I was a teenage film poster fiend. And for a few months of 1984, life was heavenly.
I'd struck up a conversation with staff at my local Odeon, and had persuaded them to let me have the week's poster when the film had finished its run. It was Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves - and though I loved the movie when I was old enough to see it, I don't think I ever cared for it to quite the extent I loved the poster. What a thing of beauty it was - intricately designed, lovingly painted and exuding all the playfulness of the film itself. The central image of a storybook - opened to show photographs of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf - was framed by tangled, thorny branches between which lurked sinister eyes and glistening fangs. It seemed almost wasteful for this work of art to be shipped back to the distributor when it could be Blu Tac'd above my bed.
So every Monday I rushed to the Odeon to claim my cardboard tube. In truth, it wasn't a golden age of poster art, or film-making, judging by the collection I built up. Bolero, for example, featured Bo Derek topless in a waterfall. The font on that one was exquisite.
In those days, before it became possible to access any film at the click of a mouse, posters were one way that young buffs could connect with the movies they were forbidden from seeing. It was a precarious relationship, dependent on persuading your adult companion to take the long route to the shops via the Granada, or pleading for dinner at the Wimpy Bar because it was round the corner from the Odeon and you could get another glimpse of that week's poster.
With no hope of getting into an 'X' when my voice hadn't even broken, it was the closest I could get. At eight years old, for example, I had no idea what Apocalypse Now was about, and no knowledge of who Marlon Brando was (apart from Superman's dad, of course). Still, the film's poster, in which Brando's face rears out of the darkness and appears to be melting, made it imperative that I saw the movie at the earliest opportunity. (It was to be another case of good film, fantastic poster.)
This week I leafed through Sim Branaghan's handsome new book, British Film Posters: An Illustrated History, with heart racing and fingers tingling. The book details the work of this country's poster artists from 1896 to 1986, when hand-illustrated posters were rendered obsolete by technological advances.
There are plenty of designs here that I remember from childhood, when I was convinced that watching Confessions of a Driving Instructor or The Sword and the Sorcerer would herald my initiation into adulthood. But Branaghan's book draws out the crisp poetry of classic British poster art. I was especially taken by Vic Fair's work. For The Hireling, Fair depicted Robert Shaw and Sarah Miles trapped in a rear-view mirror, Shaw's sinister gloved hand clasping the steering wheel. And his image of David Bowie dissolving into a landscape for The Man Who Fell to Earth has an elegance that makes you gasp.
My own poster obsession took a knock with the release of Ghostbusters shortly before Christmas 1984. Suddenly everyone was breaking down the doors of the Odeon demanding a poster, and the manager decided enough was enough. I had been cut off, and my days of plenty were at an end. I carried on collecting sporadically throughout my teens, and at one time or another owned all those titles that will now rightly get you banged up by the Poster Police - Taxi Driver, Betty Blue, The Blues Brothers, each one as integral to the student lifestyle as Pot Noodles and patchouli oil.
If my interest in modern posters is virtually non-existent, it's largely because they are little more than a tug-of-war between garish photographs and hyperbolic quotes. There are exceptions - I recall a gorgeous US design for Fargo, in which the image of an overturned car had been hand-stitched, the needle still dangling from the corner of the picture. For the most part, though, the battle between art and advertising is over. Art lost, and so did we.
