समाचार

Above: 1968 poster for Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, USA, 1966).

Last weekend I came across a bizarre poster, which you can see below, for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause: a late 60s Czech design which reimagines James Dean as a long haired, barefoot East European hippie. This got me digging into the work of its author on the estimable and essential Czech movie poster site Terry Posters (named in honor of Terry Gilliam). The artist Eva Galová-Vodrázková was born in 1940 and, after studying at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, designed numerous film posters between 1966 and 1972 (Terry Posters has forty-two of them on their site). Her bio says she gave up poster design after “normalisation changes in the venture,” whatever that means, and has since worked as a textile designer. What attracted me to her poster work is a certain devil-may-care quality—evidenced in her Rebel—coupled with a powerful sense of composition.