Play Poland 2013: Poster Boys

Play Poland returns this year with a focus on the great Polish tradition of movie poster design and welcomes legendary graphic designer Andrzej Pągowski to the festival

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 01 Oct 2013

A trip to your local world of cine would be a much more pleasant (and freaky) experience if the movie posters that festoon the cinema’s façade and stare at you as you wait in line for tickets took their lead from Poland. Don’t believe me? Go now and search Google images for ‘Polish film posters’, but make sure you’ve the afternoon free first as you’ll whittle away hours wading through decades of the country’s graphic designers’ askance takes on Hollywood movies, as well as those from their own great filmmakers.

In communist Poland in the 60s and 70s (the golden age of the Polish movie poster, which coincided with the golden age of Polish cinema) the movie poster wasn’t an advertising tool designed to maximise commercial potential, it was an art form. Instead of the airbrushed faces of the movie’s stars with hyperbolic review quotes scattered around their floating heads, a Polish movie poster goes straight to the essence of the film in question, becoming an expressionistic, nightmarish interpretation.

One of the masters of this art form is Andrzej Pągowski. This is the man who imagined Rosemary’s Baby as a close-up of the title character’s hand, with the hairy, clawed mitt of her spawn of the devil lovingly clutching her index finger. It may be a massive spoiler, but it’s also a beautiful shorthand to the complex emotions at work in Roman Polanski’s pregnancy-horror masterpiece.


Andrzej Pągowski’s Empire of the Sun poster

This is typical of Pągowski’s designs, and Polish movie posters in general: it brings to the surface the ennui lurking underneath the bombast of these works of mass entertainment. Take, for example, Pągowski’s poster for 1987’s Empire of the Sun. The original one sheet shows a wide shot of main character, Jamie, in silhouette as he celebrates a Japanese fighter plane being shot out of the air and tumbling to the ground. Pągowski’s take isn’t a moment from the film, but a pair of eyes on the Japanese flag with a tear rolling down the red cheek of the sun: a far more accurate representation of the melancholy at the core of Steven Spielberg’s underrated film.

Play Poland, that annual celebration of Polish cinema, welcomes Pągowski as this year’s festival's guest of honour. On 4 Oct, Pągowski will meet with fans at Edinburgh Meow Studio and lead a two day graphics workshop Let's Create a Film Poster. Moreover, several hundred works of Polish School of Poster Art, divided in to smaller exhibitions, will fill the screening venues in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Play Poland Film Festival’s bread and butter is, however, movies themselves, and there are some great ones in this year's programme. The feature-length debut of 32-year-old writer-director Tomasz Wasilewski, In a Bedroom, is certainly one of the highlights. It’s a fascinating character study of a call girl in contemporary Poland, but what really piqued our interest in the film is Wasilewski's striking geometric compositions and tightly controlled emotional tone.

Also making a fine debut is Filip Marczewski with Shameless, a sexually-charged drama centreing on the taboo desires of a handsome 18-year-old boy towards his sexy older half-sister. It’s far less sensational than this synopsis suggests, though: incest hasn’t been portrayed in such a non-judgmental fashion on screen since Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart.

One of the films showing in Play Poland to have made a big impression on the festival circuit is In the Name Of..., Malgoska Szumowska’s sensitive portrayal of a priest in rural Poland who’s struggling not just with his chastity, but his sexuality. Andrzej Chyra, who plays the man of faith filled with unwanted desire, has been coming in for a lot of praise for his full-bodied performance.

Other movies to look out for are second world war-set drama Manhunt; Three Sisters T, a darkly comic psychological thriller based on the true story of a middle-age man being tormented by three sadistic matriarchs; and, taking us back to movie posters, Behind the Poster, a documentary celebrating the Polish poster heyday of the 60s-70s, which also looks to the country’s future crop of young graphic designers studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.


In the Name Of... (Malgoska Szumowska)

Play Poland takes play in Edinburgh (3 Oct-12 Dec) and Glasgow (9 Oct-11 Dec). See the festival's website for full details: playpoland.org.uk/

Play Poland is funded by Creative Scotland, the Polish Film Institute and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Edinburgh