"More abstract and pop": artist paints movie posters

Berlin - "More abstract and pop": artist paints movie posters

Bradley Cooper is already quite recognizable. A brown strand of hair falls slightly over the American actor's forehead. Now Götz Valien takes care of the eyelashes. He pulls out a narrow brush and black paint. Because the huge film poster for the drama "Maestro" will one day hang in a Berlin cinema. Later, it will hardly look any different from the original poster. But there is one big difference: Valien's posters are hand-painted - and significantly larger than the originals.

The 63-year-old is a freelance artist and creates banners for new film productions for four cinemas in Berlin on the side. These include the Delphi-Filmpalast am Zoo in Charlottenburg and the Kino International, once the most important premiere cinema in the GDR. The format differs depending on the cinema - at the Delphi it is around 6 meters by 9 meters. Valien says he is one of the last cinema poster painters in Germany. An artist for movie theaters is also still active in the Munich area.

In the business for more than 30 years

The Berlin-based artist's studio in a backyard smells of fresh paint. Colorful pots of light blue, bright yellow or red paint stand on a shelf, next to brushes of all different sizes. Together with a colleague, the Austrian-born artist has been working on film posters for more than 30 years. The artist estimates that he has painted more than 3,000 posters to date and probably twice as many faces, including stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Penélope Cruz.

According to the German Film Institute and Film Museum, this is a slowly disappearing guild. Communication scientist Patrick Rössler from the University of Erfurt, who studies historical media such as film posters, takes a similar view: "Nowadays it really is an exotic scurrility, there's no other way to describe it."

The main reasons for this are financial. For many cinemas, it is not feasible to commission additional painted movie posters. In addition, films are being released in cinemas at a faster pace. "The films are no longer shown in cinemas for so long. So you have to keep repainting them," says Rössler. And often there simply aren't as many advertising spaces available.

"Titanic" as a turning point

Valien also says that until 2000, he painted around 20 surfaces per month - significantly more than today. A major impact was experienced in 1997, when the classic "Titanic" was shown on the big screen. At that time, there were still numerous cinemas on Kurfürstendamm. Because the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio was so well received, the poster hung on their façades for around three months before it was changed. The longer a banner hangs, the less economical it is.

It takes him about two days to put up a poster and, according to him, he receives several hundred euros for it. The difficulty: transferring the actors with the right proportions. "The only important thing is that the figures are really right. We humans have two eyes, a nose and a mouth. It's phenomenal that you can distinguish people at all with these few coordinates," says Valien.

The movie poster consists of several screens that are then put together. This also means that the 63-year-old never sees the entire poster when painting, but only a section of it. A projector helps him to enlarge important outlines of the template. Of course, a painted copy does not look exactly like the original, he says. But that's what makes it special. "It becomes more abstract and pop overall. I'm like the stitch in the stocking, so to speak. The fact that the painting is a tad off is what gives it its advertising impact."

Film poster exhibition in Berlin

For the Yorck cinemas, which include the Delphi and Kino International, the handmade banners have a special charm, according to a spokeswoman. "Just as we preserve old cinemas, we also want to preserve the special features associated with them." Film distributors often wanted the spaces for office space after the film releases, for example.

The Kulturforum Berlin is also exhibiting hundreds of original film posters from the 1900s to 2020s until March - including copies by Valien. Otherwise, the canvases are taken away by him after they have been brushed over with white paint and reused several times. The paint then makes them so heavy that they can no longer be used, as Valien says. With "Maestro", however, it's not that far yet. Here he now applies black background paint. This makes Cooper stand out even more.

Information on the exhibition "Great Cinema. Film posters of all times"