Posters have been used to advertise films and movies for as long as they have been around, appearing around the same time as film emerged as a form of entertainment in the late 19th century. Since then, countless film and movie posters have been produced in countless varieties the world over, and as such are a reflection of the social, philosophical, and popular trends of each era. How has graphic design captured, expressed, and conveyed these trends?
In contrast to spatial arts such as painting and sculpture, film, theater, and music are temporal in that they involve the passage of a certain amount of time; there is movement, physical expression, performance, and action. Italian film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo called cinema the Seventh Art , which belonged in the canon of arts alongside other existing forms. Film is still barely more than a century old; in its early days, it was pigeon-holed as entertainment for the masses and struggled to shake off that label, but in dubbing film the Seventh Art, Canudo must have recognized the possibility of the new art form involving rhythm and movement.
Subsequently, increasingly advanced and widespread technology led to the production of films that were not only entertaining, but also highly artistic. Described more and more as comprehensive art encompassing elements such as visual images, music, and acting, film is now firmly established as art in the modern age.
The Graphic Cube series of exhibitions provides a fascinating look into the posters in the DNP Graphic Design Archive collection. By comparing the multifaceted nature of graphic design to a cube, the exhibition attempts to capture the relationship between graphic design and the objects it represents, as well as the relationship between the objects and the viewer, from multiple angles and in three dimensions.The inaugural Graphic Cube exhibition focuses on selected pieces from the archive that provide a glimpse into how the temporal, comprehensive art of film is represented on paper, and how graphic designers can distill the essence of each film or movie into poster form.In future installation of Graphic Cube, viewers can look forward to a broad variety of subjects.