50th KFF Jubilee – The Posters Exhibition

During the KFF Jubilee you are invited for the exhibition “50 Years of the Krakow Film Festival in Posters”. Visit Szczepański Square from 2nd to 6th of June!

From 2nd to 6th of June (opening postponed due delay in renovation of Szczepanski Sq), on the newly renovated Szczepański Square the exhibition titled “50 Years of the Krakow Film Festival in Posters” is located. Our audience has an opportunity to make acquaintance with a fragment of Polish film poster history. The exhibition shows skills and finesse of Polish designers who enjoy the artistic liberty even in the times of communism. Among creators, there are the artists with international repute, such as Franciszek Starowieyski, Zbigniew Lutomski, Kuba Sowiński, Edward Lutczyn or Małgorzata Gurowska. The posters are available thanks to Cracow Poster Gallery.

The commissioner of the exhibition, Krzysztof Dydo, encourage to visit Szczepański Square:

"The jubilee of Krakow Film Festival is a superb opportunity for reminding the history of the showpiece which the annual festival poster definitely is.

With true pleasure over 50 posters, a tiny part of Polish artistic film poster of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, are presented.

Polish poster played an important role in the modern history of the poster after the WWII. Just after WWII, especially from 1956-1963, the time known in Poland as the period of the Polish School of Posters, we made a great breakthrough in the approach to the cinema advertisement, which was noticed by all art critics on the world.

In contrast to the pre-war commercial set patterns, the prevailing poster styles, the “sentimental” one and “revolver” one, the artists created a new Polish style, new poetics of poster, capturing the content and atmosphere through lapidary synthesis. The following several years witnessed a wonderful development of this art genre, possible only thanks to the patron – monopolist, a company promoting films, which accepted the artists’ ideas without reservations, allowing them at the same time to experiment. It can be said that it was a period of incredibly fast changes of a very high artistic standard which was never and nowhere achieved on such a scale.

In this vein, the posters for the film festivals and other events were made.

From 1961 until today, the best Polish designers have been taking part in it. The first poster, prepared for the all-Poland event, was designed by Witold Skulicz – a graphic artist, the professor of the Krakow Jan Matejko Academy Of Fine Art, the creator of the Biennale and subsequently the Triennial of Art in Krakow. The following projects, until 1984 were selected in competitions. The organizers frequently decided – due to the high quality of the competition – to print two different awarded projects for one festival. During the first years, Waldemar Świerzy, Rosław Szaybo and Zbigniew Lutomski were in the lead. The poster for the first international festival was made by Bronisław Zelek in 1964. An unforgettable motif was presented in 1966 by Jan Lenica. The poster was printed in as much as three formats.

From this moment until 1990 there were two parallel posters for the all-Poland and the international festival. From 1977 to 1990 there was a rule that one author designed two posters separately for each festival. Mieczysław Górowski is undoubtedly the record-holder of Krakow Film Festival, since he designed 8 posters for 5 festival editions. Until 1984, the posters of the following artists were selected for print in the course of competitions:  Janusz Bruchnalski, Zofia and Andrzej Darowscy, Andrzej Pawłowski and Maria Osterwa-Czekaj, Włodzimierz Kamiński, Jerzy Skarżyński, Jerzy Napieracz, Henryk Arendarski, Janusz Wysocki, Bronisław Kurdziel, Ewa Chodkiewicz- Świdrowa, Stanisław Kluczykowski, Jacek Stokłosa, Lech Przybylski

From 1984, no competitions were held. From this time on, as the manager of the Poster Gallery Krakow I had the opportunity to cooperate with Jan Rypalski (until 1990) and then with Janusz Nowak (until 2000) from Krakow OPFR and propose the authors of the projects coming from outside of Krakow to the festivals. Andrzej Pągowski, Franciszek Starowieyski, Wiktor Sadowski, Roman Kalarus, Andrzej Klimowski, Jerzy Kostka, Leszek Wiśniewski are undoubtedly the lead of the Polish designers of this period. 1991 brought organizational changes, which were mirrored on the posters – designed only for the international competition. The festival was joined by the following authors: Andrzej Mleczko, Piotr Kunce, Edward Lutczyn i Wiesław Grzegorczyk – artists from Krakow as well as Leszek Żebrowski, Stasys Eidrigevicius, Wiesław Wałkuski, Franciszek Starowieyski and Jan Lenica – artists of international renown.

2001 completely changed the formula, name and the festival poster. A generational change occurred. The best from the youngest – Ryszard Czernow, Lex Drewinski, Kuba Sowiński, Jakub de Barbaro, Jerzy Skakun – Joanna Górska, Małgorzata Gurowska, Tomasz Walenta – have well-grounded standing in the environment of designers. Thanks to them, we can look at the future of Polish poster, also the film one, with optimism.

Writing about posters, it is worth adding that the editions of Krakow Film Festival were often accompanied by the exhibitions of film posters, international ones, like for instance the ones in 1984 and 1986 on the Krakow Market Place, showing posters to the same films from Czechoslovakia,  the German Democratic Republic , Hungary and Poland, as well as Polish film posters on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Polish cinema in the Palace of Art and the Bunker of Art in Krakow in 1996 from the collection of the undersigned."