![\"Collage](\"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/the-cut-1024x576.webp\")
In the second half of the 1950s, the streets of Warsaw were covered with some of the most inventive graphic design of the century. Posters announced new films, Polish and foreign, without a single publicity still. A Western might be sold with a painted pistol and a blot of red, a comedy with a face made of a few hand-drawn lines. Many of the best were made by artists who had trained as painters and treated each commission as a picture in its own right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The posters were commissioned by the state film distributor, which handed the work to individual artists rather than to advertising studios. Henryk Tomaszewski, who taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, set the tone: a poster, he argued, should give the passer-by an idea of the film, not a summary of it. His students and colleagues, among them Jan Lenica, Roman Cie\u015blewicz, Wojciech Fangor and Waldemar \u015awierzy, took him at his word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result was a body of work that is unusually personal for commercial art. The same film could look completely different in Warsaw, Paris and Los Angeles, and the Polish version was often the strangest and the most memorable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The posters return again and again to the human face, often cut into strips, split by bands of colour or built out of other images. Cie\u015blewicz in particular worked with collage and photographic fragments, enlarging the dots of a printed halftone until a face dissolved into pattern. Others painted heads that open like boxes, or let a profile emerge from a field of red.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our featured image borrows this language: a woman in profile, eyes hidden by a black bar, crossed by strips of film and a cone of blue projector light, with a red band and a red circle behind. It is a collage of the cinema as an apparatus that cuts the world into pieces and puts it back together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n