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A print of Alphaville/The Pier, 1966, by Peter Strausfeld.
In operation from 1931 to 1986, the Academy Cinema was London’s premiere art house movie theater. In 1945, the Academy hired German refugee and artist Peter Strausfeld to create unique advertising posters for its roster of international film screenings. Over three decades, Strausfeld designed hundreds of bold, predominantly single-color linocut compositions with a deceptively simple hand-printed feel. Where mainstream movie posters typically relied on colorful, montage-style interpretations of scenes from a film combined with striking typography, Strausfeld’s posters remain some of the most unique examples of localized cinema advertising in history.
Strausfeld’s poster for Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville is one of his most well-known. This film is a dystopian work of science fiction in which hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution attempts to find a missing agent on a distant planet where humans are unable to experience emotion or to act illogically. The poster also promotes a screening of Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, La Jetée (The Pier), a postapocalyptic story composed out of still photographs in which a time traveler attempts to visit the past and the future in order to save the present.
Measures 11 x 15.25 inches. Ships rolled.
