designers with professional knowledge. The
cultural differences are doomed to have significant national features. The movie poster designers must base on the culture
tradition and break free of its shackles in order to improve their ultimate
goal whether in eastern or western culture.
1. Koszarski, Richard. “[Untitled].” Film History 10,
no. 2 (January 1, 1998): 241
2. Margolin, Victor. “Constructivism and the Modern Poster.”
Art Journal 44, no. 1 (April 1, 1984): 29
3. Xiao, Zhiwei. “Movie House Etiquette Reform in
Early-Twentieth-Century China.” Modern China 32, no. 4 (October 1, 2006):
515
