Andrzej Wajda’s Films in World Film Posters
15th October 2014 - 18th January 2015
The exhibition Andrzej Wajda’s Films in World Film Posters is in itself an attempt to present the achievements of one of the most eminent Polish film, theatre and television directors. The presentation is yet another cultural undertaking organized by the Film Museum in Łódź in an effort to exhibit the most outstanding filmmakers of Polish cinema and their life achievements.
The life achievement of Andrzej Wajda shown through posters which have been published over the years in other parts of the world is in some ways a pioneer undertaking, mostly due to its sheer scale. No other Polish artist of the cinema has in his list of accomplishments so many titles presented so frequently in so many places in the world.
The Film Museum in Łódź has been collecting archival materials connected with the life and works of the film director for years. The Film Museum possesses the largest collection of film posters for his films in the world – a collection which, of course, has been growing every year and will always continue to grow! So far the Film Museum has managed to gather over 400 film posters.
The extraordinary quality of the collection, apart from the unquestionable artistic value of the Polish works, is proven by the presence of posters from almost thirty countries, of which many are unique copies having been published in low numbers, and some derive from long ago and sometimes from far away areas quite exotic to Polish viewers. The presentation of posters is the simplest and the most visible proof of the Polish director’s and his films’ enormous international popularity
The exhibition presents the works of: Roman Cieślewicz, Wojciech Zamecznik, Wojciech Fangor, Franciszek Starowieyski, Wiktor Górka, Waldemar Świerzy, Jan Lenica , Józef Mroszczak – the creators of the Polish school of posters who also designed foreign language versions of posters to Andrzej Wajda’s films. Among the presented works viewers can find the posters of Wiesław Wałkuski, Jakub Erol, Cyprian Kościelniak, Andrzej Pągowski, Marek Freundenreich, Marcin Mroszczak, Rafał Olbiński, Rosław Szaybo. The exhibition will also include the work of such foreign artists as Peter Straysfeld, Alain Lynch, Dominique Guillotin, Otto Kummert, Milan Grygar , Pierre Collier and Erhard Grutter. The poster collection is constantly supplemented with new works which appeared in the past or have been appearing lately in connection with the screenings of Andrzej Wajda’s films. The complete museum collection will be displayed to the public in this form for the first time.
The exhibition has been prepared in co-ooperation with numerous partners from Poland and abroad. The partners of the project are: the National Film Archive, Poster Museum in Wilanów, the KinoArt Film Association, Kino RP, Kino Polska Television, Film Studio Kalejdoskop, Hungarian National Digital Film Archive in Budapest, National Film Archive in Prague, British Film Institute in London, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science Margaret Herrick Library w Los Angeles, Filmová galanterie Terryho Ponožky in Prague, Cinémathèque Français in Paris, National Film Archive in Tel Aviv, as well as numerous other private galleries engaged in collecting film posters. The exhibition will also display posters from the private collections of Andrzej Cebula and Pavel Rajcan.
Krystyna Zamysłowska, Piotr Kulesza
Exhibition Curators