The Greatest Stories Ever Sold ; A Poster Is Often the Cinemagoer's First Sighting of a Movie - and Can Be as Memorable as (If Not More So Than) the Film It's Promoting. Kaleem Aftab Explains How Graphic Artists Have Promoted the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Aftab, Kaleem, The Independent (London, England)

One of the most depressing sights on any trip to a cinema nowadays is the posters on display promoting the movies being shown or coming soon. They're awful.

Well, that's my view - but it seems to be confirmed by Sim Branaghan's collection of the best designs from this country's poster artists in the period 1896-1986, collected in his book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History, co-written by Stephen Chibnall.

That he's chosen not one poster from the past 21 years makes it seem as though the British film industry just stopped doing them in the mid-Eighties. But Branaghan's rationale is that movie posters went into a rapid decline with the arrival of …

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Publication information: Article title: The Greatest Stories Ever Sold ; A Poster Is Often the Cinemagoer's First Sighting of a Movie - and Can Be as Memorable as (If Not More So Than) the Film It's Promoting. Kaleem Aftab Explains How Graphic Artists Have Promoted the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Contributors: Aftab, Kaleem - Author. Newspaper title: The Independent (London, England). Publication date: March 21, 2007. Page number: 12. © 2009 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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