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Kino: Vintage Russian movie posters
04.27.2018
09:06 am
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‘The Three Million Case’ (1926).
 
The brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg were two engineers who became famous as the artists and designers of some of Soviet Russia’s greatest movie posters during the 1920s. Together, the brothers produced hundreds of posters many of which have been sadly lost as they were intended to be used only once. Cinema was considered a key propaganda tool—a bit like the Internet is today—for keeping the largely illiterate union of socialist Soviet peoples on target for building the dream of a “New Worker’s Paradise.”

The brothers were the children of a Russian mother and a Swedish father. They kept their Swedish nationality until 1933 when they were forced to sign-up as Russian citizens. This was the same year Vladimir died in an automobile accident. Georgii continued to work as a designer and was responsible for organizing the displays on Red Square for the May Day celebrations of 1947. Their once ground-breaking and avant-garde style had become part of the established order.

Their background in engineering gave the pair an edge over other their designer rivals/comrades who still favored painting for their poster work. The brothers were greatly influenced by Constructivism and Dada, which inspired their use of montage, typography, and visual distortion in their work. They were involved in setting up a society for young artists, produced some of the posters issued for the May Day celebrations in 1918, and even exhibited artwork in Berlin. Yet, it was their movie posters which have had the longest and most far-reaching influence and subsequent generations and designers across the world.

Most of the following is the work of the brothers Stenberg—the exceptions being their collaboration with Yakov Ruklevsy (The Decembrists and October), Viktor Klimashin (The Death of Sensation) and Oil which is solely by Aleksandr Naumov. As a sidebar, these posters might all look dynamic and utterly thrilling but sometimes they are selling documentaries and training films—take for example the beautifully film noirsh treatment for a documentary on Cement.
 
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‘Countess Shirvanskaya’ (1926).
 
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‘The Screw from Another Machine’ (1926).
 
More revolutionary posters, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.27.2018
09:06 am
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The revolutionary Soviet silent-era film posters of the Sternberg Brothers
01.23.2014
12:29 pm
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“Of all arts, for us cinema is the most important.”—Lenin, 1919

An exhibition of Soviet silent-era film posters now underway at London’s Gallery for Russian Arts and Design features, among many treasures, a fair few of the important works of the design team of brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg. Far from household names, it’s true, but their place in art history is difficult to deny. Their success was somewhat serendipitous—it happened that their Dada-inspired method of found image manipulation dovetailed perfectly with the conceits and priorities of the Constructivist movement that was dominating Soviet graphics of their time. They enjoyed a nearly decade-long run of superb work that ended only with Georgii’s untimely death in a 1933 traffic accident. I quote at length here from curator Christopher Mount’s essay in the exhibition catalog of their 1997 MoMA retrospective:

The 1920s and early 1930s were a revolutionary period for the graphic arts throughout Europe. A drastic change took place in the way graphic designers worked that was a direct consequence of experimentation in both the fine and the applied arts. Not only did the formal vocabulary of graphic design change, but also the designer’s perception of self. The concept of the designer as “constructor”—or, as the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann preferred, “monteur” (mechanic or engineer)—marked a paradigmatic shift within the field, from an essentially illustrative approach to one of assemblage and nonlinear narrativity. This new idea of assembling preexisting images, primarily photographs, into something new freed design from its previous dependence on realism. The subsequent use of collage—a defining element of modern graphic design—enabled the graphic arts to become increasingly nonobjective in character.

In Russia, these new artist-engineers were attracted to the functional arts by political ideology. The avant-gardists’ rejection of the fine arts, deemed useless in a new Communist society, in favor of “art for use” in the service of the state, was key in the evolution of the poster. Advertising was now a morally superior occupation with ramifications for the new society; as such, it began to attract those outside the usual illustrative or painterly backgrounds—sculptors, architects, photographers—who brought new ideas and techniques to the field.

Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg were prominent members of this group, which was centered in Moscow and active throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The Stenberg brothers produced a large body of work in a multiplicity of mediums, initially achieving renown as Constructivist sculptors and later working as successful theatrical designers, architects, and draftsmen; in addition, they completed design commissions that ranged from railway cars to women’s shoes. Their most significant accomplishment, however, was in the field of graphic design, specifically, the advertising posters they created for the newly burgeoning cinema in Soviet Russia.

These works merged two of the most important agitational tools available to the new Communist regime: cinema and the graphic arts. Both were endorsed by the state, and flourished in the first fifteen years of Bolshevik rule. In a country where illiteracy was endemic, film played a critical role in the conversion of the masses to the new social order. Graphic design, particularly as applied in the political placard, was a highly useful instrument for agitation, as it was both direct and economical. The symbiotic relationship of the cinema and the graphic arts would result in a revolutionary new art form: the film poster.

 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.23.2014
12:29 pm
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