From Nineteenth-Century Lithography to the Twilight of the Paintied Poster
Picture any Italian town on an evening seventy years ago. Television has not yet reached every home, and there are no phones lighting up in pockets. There is, instead, a wall on the corner of the square, and on that wall a large image, coloured, painted: the face of an actress, a hero with a sword, two lovers gazing at each other. Beneath it, in enormous letters, a title. It is a film poster and for passersby, the first, and often only, contact with that week’s releases. It is an invitation, a promise, sometimes a small lie. It is meant to last only as long as a film’s run, and then someone will tear it down or paste another over it, and nothing of that image will remain.
This is the story of the Italian movie poster, nearly a century of posters, locandina, and fotobusta created above all by the great Italian poster painters, the “painters of cinema” celebrated by Maurizio Baroni. For most of that history, painting was the dominant medium, giving rise to a visual language that was both original and instantly recognisable. Some artists would later experiment with mixed media in their poster work, but painting remained at the heart of the tradition. The fotobuste followed a different path: in the 1930s and 1940s, they were often works created entirely by the artists themselves. Later, still photographs taken on set began to provide the starting point, which the artists would transform, enhance, and retouch through their own skill and visual sensibility. Only much later, after the great era of the movie poster painters had come to an end, did this work pass into the hands of graphic designers. By then, the fotobusta was used mainly for higher-budget films and only by the relatively few distributors who still regarded it as an effective promotional format, working directly from the still photograph itself. The history of great Italian movie poster art therefore remains, first and foremost, a history of painting.
We will trace that history decade by decade, from the beginnings of lithographic printing in the nineteenth century to the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and finally to the decline of the hand-painted movie poster. Along the way, we will encounter the great Italian movie poster painters who helped create a distinctive art form admired around the world: from pioneers Anselmo Ballester, Luigi Martinati, and Alfredo Capitani to the generations of extraordinarily talented artists who followed them, culminating in Renato Casaro, the last great Master of this tradition. We will discover how a movie poster was created, the techniques behind it, and where these works survive today. But before we begin that journey, it is worth pausing over a simple question, the question on which everything else depends: what remains of a film once the lights come back on?
The memories of those who watched it remain. The print remains, if we are lucky, kept safe in some film archive. But there also remains a world of paper that for more than a century accompanied cinema like a faithful shadow: screenplays, production stills, cinema programmes, magazines, postcards and, above all, posters. For a long time these were considered scraps, things to throw away. Only recently have we understood that they were something more: they were witnesses.
The change did not come from nowhere. Over the course of the twentieth century, a quiet revolution took shape among historians. Scholars such as Marc Bloch and the historians of the Annales school, and later, in Italy, Carlo Ginzburg with his “evidential paradigm”, taught that history is not written only from great official documents, but also from the slighter traces, from clues, from everything that bears the mark of human passage. In the same way, in the field of cinema, historians such as Gian Piero Brunetta established a principle now widely shared: the history of cinema does not coincide with the history of films. Around the print lies a whole archipelago of materials that prepare its arrival, accompany its life and preserve its memory.
To name these materials, scholars have proposed various words. The happiest, perhaps, is parafilmic: a term modelled on paratext, the concept Genette used to describe everything that, in a book, sits on the threshold of the text proper, such as the title, the cover, the preface. The poster is exactly this: a “threshold”. It is not inside the film, nor entirely outside it; it stands at the door and invites us to enter.
Of all these materials, the poster is the most fascinating. No other form of entertainment, not theatre, not opera, not the circus, has had as close a relationship with illustrated advertising as cinema. A poster can tell the story of a film better than a thousand words: the faces of the actors, the lettering of the title, the colours, the distributor’s mark. When the film is lost, or simply forgotten, it is the poster that keeps its memory, acting like Proust’s madeleine which years later, suddenly brings a whole world flooding back.
Stagecoach · Ballester
The poster of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), painted by Anselmo Ballester for an Italian re-release. The charge of the warriors, rendered as a wave of fiery red that surrounds the stagecoach, turns the Italian title into pure image. The film that helped establish the western as a major cinematic genre opens this history with the work of the man regarded as its founding father.
The pages that follow tell the story of these posters in Italy, from their nineteenth-century roots, when cinema did not yet exist, to the slow twilight of the great tradition of the painted poster, between the 1970s and 1980s, when photography and then the computer took the place of the brush. It is a story we will follow decade by decade, because every era had its films, its audience, its stars and therefore its posters. But it is also a story that, from time to time, will leave the timeline behind to dwell on a few questions: how is a poster made? Who drew it, and how? Why is it so hard to preserve? And where have they ended up, today, the ones that were saved?
One final caveat is necessary, and no honest historian can pass over it in silence. The further back one goes, the rarer the documents become. Of Italian posters from before the 1930s very little has reached us: a few examples, often in poor condition, saved from destruction by chance. For this reason the first part of this account proceeds from a handful of precious traces, whereas for the later decades, when the materials multiply, we can allow ourselves to go into detail. It is a limitation, but also an invitation to caution and, in its own way, a part of the story, because the very scarcity of those images from the past tells us how little, for far too long, we thought them worth saving.
The film poster did not fall from the sky. When the Lumière brothers projected their first films, the advertising poster had already existed for decades, with its rules, its masters and its grammar. Cinema did not have to invent this language from scratch; it borrowed one that already existed and adapted it to its own ends. To understand where the poster of a film comes from, we must therefore take a step back, to the threshold of the nineteenth century, and tell a small technological adventure.
It all begins with a stone. In 1796 a Bohemian named Alois Senefelder devised a new printing process, lithography: one draws directly onto a slab of limestone with a greasy crayon, and from this matrix faithful copies of the drawing can be pulled. It was a silent revolution. In the years that followed the technique was perfected; in 1833 the Frenchman Brisset built a press capable of printing large sheets, and in 1837 Godefroy Engelmann developed chromolithography, that is, colour lithographic printing. Applied to the great industrial machines, this technique made it possible to pull up to ten thousand copies a day. Think what that meant: for the first time in history, one could produce the same image, in colour, in enormous quantities, and paste it up everywhere.
Without this invention, no posters. Industry was growing, commerce was expanding, entertainments were multiplying, everyone needed to be noticed, and colour lithography arrived at just the right moment, turning the walls of cities into an immense illustrated newspaper, legible by anyone.
Arch of Triumph · Geleng
The poster for Arch of Triumph (Lewis Milestone, 1948). The legacy of the great nineteenth-century poster school, the painterly taste, the sense of the scene, arrives intact in works like this one, painted half a century later by Rinaldo Geleng for the melodrama with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, adapted from Remarque’s novel. It is proof that the tradition never broke off: it simply passed from the advertising hoarding to the cinema wall.
The new medium found its chosen home in Paris, at the height of the Belle Époque. Here a handful of artists decided to put their talent at the service of advertising, and in doing so invented a new art. The first and most important was Jules Chéret, whom history remembers as the father of the modern affiche: it was he who spread colour printing on an industrial scale, and it was he who made a gesture destined to matter enormously for the future film poster. Chéret began to treat letters as images, fusing them with the drawing until they could no longer be told apart. It is an intuition that, as we shall see, the film poster would carry to its furthest conclusions.
After Chéret came other names that today hang in museums: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who drew the posters for the Moulin Rouge, Pierre Bonnard, and the Bohemian Alphonse Mucha, with his female figures wrapped in floral ornament. Thanks to them the poster ceased to be a mere announcement and became a popular art form, able to carry beauty out of the galleries and hang it on the walls, where everyone could see it. And “everyone” is the right word: in an age when a great many people could neither read nor write, the illustrated poster spoke a universal language made of colours and figures. It was, in a sense, one of the first mass media in history.
While Paris was conquering the walls of Europe, Italy too was cultivating a poster tradition of the very highest order. The heart of this school was the Officine Grafiche Ricordi in Milan, yes, the same publisher famous for its opera scores, which at the end of the nineteenth century gathered and trained an extraordinary generation of designers. There was Adolfo Hohenstein, regarded as the founder, there were Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Aleardo Terzi, Giovanni Maria Mataloni and, above all, Marcello Dudovich, the most elegant of them all. Around them flourished a true school of Italian advertising posters, with artists whose work is highly sought after by collectors today: Leonetto Cappiello, who brought a dazzling, distilled poster style from Tuscany to France, Achille Luciano Mauzan, a hugely prolific author of advertising and propaganda posters, not to mention Plinio Codognato, Marcello Nizzoli and Federico Seneca, masters of advertising between Liberty and Deco.
These names are no mere footnote. The Italian poster school had a very definite character: it was more narrative, more atmospheric, more painterly than the French. Where the Paris affiche aimed at concision and elegance, the Milanese cartello (poster) loved to tell a scene, to evoke a setting, to fix the climactic moment of a story, having grown up, unsurprisingly, in the shadow of melodrama and opera. And this is exactly the skill that would shortly thereafter serve the film poster: to translate a story into a single image. Many future masters of the film poster would emerge from precisely this milieu. The continuity is such that, in several cases, they are the very same people. It is one of the reasons why Italian posters would be, from the outset, so beautiful.
My Forbidden Past · Olivetti
The poster of My Forbidden Past (Robert Stevenson, 1951), painted by Giorgio Olivetti. The melodrama with Ava Gardner and Robert Mitchum is rendered with the sense of scene and atmosphere inherited from the great nineteenth-century poster tradition. Half a century after Chéret and Dudovich, the legacy of the pioneers lives on in the hand of a painter of cinema. It is precisely the continuity this chapter recounts.
There was also a second current, apparently its opposite, that would leave a lasting mark. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the avant-gardes, and the Futurists in particular, made advertising a field of experimentation. Marinetti and artists such as Fortunato Depero played with “words in freedom”, distorted typefaces and made text explode across the page. It may seem a world away from commercial advertising, yet many of those inventions, above all the idea of the word-image, of the title becoming an image in its own right, would later find their way into film posters. The Italian poster thus emerged from the meeting of two legacies: the figurative tradition of the great nineteenth-century poster artists and the experimental drive of the twentieth-century avant-gardes. It drew something from both.
There is an appealing paradox: the first poster made for what would come to be called the “seventh art” is older than cinema itself. It was signed by none other than Jules Chéret, the father of the affiche. In 1892 he drew the poster for Émile Reynaud’s Pantomimes lumineuses, the show of animated images projected at the Musée Grévin in Paris, considered the ancestor of cinema. A copy of that poster is today kept at the National Cinema Museum in Turin. Chéret himself, it seems, was also commissioned to draw a poster for the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe, but for reasons we do not know it was never used.
The official birth date of cinema is 28 December 1895. On that day, at the Grand Café in Paris, the Lumières projected their short films to a paying audience for the first time: workers leaving the factory, the demolition of a wall, L’Arroseur arrosé and other brief clips. And at once, alongside cinema, came the poster. Three posters advertised the invention, signed by Henri Brispot, Abel Truchet and Marcellin Auzolle. Two of them are worth pausing on, because they tell us something important. Brispot’s poster does not show a film; it shows the crowd queuing before the gas-lit door of the hall, with a gendarme keeping order. What is advertised, in other words, is not yet a film but an event, the very magic of going to the cinematograph. Auzolle’s poster, by contrast, takes the next step, portraying an elegant family in the front row, laughing at L’Arroseur arrosé, the first slapstick comedy in history. For the first time, a scene from the film and the spectators watching it appear together on a poster. It is the film poster taking its first steps.
One might think that, after so promising a debut, movie posters would have arrived in droves. But no: nearly a whole decade of silence followed. The reason is simple, and it helps us understand what the cinema of the earliest years was like. At the time films had no home of their own; they were shown in cafés-chantants, as one of the many attractions of the evening, or in fairgrounds and village fairs, where advertising was already done in other ways. Why print a special poster for something that lasted two minutes and was on the bill for a single evening? Only exceptional events deserved a poster, as happened in New York in 1898, when some films showed Pope Leo XIII and huge, splendid posters were printed for the occasion. But these were exceptions.
The poster for the single film returned to the stage for good only when cinema found a home: the permanent cinema, a venue open every day. It happened around 1905, and France led the way. Gaumont and Pathé, which then dominated the world market, began to produce posters for their films, sometimes printing four or even seven smaller ones on a single sheet. From 1907 Gaumont went so far as to devote a poster to every important title. There is something moving, looking at them today, in the disproportion between those magnificent posters, true masterpieces of the lithographic art, and the little films of a few minutes that they announced.
Scandal Sheet · Capitani
The poster for a id="a1">Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952), painted by Alfredo Capitani. A noir about the editor of a scandal sheet who finds himself at the centre of his own crime story. Exactly half a century after the pioneering posters described in this chapter, the film poster had become a mature art and the old disproportion had been reversed: no longer magnificent posters for two-minute films, but painting and cinema at last on equal terms.
And what about Italy? Here we come to the delicate point mentioned in the introduction, because very little survives from those years. The oldest Italian film poster known today dates back to 1905 and was created forWebroot Classification: green Briganti in Sardegna, produced by Arturo Ambrosio in Turin. It is the work of an artist whose name remains unknown. The date is no accident: it was precisely in those years that the Italian film industry was being born, with Turin as its first great centre. In Rome, Filoteo Alberini and Dante Santoni founded the Alberini & Santoni film workshop, which was reorganized as Cines in 1906. That same year in Turin, Arturo Ambrosio founded his own production company, soon joined by Giovanni Pastrone's Itala Film. For two or three years Italy and France dominated the production of illustrated film posters. The few surviving Italian examples, though by unknown artists, already reveal a sure hand and that instinct for “telling” the film which would become a hallmark of the national school. They are rare and precious clues, like shards of a shattered vase, allowing us to glimpse a whole that is, for the most part, lost.
In the United States, meanwhile, things went differently and almost the opposite way. For years it seemed enough to Americans to light up the front of the venue and post a simple list of titles at the entrance. When an image really was needed, exhibitors picked more or less at random among the posters for stage dramas, following a habit inherited from the circus and the travelling theatres; anything that might intrigue the passer-by would do
Everything changed in 1908, when the major studios, at Edison’s instigation, joined together in a consortium, the Motion Picture Patents Company, which also gave rise to a distribution company. One of its first acts was of a thoroughly American practicality: to fix the standard measurements of advertising material, borrowing them from the world of fairs and the circus. This gave rise to advertising formats destined to spread worldwide, measured in "sheets": the one-sheet, the three-sheet, the six-sheet and the gigantic twenty-four-sheet, a poster of twenty-four sheets meant to be seen from a distance, as the roads grew and the first cars went by.
Alongside the great mural formats, Americans also invented the materials for cinema interiors, and here the matter concerns us closely, because from those inventions two Italian “classics” would be born. Lobby cards were illustrated cards, produced in sets of eight or ten, one with the title, the others with scenes from the film, and displayed in the cinema foyer: they are the ancestors of our fotobusta (the Italian large-format lobby card). The window cards, on the other hand, had a blank space at the top on which to print showtimes, dates and the name of the cinema; from them descends directly our locandina (the small Italian format). Both would arrive in Italy later, the fotobusta remaining very rare until the end of the 1930s, the locandina appearing only after the war, but it is here, across the ocean, that their model takes shape.
It is hard to believe today, but in the years before the First World War Italy was one of the world’s leading cinematic powers. Its production companies exported films across the globe, and their calling card was the great historical epic and costume drama. These were lavish, monumental productions built around vast sets and seemingly endless crowds of extras. Quo Vadis? by Enrico Guazzoni, in 1913, and above all Cabiria by Giovanni Pastrone, in 1914, established a model of spectacle that would influence even early Hollywood. During those years, Italian silent cinema ruled the roost.
Filibus · 1915
The poster of Filibus (Mario Roncoroni, 1915). The mysterious pirate baroness who descends from her airship to pull off impossible heists, amid disguises, chases and fantastical technology: one of the most strikingly modern serials of Italian silent cinema, now rediscovered and celebrated abroad as well. The work, by an unknown designer as was the custom then, is a period print that survived destruction by chance: one of those fragments of a vase the previous chapter speaks of, reaching us with its scars.
Alongside the epic a second phenomenon was being born, destined to matter enormously for posters: the star system. In Italy it had, above all, a female face. The great divas of the silent era, Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli, became the object of a genuine popular cult. The public no longer simply went “to the cinema”; they went to see Her. People imitated her poses, her languid gestures, her clothes. A word was even coined, “borellismo”, to describe that way of moving and suffering on screen. When a face becomes a magnet capable of filling the halls, it is inevitable that it will end up at the centre of the poster.
In these years the Italian poster begins to take on a recognisable physiognomy, even if, we repeat, the surviving examples are few and must be handled with care. It reflects the grandiloquence of the epic, with crowded, dramatic compositions. The most celebrated case is that of Cabiria: because Gabriele D’Annunzio, no less, had taken part in the production as a “literary collaborator”, author of the intertitles and of the characters’ names, his name appeared on the poster with an altogether unusual prominence. It is a detail that says a great deal. At the time, in fact, the director’s name was almost never written: it was not thought capable of drawing an audience. If an exception was made for Cabiria, it was only because D’Annunzio’s prestige was “merchandise” worth spending at the box office.
Other elements too, which we take for granted today, arrived with surprising slowness and some resistance. The film’s title began to appear with any regularity only after 1910; in France it was already there, prominently, from 1904. The actors’ names cropped up later still, around 1919; before then the players often remained anonymous, and this suited the producers perfectly, since a nameless actor cost less. As for the director, the very rare exceptions, such as the poster for Za la mort with the name of Emilio Ghione prominently displayed, only confirm the rule.
It was during this decade that the man history would come to recognise as the father of the Italian film poster entered the scene: Anselmo Ballester. In 1914, while still very young, Ballester produced his first film poster design, beginning a career that would span more than fifty years. The earliest posters currently documented date from the years immediately following. Over the course of his very long career Ballester would sign thousands of posters, building a style that seems simple but is the fruit of great mastery: a sure pairing of colours, a continual play of echoes between the words and the drawing. With him something important happens: the poster ceases to be an anonymous product and becomes the work of a recognisable artist. Ballester would be the first of the three “grand old men” around whom the whole story we are telling revolves.
Already in these years, moreover, Italian cinema had its genres, and each asked a different language of the poster. There was the historical costume film, the epic already mentioned, with its grandiloquence of crowds and colonnades. There was the diva film, the passionate melodrama built on the face and the gestures of the actress. There was slapstick comedy, animated by hugely popular figures such as Cretinetti, the character of the Frenchman André Deed, star of the Turin-based Itala Film, or Polidor, forerunners of a comedy that the poster rendered with lively, colourful vignettes. There was the serial film, the adventure in instalments, of which Za la mort with Emilio Ghione is the most celebrated example. These were the foundation stones of the genre imagery that, decade after decade, would fill the walls of Italy.
The 1920s were, for Italian cinema, a bitter decade. The industry that had conquered the world collapsed within a few years. The reasons can be summed up thus: Italian success had rested on two extremely costly models, the epic and the diva film, which worked only so long as one could sell across the whole world. When first the war, and then American competition, closed off the international markets, the entire system crumbled. An attempt to fight back by merging forces into a massive trust, the Unione Cinematografica Italiana, failed at the start of the decade. National output plummeted to a few dozen films a year, and Italian cinemas were soon overrun by Hollywood.
As Italy fell back, the public was learning to love a new firmament of stars: the American ones of the silent screen, from the Italian-American idol Rudolph Valentino, worshipped the world over, to the great actresses from across the ocean. The poster registered this shift precisely: the face of the star, isolated and idealised, became the subject par excellence of the poster.
The Gold Rush · Ferrini
The poster for The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925), painted by Renato Ferrini. The most beloved tramp in the world, amid hunger, snow and the famous roll dance, in the film Chaplin himself said he wished to be remembered by. It is the American stars of the silent screen who conquer the Italian cinemas of the decade, and their faces that take over the city walls.
And yet, even in a decade of crisis, the language of the poster does not stop; on the contrary, it matures. Alongside Ballester the other two “grand old men” come to the fore: Alfredo Capitani and Luigi Martinati. Both have a rapid brushstroke and vivid colours, and both tend to specialise in different genres. To Martinati, a great lithographer, we owe one of the most successful formats in Italian poster art: the "testone" (literally "big head") close-up. The term sounds modest; the idea was anything but. It is the great close-up portrait of the leading actor that dominates the whole poster. That giant close-up was at once an irresistible emotional appeal and a commercial guarantee: it translated the growing cult of the star into a single image. It worked so well that the film poster would keep it, almost unchanged, for decades.
The Left Handed Gun · Martinati
The poster for The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958), painted by Luigi Martinati. The face of Paul Newman, the tormented Billy the Kid of Penn’s debut, fills the sheet: it is the “testone” in its finished form, the invention Martinati had perfected decades earlier and which here, in full maturity, shows all its power. A later example of an idea born in these years, and unchanged because it was perfect.
In 1926 Capitani and Martinati pooled their talent and founded a company, which they called “Maralca”, joining the syllables of their surnames. It is a small sign of a great change: poster art ceases to be a purely individual craft and begins to organise itself as a business. And yet, in a trait that is thoroughly Italian, those masters never founded a true school. They went on working as artisans, without assistants who might become their pupils. Their knowledge was passed down through osmosis and influence, rather than formal discipleship. Between the two wars the film designers remained few and worked in isolation. It is a detail we will come across again at the end of our story, and it explains, at least in part, why that tradition died out so quickly.
With the 1930s, everything changes, and changes fast. In 1930, sound reaches Italy too, with La canzone dell’amore by Gennaro Righelli; from now on the public not only sees but hears. Meanwhile, cinema becomes a serious matter, indeed, a matter of State. The Fascist regime, which had quickly grasped cinema’s value for propaganda and consensus, built within a few years a whole architecture of institutions destined to last for generations. As early as 1924 the Istituto LUCE had been founded, a factory of newsreels and documentaries. Then, in rapid succession: in 1932 the Venice Film Festival, the first international film showcase in the world, in 1935 the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a school and film archive, and in 1937 the inauguration of Cinecittà, the great studios that would become the “heart” of Italian cinema.
To all this was added a robust protectionism, culminating in the Alfieri Law of 1938, which in effect established a State monopoly over the importation of foreign films. The reaction of the great American companies was sharp: they withdrew their films from the Italian market. The effect, paradoxically, was to free the screens and to give impetus to national production. For the poster artists all this meant something very concrete: more films to advertise, a growing market, work in abundance.
What sort of cinema was that of the 1930s? For the most part, it was escapist cinema. The sentimental comedies of the so-called “white telephones” were all the rage, named after the luxurious, modern furnishings of their bourgeois interiors, an elegant and glossy world, often far removed from the real Italy. From these films a thoroughly Italian star system was finally born, with its beloved faces: Assia Noris, the young Vittorio De Sica in the role of the light leading man, Amedeo Nazzari, Alida Valli. The poster adapted to the taste of the time: luminous, elegant compositions, meticulous portraits of the players, a refined graphic style that took up Martinati’s “testone” and dressed it in evening wear. On the technical side, it was in this decade, especially towards the end, that fotobuste (the Italian large-format lobby card), until then very rare in Italy, finally began to spread. The three historic masters, Ballester, Capitani and Martinati, dominate the scene and are preparing to become, after the war, a dominant trio.
The Women · 1939 (fotobusta)
The fotobusta for The Women (George Cukor, 1939). Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell at the perfume counter, in Cukor’s sparkling comedy performed by an all-female cast: the glossy elegance that the Italian public of the decade adored, in the format that was spreading through theaters in exactly those years, the fotobusta, with the photographic scene and the credits printed in the bottom band. A world of furs, little hats and gossip that is the Hollywood cousin of Italy’s “white telephone” comedies.
Few decades are so sharply divided in half as the 1940s. The first part is that of the war, with a production partly bent to propaganda. The second is one of the great periods in the history of world cinema: neorealism. With Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini (1945), Shoeshine and then Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica (1948), and The Earth Trembles by Luchino Visconti (1948), Italian cinema brought to the screen the streets, the rubble, the hunger and the dignity of ordinary people, often with actors drawn from real life. It was a new language, one that made truth a moral and aesthetic choice, and that the whole world watched with admiration.
The Earth Trembles · Ciriello
The poster for The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948), painted by Averardo Ciriello. The tragedy of the fishermen of Aci Trezza, filmed with the real inhabitants of the village and performed in dialect, is one of the most radical expressions of neorealism. To the painter fell the almost impossible task of giving a seductive face to a film that refused all seduction: the Italian school’s answer to this puzzle is recounted below.
It is also the decade in which, in Italy, people begin to think seriously about preserving cinema. In 1947 the Cineteca Italiana was founded in Milan, becoming the country’s first film archive and preserving an important collection of materials related to the history of cinema. Two years later, in 1949, the Cineteca Nazionale was established in Rome, likewise with a rich poster collection. It is the beginning, however tentative, of the awareness that preserving cinema means saving not only the films themselves, but also all the paper that accompanies them.
Neorealism confronted the poster artists with a curious problem, almost a puzzle. How can you advertise, with an enticing image, a film that has deliberately chosen to renounce every form of spectacle? How do you persuade the public to come into the hall with the poster of a story made of unemployment, poverty and stolen bicycles? The answer was, in most cases, an intelligent compromise. The close-up of the protagonists and the traditional figurative framework remained, but the tones became more sober, the atmospheres more dramatic and the palette less vivid. It is one of the best examples of a constant that runs through the whole history of the film poster: the poster never merely reflects the film, but continually mediates between its own commercial function and the soul of the work it is called upon to announce.
In the postwar years, finally, a new format emerged in Italy, destined for immense popularity: the locandina (the small Italian format), that handy vertical card (about 33×70 centimetres) which often reproduces the large poster in miniature. It descends, as we have seen, from the American window cards. With its arrival, the set of formats that would characterise the golden age of the poster is at last complete.
If we had to name a single decade as the golden age of the Italian poster, it would be this one. And not by chance: the 1950s are the years in which Italians went to the cinema more than ever before or since. During reconstruction and, later, the economic boom, the cinema was the chief place of leisure and encounter for the masses. Tickets were sold in numbers that would never be reached again. To this overwhelming hunger for films corresponded an equally enormous hunger for images on paper: every film, Italian or foreign, wanted its posters, its locandine, its fotobusta (the Italian large-format lobby card). Never did the poster artists have so much work.
These were also the years of “Hollywood on the Tiber”: drawn by the low costs and the great resources of Cinecittà, the American majors came to Rome to shoot their epics, from Quo Vadis (1951) to Ben-Hur (1959). And meanwhile, on the Italian front, the popular genres destined to fill the halls were being born and prospering: the mythological film, or peplum, launched by the triumph of Hercules (1958) with the bodybuilder Steve Reeves, the commedia all’italiana, which with Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) by Mario Monicelli found its perfect formula, the comic film, dominated by the inimitable mask of Totò, whose pictures packed the cinemas and gave the poster artists a pretext to play with his face, the tear-jerking melodrama of Raffaello Matarazzo, with the popular pairing of Amedeo Nazzari and Yvonne Sanson, the adventure film and the swashbuckler. Above all this the star of a young director from Rimini was beginning to shine: Federico Fellini.
Beautiful but Dangerous · Fratini
The poster of Beautiful but Dangerous (Robert Z. Leonard, 1955), painted by Renato Fratini. Gina Lollobrigida as the singer Lina Cavalieri, in one of the decade’s popular triumphs, the very embodiment of golden-age Italian stardom. The poster of Beautiful but Dangerous promising exactly what the title declares.
Funny Face · Brini
The poster of Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957), painted by Ercole Brini. Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in the musical that turns fashion into dance: Brini’s soft watercolour touch, with its Macchiaioli light, is grace itself translated into poster form, perfectly suited to Donen’s Parisian fairy tale.
The enormous demand for images created opportunities for a whole generation of designers who, alongside the three historic masters, brought the Italian poster to its absolute peak. Not one but dozens of artists of the highest calibre worked at the same moment, each with a recognisable style and often tied to a genre: the peplum, the comedy, the sentimental drama, the adventure film, the swashbuckler. It is the proof of the maturity attained: the poster is no longer an anonymous craft but an art form shaped by recognisable individual artists, to whose names and portraits a whole chapter is devoted further on.
The Italian style, built on painted illustration, near-photographic likenesses and bold colours, was recognised as one of the most beautiful in the world. So much so that Hollywood came looking for it. The most famous case is that of Silvano Campeggi, known as “Nano”, commissioned to create posters for legendary films, from Ben-Hur to Casablanca, from An American in Paris to Exodus. His personal version of the Ben-Hur poster is often cited as a masterpiece: the lettering of the title, rendered in relief with an almost Futurist taste, becomes the image itself, a thing to be looked at before it is read. The same happens in the poster for Gigi, where it is the letters that fill the whole space.
Sayonara · Campeggi
The poster of Sayonara (Joshua Logan, 1957), painted by Silvano Campeggi. Marlon Brando and postwar Japan in a melodrama about love across the barriers, awarded four Oscars: the poster of Sayonara is Nano at the summit of his dialogue with Hollywood, the Florentine artist whom the American majors asked to paint their dreams.
Here we return to an idea encountered at the outset, with Chéret: the word that becomes image. The scholar Egidio Mucci coined a curious formula for this phenomenon: “neo-logo-iconic language”, which, translated, simply means that word and figure fuse into a single thing, endlessly referring one to the other. The word wants to be seen, the image wants to be read. It is one of the most fascinating inventions of the poster, and the great Italian poster artists brought it to perfection.
The 1960s are the decade in which Italian cinema reached extraordinary heights on two very different fronts. On one side the great auteur cinema, which conquers festivals the world over with Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pietro Germi. On the other the explosion of genre cinema, a formidable machine turning out films at an industrial pace: the spaghetti western, inaugurated by Sergio Leone, the gothic horror of Mario Bava, the Italian-style thriller, the giallo, which would soon find its most celebrated name in Dario Argento, science fiction, the peplum still in vogue, the musicarello with the pop singers of the moment, and the commedia all’italiana in its happiest season. Every genre, naturally, calls for its posters, and the poster artists have never been so in demand.
Curiously, the prestige of the film is not necessarily reflected in a different graphic treatment; the poster obeys laws of its own, those of immediate impact, so that a film by Antonioni can be announced with the same emphasis as a popular one. Behind those images lie hands of extraordinary quality. Alongside the great masters of the previous generation, still in full activity, a new wave of highly specialised poster artists emerges, able to interpret in ever more recognisable languages the different strands of Italian cinema: from the spaghetti western to the gothic, from the giallo to science fiction, all the way to comedy.
Once Upon a Time in the West · Gasparri
The poster of Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968), painted by Rodolfo Gasparri. The faces of Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale composed like an overture around the duel: the poster of Once Upon a Time in the West is today one of the most celebrated images in the whole history of the genre, worthy of the twilight masterpiece it announced.
On the technical side, however, something is stirring beneath the surface. Photography and offset printing begin to enter the poster, first alongside the drawing, then in its place. Photomontage, collage and retouched photography allow faster and cheaper results. The great painted illustration still enjoys a glorious season. It is in these years that Renato Casaro makes his debut, destined to be its last great master, but the conditions for its decline were already in place.
The 1970s bring to the screen a cinema of political and civic engagement, while the popular genres give their last flourishes: the crime film, the risqué Italian sex comedy, horror. The long decline in cinema attendance had already begun in the late 1950s, but in the 1970s it became dramatically steeper. Television was now firmly established in Italian homes and, from the early 1980s, private commercial networks would intensify the competition for audiences. Cinemas close, spectators dwindle, and the promotion of films moves from the walls of the cities to the domestic screen, relying more and more on television spots and appearances on variety shows. The poster loses its centrality, and with it the resources and the attention that had sustained its quality.
The Spy Who Loved Me · Aller
The poster of The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977), painted by Aller. Roger Moore in a tuxedo and Barbara Bach above a world of submarines and jet skis: even in the decade of decline, the great international launches still called for the brush. One of the last great spectacles of the painted poster, signed by an artist of the school’s final generation.
It is in this climate that the tradition of the painted poster dies out. The reasons add up: economic, because the market no longer offers the margins to pay for costly original illustrations; technical, because photography and offset demand less effort and cost less; generational, because the great masters are ageing and, as we have said, had trained no pupils. A true school had never been born; there were no disciples to whom to pass on knowledge that, by then, the market no longer demanded. Pencils and brushes are used more and more rarely: photographic artwork becomes the norm. Renato Casaro would go on painting for a long time yet, into the 1990s, for international productions too, but he is by now the last of a line.
The poster, to be sure, does not disappear; it is still printed today, almost solely by photographic and digital means. It ceases to be that popular and collective art form it had been for nearly a century. And it is precisely its twilight that throws into relief, by contrast, the greatness of that season: the painted poster had not been a mere selling tool, but a figurative genre in its own right, with its masters, its masterpieces and an unmistakably Italian character. It is no accident that a collector and scholar, Maurizio Baroni, coined for those artists a definition that says it all, and to which we shall return.
Let us step away from the chronology for a moment and take a closer look at the object itself. What exactly is a manifesto? In technical terms, it is a document combining text and images, printed in multiple copies on one side of one or more sheets. Behind this dry definition lies a small universe of formats, rules and tricks of the trade. It is, in essence, what the English-speaking world calls a movie poster, but in Italy the manifesto proper belonged to a broader family of promotional materials, each with its own conventions and function.
For any given film, posters in several sizes were routinely printed. The Italian system, which became standard over the course of the twentieth century, classified poster sizes by "sheets" (fogli), the traditional unit of measurement used by printers.
The standard promotional set supplied to cinemas could include three principal formats. The 70×100 cm poster, known as the "one-sheet" (un foglio) or soggettone, remained relatively uncommon for a long time, but became increasingly widespread in the final decades of the system, when it often replaced the larger formats in promotional sets for lower-budget films. The 100×140 cm poster, known as the "two-sheet" (due fogli), was the standard format and was printed as a single piece. The 140×200 cm poster, known as the "four-sheet" (quattro fogli), was printed in two separate sections that had to be joined because printing presses could not accommodate a sheet of that size.
Not every film received all three formats. The promotional material produced depended on the budget, and the set could therefore remain incomplete.
Even larger formats were produced, up to forty-eight sheets, for outdoor display and were chosen directly by distributors for major releases. These extra-large posters were not part of the standard promotional material supplied to cinemas.
Alongside the manifesto, a film's promotional set could include two other, fundamentally different types of material. These were not alternative formats of the same object, but distinct promotional forms, each with its own function.
The locandina (the small Italian format) is the manifesto's closest relative. It typically reused the artwork of the four-sheet, or of the two-sheet when no four-sheet was produced, adapting it to a tall, narrow format of around 33×70 cm. Its upper portion, however, was left blank for the cinema's name and screening times.
The fotobusta (an Italian lobby-card set, made up of a series of promotional sheets) followed an entirely different logic. Early fotobusta sets were often illustrated or graphically treated, typically in the smaller 35×50 cm format; later examples became predominantly photographic and were commonly produced at 50×70 cm.
Its primary purpose was not simply to repeat the main poster artwork, but to present scenes and star portraits from the film. The number of subjects varied considerably. A set often comprised eight or more subjects, while major productions could be accompanied by substantially larger series.
Cinemas displayed fotobusta in showcases in foyers and other interior spaces, where they offered audiences a visual preview of the film and helped sustain interest in forthcoming screenings. Over time, as cinema advertising changed and photographic publicity materials evolved, the fotobusta gradually disappeared from the traditional promotional set.
The Seventh Seal · 1957 (locandina)
The locandina of The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), painted by Carlantonio Longi. The knight who challenges Death to a game of chess, one of the absolute summits in the history of cinema, in the small vertical format of the Italian tradition, about 33×70 centimetres, with the space reserved for the name of the cinema and the showtimes. Born for the shop window and the cinema entrance, the locandina is today among the formats most prized by collectors.
Beau Hunks · 1931 (fotobusta)
The fotobusta of Beau Hunks (James W. Horne, 1931), produced by Hal Roach. Laurel and Hardy enlist in the Foreign Legion to forget a heartbreak, in one of the pair’s best-loved comedies, revived for decades in Italian cinemas. The series of photographs with title and credits in the bottom band, a direct descendant of the American lobby card, told the film scene by scene to anyone deciding whether to buy a ticket: together with the locandina it completes the family portrait of the Italian formats.
One of the things that makes the poster special is that it speaks two languages at once: that of images and that of words. Images catch the eye; words inform and persuade. The most important word is of course the title, usually in enormous letters, though sometimes, when the actor is hugely famous, it is his name that grows larger. Often, beneath the Italian title, the original one appears in small type. The Italian title itself was not infrequently a loose or fanciful rendering of the original, and sometimes departed from it altogether.
Esterina · Symeoni
The poster of Esterina (Carlo Lizzani, 1959), painted by Sandro Symeoni. For the film with Carla Gravina, Symeoni takes the path of graphic distillation that would become his signature: few elements, a single idea, modernity entering the Italian poster.
Then there are the taglines, the slogans: “an absolute novelty”, “a colossal adventure drama” and a thousand other promises. There are the names, those of the actors, which grow in importance as the star system takes hold. The career of Marilyn Monroe, seen through the posters, is a small novel. Her name, at first absent or printed in tiny type, grows from film to film until it outstrips the very title in size. As for the director, in the Italian posters of the period he almost never appears: it was thought, wrongly, that he did not sell tickets.
The margins often contain the details most useful to scholars: the date and the printer, the notes on the edition and, from 1958 onwards, the clauses governing the rental of the materials between S.A.C. and cinemas, with the warning to return everything. There is then, at times, the poster artist’s signature: small, in a corner, but it is the sign that this poster has an author.
If the words matter, the image is decisive. It must strike and it must say at once what kind of film this is. For this the designer resorts to recognisable signs, a sword, a pistol, a spaceship, a palm tree, that trigger immediate recognition of a familiar world. The prime model is the key scene: the moment of maximum tension is frozen, the protagonists are brought into focus in the foreground and the extras are left barely sketched in the background. Sometimes the designer condenses into a single image scenes far apart from one another, like a paper trailer. At other times he invents out of whole cloth: these are the famous “graphic lies”, posters that show scenes not in the film or that make the adventure seem more spectacular than it is. All, naturally, to bring as many people as possible into the hall. When words and images fuse until they can no longer be told apart, when the title itself becomes an image, we return to that magic which runs through our whole story: the word made to be seen, the image made to be read.
If there is one thing the poster does better than almost anything else, it is to signal at a glance what genre a film belongs to. Before even reading the title, the viewer “feels” whether this is a love story or an adventure, a comedy or a drama. It is a language of codes, and every genre has its own. They are worth exploring, because in each of them the great poster artists produced memorable work.
The historical film and costume epic, founding genres of Italian cinema, call for grandeur: crowds of extras, monumental architecture, heroes in the foreground. The same is true of the swashbuckler and the peplum, the mythological film of muscular heroes and monsters, where hyperbole comes naturally. Melodrama and the sentimental film, the celebrated tear-jerker, depend instead on faces and tears; here the great portraitists reign, able to condense into a single gaze all the passion and grief of the story.
Then there is the lighter side. Comedy, and the commedia all’italiana in particular, favours lively, crowded posters that often play on caricature; comic films, from Totò onwards, put the actor’s face at the centre because that is what makes people laugh and sells the ticket. Later came the hugely popular Italian sex comedy, which generated an enormous number of posters. At the opposite end, auteur cinema and drama often receive a more sober, allusive treatment, even if, as we have seen, poster art rarely abandons its taste for emphasis.
Then come the genres that flourish from the 1960s onwards, each with an unmistakable iconographic repertoire. The Italian-style western, the spaghetti western, lives on gaunt faces and levelled pistols. Gothic horror lives on castles, threatened women and unnatural colours; the giallo and thriller on gloved hands and glinting blades; the crime film on night-time cities, chases and drawn guns. Science fiction brings out robots, spaceships and alien planets, a field to which an entire poster collection has even been devoted. The musicarello brings to the poster the faces of the pop singers of the day; adventure and exotic films play with palm trees, seas and distant lands; war films with explosions and heroics. Even documentaries and Istituto LUCE newsreels had their own graphic language.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers · Biffignandi
The poster of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), painted by Alessandro Biffignandi. The masterpiece of 1950s paranoid science fiction, with the pods that replace human beings while they sleep: the iconography of the genre, poised between terror and wonder, in one of its most effective Italian expressions.
Ocean’s Eleven · Ciriello
The poster of Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960), painted by Averardo Ciriello. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the whole Rat Pack in the most elegant heist in Las Vegas: one of the films that helped define the stylish heist movie of the 1960s, and a poster that captures its nightclub spirit, all tuxedos, lights and cocksure smiles.
Seen together, these posters form a small atlas of the Italian imagination of the twentieth century. Every genre is a world, every world has its signs, and poster artists were remarkably adept at moving rapidly from one genre to another, shifting effortlessly from epic painter to caricaturist to master of horror.
Each of these genres lives again today in a collection of restored posters, from the Italian-style western to gothic horror, from comedy to the peplum, available to explore poster by poster.
The scholar and collector Maurizio Baroni called them, in a perfect phrase, “painters of cinema”. The phrase is apt: they were painters in the fullest sense, artists of remarkable technical and imaginative skill, who nonetheless chose, or accepted, to put their talent at the service of the wall and the box office. It is worth getting to know them a little more closely, one by one, because behind every memorable poster there is a hand and a story.
For each master, what follows is a biography and a selection of works:
Many of these works have been recovered and are currently being digitally restored from original period prints.
Giant · Cesselon
The poster of Giant (George Stevens, 1956), painted by Angelo Cesselon. James Dean, in his final performance, dominates the sheet with the almost photographic likeness that was the hallmark of the school’s portraitist par excellence. A portrait like this shows why Cesselon's close-ups alone were enough to define a career.
Alongside them stands a host of distinctive talents. Enrico De Seta, prince of comedy and caricature. Rinaldo Geleng, a painter of great refinement, and his son Giuliano Geleng, who took up and carried on his art. Arnaldo Putzu, with brilliant colour and a lively line, celebrated in Great Britain as well. Alessandro Biffignandi, master of the popular poster in bright, sensual tones. Sandro Symeoni, with a modern, distilled style capable of bold, almost abstract solutions. Renato Fratini, with his dynamic line, long active in Britain too. Rodolfo Gasparri, hugely prolific, a master of comedy and popular cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. And then the many others: Giorgio Olivetti, Agatino Avelli, Dante Manno, Carlantonio Longi, Francesco Fiorenzi, the Nistris, each with his own speciality and preferred genre. Among the later generation of genre and horror poster artists was Enzo Sciotti, one of the most prolific and long-lived Italian poster artists, active from the 1960s into the most recent decades.
The Young Philadelphians · Longi
The poster of The Young Philadelphians (Vincent Sherman, 1959), painted by Carlantonio Longi. Paul Newman as an ambitious young lawyer moving through Philadelphia high society in a drama of ambition, prejudice and social climbing. The poster offers a close look at the hand of one of the many virtuosos listed above, poised between painterly storytelling and graphic distillation.
At the end of the line stands the last great master: Renato Casaro. Born in Treviso and a virtuoso of both airbrush and brush, he was a leading figure from the 1960s through the 1980s, his name associated first with Sergio Leone’s Italian-style westerns and then with major international productions well into the 1990s. With him, an era comes to a close. After him, photography and the computer would definitively take the place of the brush, but his posters, like those of all the “painters of cinema”, remain to remind us what the Italian poster once was: not merely a trade, but a great and unrepeatable season of art. Renato Casaro died in Treviso on 30 September 2025, leaving friends, collaborators and numerous projects unfinished. He was a sublime artist, but also a gentle, modest and reserved man who worked to the very end.
A Difficult Life · De Seta
The poster of A Difficult Life (Dino Risi, 1961), painted by Enrico De Seta. Alberto Sordi as an idealistic journalist moving through twenty years of Italian history, from the postwar period to the economic boom, in one of the high points of the commedia all’italiana. The prince of caricature takes on one of the bitterest and finest films starring the actor who came to embody an era.
Every poster required an amount of work that is hard to imagine today. The poster artist had to be a skilled painter, a capable portraitist and, at the same time, an exceptionally fast worker, because production companies were always in a hurry. The process was almost always the same: the press office asked the artist for several preliminary designs, perhaps three, five or even ten. Once a concept had been selected, the artist produced the final bozzetto, the original artwork intended for reproduction.
It is in the final bozzetto that the poster artist’s work can be seen in its fullest form, painted by hand before mechanical reproduction begins. It is there that the poster artist’s art truly lives: the texture of the brushwork, the physical presence of the paint, the pencil revisions, all the things printing would later flatten. This is why the original bozzetti that survive today are exceptionally valuable artefacts.
We have a wonderful account of this working method from Silvano Campeggi, “Nano”. It all began with a screening of the film, shown in the original language in a small projection room for the executives. Then came the production stills, nearly a hundred of them, from which the right portrait and composition had to be chosen. From there came the bozzetto, or rather several of them, ranging from the most obvious solution to the most daring. Campeggi said he preferred to work at a small scale because, when enlarged, the brushwork gave the finished poster a looser, more natural flow. He also recalled how, over time, he had stopped concentrating solely on the actors’ likenesses and begun to aim for the overall effect, using boldly coloured backgrounds to set off the foreground. The poster, he said, had to “hit you right between the eyes”.
One observation of Campeggi’s is worth more than a treatise. The poster, he explained, did not have to please the head of the press office; it had to speak to the public, and audiences differed between major cities and provincial towns. Posters for the provinces had to be more illustrative, simpler, almost fairy-tale-like. City posters, aimed at hurried, distracted passers-by and motorists, had to be more distilled and emphatic, built around a single idea capable of stopping you in an instant. This is why, at times, works by different poster artists were chosen for the various formats of the same film, and why, in multi-sheet posters, the image was never simply enlarged but completely rethought.
The Frightened City · Putzu
The poster of The Frightened City (John Lemont, 1961), painted by Arnaldo Putzu. The London crime film with Herbert Lom and a young Sean Connery on the eve of 007: a perfect subject through which to observe the craft described in this chapter, the key scene frozen, the protagonists in focus, the city in the background, everything built to catch the passer-by’s attention in an instant.
Here lies the paradoxical heart of our whole story. The poster is, by nature, an ephemeral object, printed to last only as long as a film’s run, “the span of a morning”, Brunetta wrote, and then destined for the pulping mill, to be torn down or to disappear beneath the paste and paper of the next poster. To speak of preserving such an object can seem almost a contradiction in terms. And yet it is precisely this fragility that makes the surviving examples so precious. Italian movie posters, regarded as some of the most highly prized internationally, were rarely collected and were almost always discarded. Those that remain are few, and each bears the scars of its own history: folds, tears, faded colour.
Poster restoration is a specialised craft, and a fascinating one. A particularly valuable account comes from Brigitte Bussière, restorer at the Bibliothèque du film in Paris, whose description allows us to follow the stages of the work almost as if it were a surgical operation.
The process begins with examination: the type of paper must be identified, its condition assessed and the stability of the colours checked. Some reds used by certain printers are notoriously unstable. The restorer must also establish how far it is possible to intervene without altering the work. Surprisingly, an early-twentieth-century poster is often easier to treat than a recent one: modern papers, low in fibre, can cause the printed surface to lift away along with the colour. If the poster has been mounted on an unsuitable canvas backing, the next step is delining, removing the old support, an operation Bussière calls “an adventure” and one that can mean days of millimetre-by-millimetre work with a small chisel. Cleaning follows, with water baths or, cautiously, neutralising products, but some marks, felt-tip pen stains and the halos left by adhesive tape, remain forever.
Then comes the new lining. Unbleached cotton is stretched over a frame, coated with reversible adhesive and a thin layer of Japanese paper; the wet poster is laid on this bed, and losses are filled with old paper of the same type so that it takes colour like the original. After five to eight days of drying in a controlled environment, colour retouching begins, using reversible tempera and watercolours, fine brushes for details and an airbrush for larger areas. It is patient work in which the apparently “easy” colours, such as black and red, are often the most treacherous. Finally, each work is protected in a transparent sleeve and accompanied by a restoration record documenting its history and treatment. For a poster, as we now know, is a document to be preserved with care.
Alongside the physical restoration of a poster, there is another form of conservation that does not act directly on the paper itself, but on the image it preserves: il digital restoration. The original period print is digitised at high resolution, and every part of it is carefully analysed to distinguish the marks that belong to the original artwork from those left by time, use and storage.
Folds, tears, abrasions, stains and missing areas can be corrected or reconstructed by hand. Colours, often altered after decades of exposure to light, can also be rebalanced in an attempt to recover their original appearance without changing the character of the work. With large-format posters, the process becomes even more complex: the separate sheets that once formed the complete image may show overlaps, misalignments or colour variations that must be carefully recomposed into a single, continuous image.
Digital restoration, however, does not mean making a poster look more attractive or reinterpreting it according to contemporary taste. Its purpose is to recover what time has made difficult to see, while preserving the original drawing, colours, halftone screen and distinctive qualities of the artwork.
Digital restoration therefore does not replace the vintage poster or its physical conservation. Instead, it preserves and restores its image, allowing works originally created to remain on display for only a few weeks to be seen clearly once again and passed on even when the original object bears the marks of many decades of history.
Before and after: the digital restoration of the poster of Fra Diavolo (Hal Roach and Charles Rogers, 1933). On the left, the period print bears the scars of ninety years of history: folds, tears, faded colour. On the right, Laurel and Hardy are restored to the colours in which they once appeared on the walls. It is the same principle of recovery described in this chapter, here applied digitally to a heritage that, for far too long, no one thought worthy of care.
If many posters have been lost, others have survived and today are preserved in places devoted to safeguarding their memory. Their first “homes” were the film archives: in Milan, in 1947, the Cineteca Italiana was founded, the country’s first film archive; in Rome, from 1949, the Cineteca Nazionale likewise contributed to the preservation of Italy’s cinematic heritage and the materials associated with it. In Turin, the city that had been the cradle of poster art, the National Cinema Museum holds one of the richest and most significant collections. The Cineteca di Bologna gave its own collection the evocative name Archivio della grafica. Turin, Bologna and Rome are among Italy’s major centres for the preservation of film posters and cinema-related materials.
Please, Not Now! · Iaia
The poster of Please, Not Now! (original French title La bride sur le cou, Roger Vadim, 1961), painted by Piero Ermanno Iaia. Brigitte Bardot in Vadim’s Parisian comedy, at the height of her splendour: one of those faces whose posters were torn straight off the walls - which is, as this chapter recounts, how many great collections began.
Then there are archives devoted to artists and films. The CSAC at the University of Parma holds thousands of bozzetti, including a major bequest from Anselmo Ballester. Archives and foundations have grown up around directors and actors; valuable papers, such as those of Cesare Zavattini, have found homes in public libraries such as the Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia. And then there are the collectors, whose passion saved what institutions neglected: great private collections emerged, from Nicola Gargano’s, numbering tens of thousands of pieces and later largely acquired by the Puglia Region, to the collection that entered the Provincial Library of Foggia, and finally the celebrated Salce Collection in Treviso. Nando Salce began his collection in 1895, at the age of eighteen, purchasing, from a municipal billposter, Giovanni Maria Mataloni's poster for Incandescenza a gas brevetto Auer.
S.A.C. (Servizi Ausiliari Cinema) deserves a story of its own. From 1958 it built a distribution and logistics system so efficient that its solution was gradually adopted by every distributor: first for posters and locandine (the small Italian format), then for film prints too, from celluloid to digital. As Marco Momigliano of S.A.C. recounts, the obligation to return the material was printed on the posters, but in practice this rarely happened and, all things considered, it was a stroke of luck. Those “retained” materials, instead of ending up in the pulping mill, found their way into collections and archives. Today that heritage is enjoying a second life: a programme of recovery and digital restoration, carried out in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, is bringing back to light tens of thousands of period posters and locandine, along with the work of the painters of cinema who created them.
To understand what makes the Italian school distinctive, it helps to place it alongside other great traditions. France, homeland of the affiche, has always cultivated an elegant, distilled poster, more attentive to harmony than spectacle. The United States imposed its own industrial model on the world, built on standard formats and commercial efficiency, with the studio brand at its centre. At the opposite extreme stands the celebrated Polish school of the postwar years, which turned the poster into pure artistic invention, free to ignore the faces of the stars and scenes from the film, creating images fit for gallery walls. These are three very different paths, all of great value, but each differs significantly from the Italian tradition.
Italy occupies a position of its own between them: neither a purely commercial system nor pure artistic invention, but a rare synthesis of painterly power and promotional purpose. That painterly power has ancient and distinctly Italian roots: the dignity of the Renaissance portrait, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, the light of the Macchiaioli, the elegance of Boldini. Italian poster artists can be seen as late heirs to that great tradition. This balance helps explain why Italian film posters are considered among the most beautiful in the world. On one side stood the great illustrative tradition of past centuries; on the other, a vast mass market fuelled by some of the highest levels of cinema-going in Europe. Artistic skill and mass demand together produced not one master, but an entire generation of masters working at the same time.
Six Days a Week · Gasparri
The poster of Six Days a Week (Luigi Comencini, 1965), painted by Rodolfo Gasparri. Catherine Spaak torn between too many men and too many lies, in Comencini’s bittersweet comedy: an example of Gasparri’s versatile, brilliant hand applied to the social comedy of the 1960s.
There is, finally, one aspect that is easy to overlook. As an image displayed in public, the poster was subject, like the film itself, to censorship. Before it could be posted, it required authorisation from the local police headquarters, whose date sometimes appears on the document and now provides a useful clue for dating it. It is a detail that weaves the history of the poster into the larger history of state control over images and entertainment, making the poster a document not only of cinema but also of the society and politics of its time.
One comparison, more than any argument, reveals the identity of the Italian school: placing side by side the posters for the same film in different national editions. For decades, when a major Hollywood film was released in Italy, it did not simply arrive with its American poster; an Italian artist often created an entirely new one for the local market. And there the difference in both technique and conception becomes clear, because two posters for the same film, produced only weeks apart, can tell its story in completely different ways.
The American poster emerged from a powerful industrial system and bears its marks: a preference for immediate effectiveness, clean graphic composition, strong typography and the studio logo. The priorities are brand recognition and an instantly legible title. The Italian poster, by contrast, works through faces and emotion. The great painted portrait, the “testone”, brings the viewer eye to eye with the star and gives colour and brushwork a warmth that pure graphic design does not seek. Where the American poster informs and organises, the Italian poster seeks to move through painting. It is no accident that Hollywood, on more than one occasion, came looking for that Italian hand.
With France, the comparison is between two different kinds of nobility. The French affiche, heir to the great season of the late nineteenth century, favours economy, elegance and atmosphere: it says much with little, playing on allusion and taste. The Italian poster is more narrative. It wants to tell a scene, capture a moment, fill the eye. Two conceptions of beauty: restraint and harmony on one side, passion and story on the other. Both are of the highest order, yet unmistakably different.
The extreme case is the Polish school, which in the postwar years turned the poster into pure artistic invention: metaphor, abstraction, complete freedom from the film’s literal imagery. The Italian tradition often took a more representational path, remaining faithful to the star’s face and to the concrete promise of spectacle. On one side, the poster as a conceptual work, almost a painting for the gallery; on the other, the poster as a popular invitation, made to stop the passer-by outside the cinema. They are opposite answers to the same question, “how do you announce a film?”, and their contrast makes clear just how recognisable and original the Italian approach was.
The Touch · Nistri
The poster of The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971), painted by Lorenzo Nistri. The drama with Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould, the Swedish master’s first film in English: even the most austere European auteur cinema, on reaching Italy, passed through the brush of a painter. It is the phenomenon described in this chapter: the film remains the same, but the poster changes from country to country.
Let us return, in closing, to the question from which we began: what remains of a film? The memories of those who saw it remain. The print remains, if we are lucky. And there remains the world of paper that accompanied cinema like a shadow for more than a century, above all the poster. Nothing can tell the story of a film quite like a poster: the lettering of the title, the painted faces of the actors, the colours, the promise of an emotion. And nothing, years later, can bring that world so vividly back to life.
We have seen how the poster’s history is inseparable from that of cinema and from the country that produced it. Every decade had its style because every decade had its films, its audiences and its dreams: the silent epics and first divas, the crisis of the 1920s and the “testone”, sound and Cinecittà, war and neorealism, the golden age of the 1950s, the auteurs and genres of the 1960s, the slow twilight of painting. The poster recorded all of this, translating it into its own language of faces and colours. That is why we can read it today as a precious source for tracing changes in the tastes, customs and imagination of entire generations.
At the heart of this story lies the central paradox: what was created to live only as long as a film’s theatrical run has become one of the most vivid witnesses to cinema history. And with that comes a collective duty: to preserve this fragile heritage, for too long entrusted to the passion of collectors alone, so that it can continue to tell its story to future generations.
One image from a film says all this better than any argument. In The 400 Blows by François Truffaut, the young protagonist walks through Paris, stops in front of a poster and tears the face of an actress from it to carry with him. It is the gesture of someone who recognises in a poster not a mere advertisement but a fragment of a dream worth keeping. It is also the same gesture, a little childish, a little furtive, but full of passion, from which many great collections were born. That gesture encapsulates the meaning of this story: in Italian movie posters, what survives is not only the memory of the films, but also the memory of those who loved them.
The 400 Blows · 1959
The poster of The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). Antoine Doinel, the boy played by Jean-Pierre Léaud through whom Truffaut channelled his own childhood, in the debut that launched the Nouvelle Vague. It is the film mentioned a few lines above, the one with the poster torn out of love: to close these pages with its Italian poster is to give that gesture back, keeping the image instead of tearing it away.
The works reproduced on this page come from the original prints of the period, recovered, photographed and digitally restored by Movie.it.
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Registi: Michelangelo Antonioni · Dario Argento · Mario Bava · Ingmar Bergman · Charlie Chaplin · Luigi Comencini · George Cukor · Vittorio De Sica · Stanley Donen · Federico Fellini · John Ford · Pietro Germi · Enrico Guazzoni · James W. Horne · Phil Karlson · John Lemont · Sergio Leone · Robert Z. Leonard · Carlo Lizzani · Joshua Logan · Raffaello Matarazzo · Lewis Milestone · Mario Monicelli · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Giovanni Pastrone · Arthur Penn · Gennaro Righelli · Dino Risi · Mario Roncoroni · Roberto Rossellini · Vincent Sherman · Don Siegel · George Stevens · Robert Stevenson · François Truffaut · Roger Vadim · Luchino Visconti.
Actors: Bibi Andersson · Fred Astaire · Barbara Bach · Brigitte Bardot · Ingrid Bergman · Francesca Bertini · Charles Boyer · Marlon Brando · Charles Bronson · Claudia Cardinale · Sean Connery · Joan Crawford · James Dean · Henry Fonda · Ava Gardner · Emilio Ghione · Elliott Gould · Carla Gravina · Audrey Hepburn · Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy · Jean-Pierre Léaud · Gina Lollobrigida · Herbert Lom · Dean Martin · Pina Menichelli · Robert Mitchum · Marilyn Monroe · Roger Moore · Amedeo Nazzari · Paul Newman · Assia Noris · Steve Reeves · Jason Robards · Rosalind Russell · Yvonne Sanson · Norma Shearer · Frank Sinatra · Alberto Sordi · Catherine Spaak · Totò · Rodolfo Valentino · Alida Valli.
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