Painting in the Cinema: Painted Giant Cinema Posters, Lithographs and Models Made by Greek Artists in the Years 1950- 1975 / Polish Film Poster. 100th Anniversary of the Cinema...

Painting in the Cinema: Painted Giant Cinema Posters, Lithographs and Models Made by Greek Artists in the Years 1950-1975 (Athens: National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1996) Introduction by Marina Lambraki-Plaka. 111, ISBN 960-85692-3-0. Available from The Hellaffi Collection, 2 Omirou St., 166 75 Glyfada, Greece.

Polish Film Poster. 100th Anniversary of The Cinema in Poland 1896-1996 (Krakow: Galeria Plakatu, 1996), ed. Krzystof Dydo, 295, ISBN 83-905899-0-7. Available from Galeria Plakatu, ul. Stolarska 8-10, Krakow, Poland.

Poster Art from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema (Harlingen, Texas: Archivo Filmico Agrasanchez, 1997) Curated by Rogelio Agrasanchez, Jr., introduction by Charles Ramirez Berg. 200, ISBN 0-29270485-2. Available from University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 787137819.

For many years, movie posters were dismissed by film scholars as the most commercialised corner of the motion picture industry, of little interest to anyone studying the art of film. With the exception of a handful of images clearly related to some contemporary art movement (like Stahl-Arpke's designs for Caligaril, graphic arts historians found reasons of their own to ignore the movie poster, and were especially dismissive of the anonymous designs used to advertise films in America.

These attitudes only began to change in the 1 960s, and as with much of the art scene in that decade, evidence of the change was first apparent in the marketplace. The most expensive film poster listed in the 1 964 Larry Edmunds Bookshop Cinema List was Rudolph Valentino in The Conquering Power (1921), quoted at $100. An original All Quiet on the Western Front(1930) was $35, while the first $15 could take home a one-sheet for It Happened One Night ( 1934). Today, It Happened One Night changes hands for $7500, while All Quiet is all but unavailable and Valentino, merely a silent movie actor, sells in the low thousands. Sotheby's and Christie's report poster sales in the six-figure range for collectible Universal horror classics like Frankenstein and Dracula, with close to a half-million dollars being paid for the current record holder, The Mummy.

All this happened at the same time that film scholars began to expand their field of inquiry beyond the films alone, and started talking about the cinema, a system in which the exhibition component was as worthy...