British version left – Polish version, below right. Same film, different poster.An exhibition –77 Posters/77 Plakatów - of British film posters with Polish equivalents dating back to the Cold War era can be seen on display at Mała Litera (ul. Nawrot 7) in Lodz, central Poland.
The exhibition, which has already been at the BFI National Archives in London, shows how communist-era Polish poster designs advertising British movies often differed significantly from the originals.
The Polish market opened up to the British in 1947 when industrialist and film producer Arthur Rank signed an agreement to distribute his movies in communist Poland. The Brits were keen to find new markets after the US became a difficult place to release movies as codes of decency became stricter.
The problem was, the communists in Warsaw thought that many of the posters that accompanied the British releases were obscene.
“Polish film magazines back then printed numerous articles about how bad Western movie posters were, which they though assaulted the viewer with weapons and nudity . So the communist decided to bring them to create new versions of them,” says Ewa Reeves, the curator of the exhibition.
For instance, the British poster for One Million Years BC (see very kitschy Hammer Films trailer here) showed a scantily clad Rachael Welsh in amongst a barren land stalked by dinosaurs. The communists were having none of that, so they replaced skimpy Rachael with an abstract graphic of a dinosaur by artist Bohdan Butenko.
A similar fate befell Julie Christie, who disappeared from the Polish version of the poster for the adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the madding crowd.
The exhibition runs till August 27. (pg)
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