When Tony Nourmand began collecting movie posters and other print memorabilia from the French New Wave 30 years ago, he could usually pick them up for next to nothing. “I remember going to Paris and walking into poster shops and digging for hours,” he recalls, “and then I’d suddenly find a poster for Breathless and it was 50 francs, and I’d be so excited. Nobody else seemed to care.”
Their stock has certainly risen since those days, but, curiously, this artwork from one of the most explosively creative moments in cinema history is still far less prized than classic Hollywood posters. “Movies like Casablanca, Bullitt or The Exorcist were made by major studios,” says Nourmand, “so their posters were more conservative.” The poster design for films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other boundary-pushing French directors of the late 1950s and 60s was anything but.
For evidence, take a look at Nourmand’s hefty French New Wave: A Revolution in Design. Published this week by his own Reel Art Press, the book draws almost exclusively from the collection that Nourmand – who was born in Tehran, but has lived in the UK since 1976 – started back in 1990. It is now, he claims, the largest collection of French New Wave advertising material in the world, containing more than 3,000 items including photographs, press-books and magazines. (He sold the whole lot to an English collector in 2011, but was given full access for this project.)
Much has been written over the decades about the French New Wave – about its rebellious young auteurs and the technical innovations they pioneered, about the influence they’ve exerted on successive generations of film-makers. Far less attention has been paid to the designers who created a visual identity for the films around their release. Prioritising the poster artists over the directors, listing them A to Z with a short biography for each one, Nourmand’s book seeks to redress the balance. He and his managing editor at Reel Art Press, Alison Elangasinghe, have spent years researching these often obscure designers and illustrators, many of whom, he says, have not been written about before.
With its blend of intellectualism, politics, sex, violence, sartorial elegance and ennui, the New Wave was an inimitably French movement. The artworks in the collection, though, were designed in different parts of the world, in Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Japan, the US and communist-era eastern Europe. Seen together, they provide a fascinating picture of how different countries represented and promoted these films.
“The diversity of it was something that really excited me,” says Nourmand. “When you look at horror movie posters from the 1930s, the American and French versions will obviously be different, but they both have that same painterly aesthetic. But with a film like [Godard’s] Weekend, the German poster, designed by Hans Hillman, is very typographical, whereas the Japanese poster, by Kiyoshi Awazu, could almost have been done by Warhol. They’re very different approaches.”
Movie poster design can be an extremely conservative art form, constrained as it is by the commercial pressures of the industry: studios and distributors typically want the poster to speak to the widest possible audience by showcasing the movie’s stars, their faces framed by jaunty straplines and favourable review quotes. What’s notable about the New Wave posters is the degree to which they push back against these conventions, sidelining the lead actors or doing away with them altogether in favour of experiments with typography and collage. Take Clément Hurel’s poster for À bout de souffle (1960), in which the enlarged first letters of the title’s four words compete for space with Jean Seberg and a stricken Jean-Paul Belmondo. Or the cut-up effect Hans Hillman created for Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963), in which a notebook page bearing a woman’s face is torn in half to reveal the film’s title.
Some of the posters, Hillman’s among them, are daring in their minimalism. Others, such as Jolanta Karczewska’s Polish treatment of Zazie dans le Métro (Louis Malle, 1960), favour riotous bursts of colour.
That’s not to say that all the posters were defiantly anti-commercial. Georges Allard’s 1963 one sheet for Le Mépris, Godard’s biggest box-office success, is dominated by an almost comically sensuous Brigitte Bardot, whose name on the poster dwarfs that of the auteur. Italian designers also liked to accentuate the glamour of the stars, while the US posters tended to be overrun with quotes from approving critics ( only three American designers feature in the book).
When he remarks at “how fresh and modern” the New Wave posters look today, Nourmand is not just celebrating a high point of movie poster design but also lamenting the inexorable decline that followed. The rot set in, he believes, with the rise of the blockbuster in the late 1970s. “When Jaws came out, that image of the shark rising up to the swimming woman became a key image – they used it in France, in Italy, in Japan. The tradition of having different posters in different countries started to die out.
“Before VHS, which had trailers for forthcoming movies at the start, the main way that you would know what’s showing at your local cinema was through movie posters. Today, with trailers and leaked details online, it’s probably the last thing that the distributors think about, because you know everything you need to know about a film before you even see the poster.” But why, within a field as risk-averse as poster design, was so much imagination and experimentalism allowed to flourish over the course of a decade?
“Most of the posters were done by independent distributors and producers who appreciated the poster as art form,” says Nourmand. “In the same way that they gave Godard and Truffaut freedom, distributors also gave the poster artists freedom. It must have been a conscious decision.”
It also helped, he says, that many of the designers were, like the film-makers, “young, energetic, creative. They broke the rules. A lot of them went to art school and were aware of what was going on [in art].” (See, for example, the Pop Art fist in Andrzej Krajewski’s poster for Alphaville.) “They pushed all the boundaries.”
• French New Wave: A Revolution in Design is published by Reel Art Press (£49.95). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
