The history of the Czech film poster is a curious example of creativity under constraint. According to czechfilmposters.com due to the high cost film posters were rarely imported with the film, so Czech typographers were given the chance to unleash their dark and quirky style on posters for movies like Hitchcock’s the Birds and Psycho, Fellini’s 81/2 and La Dolce Vita, as well as hip Hollywood hits such as Hopper’s Easy Rider and Badham’s Saturday Night Fever.

Czechfilmposters.com offers a comprehensive history of poster art that I am more or less going to summarize.

The Czech film poster of the 1920s and 1930s almost exclusively used realistically painted characters and scenes from the film and screamed the names of its stars often in letters larger than those of the film’s title.  Towards the end of the 1930s, photos of the main character started appearing in the film poster design – usually on a painted background, complemented by lettering created by the poster’s designer. The film poster art lost most of its bite and glamour during the Nazi occupation. The Czech film industry was nationalized as early as August 1945 – two and half years before the Communist takeover in February 1948, and was promoted by mostly fully painted and heavily censored posters. The second wave of nationalisation brought an end to the independent graphic design studios and artists worked full time for a promotional department.

The decade between 1948 and 1958 was dominated by communist propaganda in all aspects of life and film was one of its main tools. The two main cracks in the uniform surface of socialist realism in both film and the accompanying film poster were the exhibition in 1954 of Polish film posters (way more creative than the Czech) and Khrushchev’s criticism in 1956 of Stalin’s cult and methods of governance. The “thaw” after 1956 enabled artists to organise themselves into groups and be independent rather than film distribution yuppies. A new modern style sneaked into Czech film posters in 1958. Black and white photographs of main characters appear on strikingly modern painted backgrounds or the whole artwork is painted in a style that would now generally be called Mid-Century Modern. The commissioning editors at the state film distribution company UPF (Ustredni pujcovna filmu – Central film distribution agency) even started shifting the majority of poster commissions to freelancers. Modern Czech film poster art was born.

The 1960s became the golden age of the Czech film poster. While the American and Western European film poster primarily served the film, in Czech and Polish film poster art the film served the poster. The art of the poster went far beyond the mere capture of the public’s attention. The fact that the text on the poster was usually limited to the film title, name of director and the leading actors, without logos of film distributors and sponsors, quotes lifted from reviews, studio information etc., also helped.

While the Polish film poster was predominantly painted, the palette of techniques utilised by the Czechs included artistic typography and print, photo-montage, image manipulation and collage – often combined with or superimposed on painted backround. The art work not only presented the film but also interpreted its meaning.The artists were usually shown the film in an advance screening but sometimes all they had to work from was a couple of photos and sometimes only a synopsis. Among the leading poster artists of the 1960s were Jiri Balcar (La Strada), Bedrich Dlouhy (8 ½), Milan Grygar (Blow-Up), Karel Vaca (La Dolce Vita), Zdenek Ziegler (Psycho), Karel Teissig (Les Grandes Familles), Josef Vyletal (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo), Olga Vyletalova-Polackova (Une Femme Douce) and Karel Machalek (Oidipo Re).

The decade of hope ended with the Russian invasion in August 1968. Paranoid aparatchiks searched for anti-communist propaganda where there was none – film poster designs submitted by artists were often rejected or had to be reworked for bizarre reasons. In her article “Czech Film Poster from 1945 until today” published in the book Czech Film Poster of the 20th century, Marta Sylvestrova writes about a commissioning editor getting fired because of a claim by a communist official that the space between the legs of elephants pictured on a poster for the film “Surrounded by Elephants” looked like a swastika. According to Sylvestrova Zdenek Ziegler was interviewed by the secret police about where he got the 100 USD banknote he used in his design for the 100 Rifles poster and Josef Vyletal had to obscure the US flag on the back of Henry Fonda’s jacket with smoke from one of the passing motorbikes on his poster for Easy Rider(above).

100 rifles, Ziegler

This was the so called “normalization” atmosphere, writes Marta Silvestrova, characterized by the return of censorship and self-censorship. Many poster artists emigrated, and two very talented personalities, Richard Fremund and Jiri Balcar, died in tragical car accidents. Posters became more metaphorical in their spirit as shown in surrealist posters by Josef Vyletal (Hitchcock’s “the Birds”) and Zdenek Vlach, while many other artists used grotesque drawing (Jiri Salamoun, Petr Pos, Vratislav Hlavaty).

In the early 1990s, the decline of film poster creation started with the demise of the Central Film Distribution Center, when free market opened again and American film distributors established their branches in the Czech Republic. Together with their films, they also brought original American poster designs. There was only limited space left for Czech designers. Now they can only promote Czech films, and even there the Hollywood style of manipulated photographs has affected Czech designs. In terms of creative personalities, the present-day Czech film poster is predominantly associated with the names of Ales Najbrt and his graphic design studio (Cosy Dens); Eva Svankmajerova´s surrealist style in the posters for Jan Svankmajer’s animated movies; and Slovak film director Juraj Jakubisko, who continues designing posters for his own movies as well as for Kytice (Wild Flowers).

Eva Svankmajerova for the film Alice

For a more comprehensive gallery I strongly recommend this website.