Italian Film Posters - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

With a pride in fine printing and an innate predisposition toward the grand and passionate, Italy has produced some of the finest film posters in the world. These colorful images, startling in their freshness and boldness, arouse expectations of romance, mystery, action, or escape. Italian Film Posters is the first collection of these highly evocative images to be published in English.
While Italian film posters are well known to European collectors and cinema lovers - and the work of artists such as Anselmo Ballester, Alfredo Capitani, and Luigi Martinati is displayed in museums and commands high prices at auction - they remain largely unknown to the American public. This overview of the Italian tradition begins with the Art Nouveau-influenced designs of the silent-film era, moves into the stunning stone lithographs of the 1930s and 1940s and concludes with the idiosyncratic creations made possible by offset printing in the 1950s and 1960s.
The volume opens with a lively and highly informative introduction by Dave Kehr, a New York-based film journalist who has written for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News and currently writes for the The New York Times. The 128 color illustrations, including details of several of the posters, are organized thematically into six sections: "Fantasy & Adventure," "The Musical," "The Western," "Melodrama," "Film Noir,"and "The New Wave." This organization invites many dramatic and unusual comparisons and contrasts. Included are examples of such film classics as L'Avventura, 8 1/2, French Cancun, Spellbound, Casablanca, The Lady from Shanghai, La Notte, Bicycle Thieves, and many others. Besides the films themselves, no other artifact of the film industry is more provocative than the poster. Film historians and archivists, moviegoers, poster collectors, and the general reader will find the images in this book captivating, amusing, sensual, and, often, astonishing.

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