Latest news with #DownByLaw
New European
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
The iron curtain and the silver screen
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. The Polish poster for the 1979 sci-fi horror Alien , designed by Jakub Erol Andrzej Klimowskiʼs poster for Down By Law (1986) Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror The Shining as designed by Leszek Żebrowski Images: Kinoteka/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025 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.' The poster for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), designed by Waldemar Swierzy Witold Dybowski's poster for Return of the Jedi (1983), the third instalment in the original Star Wars trilogy The Polish poster for John Schlesinger's drama Midnight Cowboy (1969), by designer Waldemar Swierzy, featured in the Familiar Strangers Outdoor Polish Film Poster Exhibition at Coal Drops Yard, King's Cross, London Images: Kinoteka 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 Edifice , a new graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski, is published by Self-Made Hero
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Light fantastic: the road trip that inspired Paris, Texas
In preparation for his 1984 film Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders set out on a road trip through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The trip resulted in the photo series Written in the West, which was first exhibited in 1986 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 'It was another way of preparing for the film, a different kind of research that had less to do with locations than with the light in the west,' says Wenders. Written Once is at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, until 15 March 'Although these photos were taken in connection with the film we made in that part of the country, they are quite independent of it. They were all made in locations where we did in fact shoot the film. But these large-format photos were my own personal, private way of preparing for it' 'Once, I drove to a screening of Paris, Texas together with Harry Dean Stanton, in a limo that almost stretched over two blocks. Even in the middle of New York, Harry was still Travis sitting in the back of his brother's car and travelling through the desert in silence' 'I had never made a film in that landscape and was hoping that taking photographs would sharpen my understanding of the light and landscape, my sense of empathy with it' 'Once, I was in Montreal, when Jim Jarmusch was showing Down By Law there. In my memory, it was raining when I took this picture of Jim, and I was sure he was holding an umbrella. But there was no umbrella in the photograph and certainly not on the negative. Instead, I discovered Roberto Benigni in the background' 'Very often, the ideas you have in advance about the colours in a film quickly begin to look tired. So my only aim in taking these photos was to improve my own capacity to react to colours; to become more open to colours; simply to get to know them better. I took a whole lot of photos purely for the colours, which was quite a new departure for me' 'In 1941, the actor Elisha Cook Jr had a supporting part in the movie The Maltese Falcon by John Houston, based on Dashiell Hammett's novel by the same title. In my movie about Hammett's life, Elisha played a cab driver' 'In the middle of the godforsaken Valley of the Gods, and after not seeing any other car for hours, we came upon a car parked by the side of the road. It was jacked up and a man's legs were sticking out from under it. We stopped behind it to see if we could help. The woman standing by the troubled car turned out to be Isabella Rossellini, the man crawling out from under it was none other than Martin Scorsese' '[This is] the lounge in a little hotel, which had been closed down for a long time, where I saw all these incredible armchairs in all those colours. I tried to get in but it was all locked up. At last I found an old man who had the keys and he suspiciously let me in. The 'surface' that interested me was the colours of the armchairs, four or five different colours. They were in a semicircle, which looked slightly theatrical in itself. You didn't even feel that the characters were missing, because it was as if the armchairs were talking to each other' 'John Lurie, great actor and sax player, and obviously quite a kisser too' 'Once, together with Dennis Hopper, we drove from Los Angeles all the way up to Barstow in the middle of the Mojave Desert, to see Nick Ray. Miloš Forman was shooting the movie version of Hair, and Nick played the general in it, in spite of the cancer he had just been diagnosed with. Dennis knew Nick from a long time ago, when Nick had given him a small part in Rebel Without a Cause. Dennis had become best friends with James Dean. Later that night the conversation inevitably turned to James Dean and Nick proudly declared: 'I taught him how to walk!''
