Film in Print

From July 9th, 2013 to January 26th, 2014 – Museu del Cinema. Sala d'exposicions temporals

Art and Publicity on Paper (1895-1980)

Ever since the very first screenings, the film industry has always had an undeniable need to advertise its films. In its 117-year history, it has exhausted all known forms of publicity to reach cinema audiences. For most of those years, this publicity was mainly undertaken using paper media. Posters, hand programmes, billboards, pressbooks, picture cards, postcards, photographs, and so on, were some of the main elements of publicity in print used en masse from the days of early cinema to the 1980s, when other forms gradually began to replace them.
Nowadays, film studio advertising campaigns hardly use paper to convey their messages. Perhaps the indestructible film poster would be the exception. However, new information technologies and new media have taken over to an overwhelming extent.

Through this exhibition we would like to recover the memory of a style and a way of film advertising that has almost completely disappeared today. We want to show some printed publicity materials that are already part of our film heritage and should be preserved and esteemed. The exhibition is organized into several sections that deal with the main publicity formats on paper from early cinema to the 1970s.