Painting process of the Giant cinema posters

The entirety of the work included in the painted advertising material for every film presented on first release was based on the primary material, the so called “documents”. This mainly included photographic material given to the workshops by the film’s distributors. Regarding the creation of the painted Giant cinema posters, this material –the documents– was usually delivered every Friday evening, so that the posters could be prepared and hung by Sunday night. For all other promotional work, if such was to be undertaken, the material would arrive at the painter’s workshop several days in advance. A whole new world had to be created based on this material to become the ideal context for the promotion of the film (see also p. 223).
The first films advertised were black and white: that meant the photographs received by the artist and his crew were in black and white. The artist had to transform a neutral color material into an artistic work that would become a magnet for the audience.
He had to transfer it with economy on a given space, which was often challenging as far as size or proportions were concerned. The final work had to harmoniously fit the cinema façade surfaces for which the advertising Giant poster was created. These cinemas (ATTIKON, REX, PANTHEON, KOTOPOULI, ΑPOLLON) became the permanent canvas for his work (Fig.13). He often had the freedom to go beyond the given space, to embellish it or change it completely, thus creating a new “reality”. The buildings adjacent to the cinema house and the changing atmosphere of the city were the natural frame of his compositions.
His experience in isolating the photograph that would make the strongest impression guaranteed the core of the composition. The supplementary compositions framing the main figures gave a general idea of the film, rarely picturing something specific.

Part of the ΑΤΤΙΚΟΝ cinema façade, where the Giant poster was displayed in order to promote the current film. George Vakirtzis usually went beyond the dimension of the above rectangular to provoke the glance of the passerby (see “Découpé ”, p. 236).

In later years, when films became colored, the primary material was once again not followed closely. The specific colors of the photographs simply became the steppingstone for the artist to mark his own preferences. The few times he copied the prototype images with little deviation from the original were extremely successful, creating pictures of great strength (Figs 14-17). An extra element to be taken into account was the artificial light generated by the neon lights at the cinema entrance (see p. 223). He knew from experience the distortions light caused on the colored surfaces and used subtler colors that could be brought alive with the light.

Today, sixty years after the era of the “seven day artwork”11, images of the city with the painted Giant cinema posters hanging on cinema façades are preserved on photographs from the social pages photo reportage of the time, commissioned by such agencies as Harissiadis, Foto-Tzal, Megaloikonomou, Émil Seraf and Inomeni Photoreporters. There is also a more specialized category of photographs, solely taken so as to record the painted Giant cinema poster as it hung on the cinema façades. They offered evidence as to their creation and were proof of the agreement made between the artist and the cinema owner (see p. 269).

The main motif

The face of the leading actor is usually located at the center, but painted on a different scale from the rest of the composition. The features are stressed so as to create the strongest possible impression from the pavement and from across the street.
The contribution of Vakirtzis is evident in liberating compositions from the narrow, purely narrative context of a naïve realism that was prevalent at the time. This owes partly to the fact that the boldness and strength of his creative
fantasy enabled him to turn the image of a small black and white photograph into a pulsating portrait. The rough, thick brushstroke and his choice of unconventional colors for the face (blue, green, bright white, brown), as well as his insistence on depicting facial expressions, created unsurpassable models of this special kind of portrait.
Light is rendered with intensity and is further enhanced by artificial lighting on the cinema façade. Men’s faces are painted with a bold chiaroscuro technique, while women are depicted with the use of unified, monochromatic surfaces lighted with a bright shine in the eyes, the use of a very strong color on specific areas of the face (Figs 18-20), or the incorporation of an external element in the background, e.g. a flower or the moon.

Scenes

Complements to the faces, they operate at a second level, serving as a narrative element of the action or simply offering a sense of the film. As the artist himself wrote12, he often had no material from the production department of the film so as to create the necessary composition that would frame the central motif and had to go through his well-organized and extensive photographic archive (p. 223). Files that contained all kinds of photographs from newspapers, magazines, advertisements or older movies filed by subject, were found in his workshop. This material became the thematic core for his composition or, more often, complime-nted his creative ideas. He purposely uses darker colors (grey, brown) that stress the complimentary role of these scenes and project the main motifs. During the first years, scenes take up a greater surface without the use of a central theme. This is later reversed and Vakirtzis shifts the focus onto the main composition.

He isolates an impressive movement or intense action detail, a special landscape or a feature element for the kind of film in hand (Figs 21-24). These scenes or landscapes are embellished with simplified graphic elements, underlining the film’s atmosphere without necessarily being connected to anything specific in its plot.
Independent of the film’s subject, complementary scenes, landscapes and ornaments all demonstrate the same dynamism. Action scenes are characterized by intense movement and epic character. Drawn concisely, almost with a single stroke, they are some of the elements the artist most enjoyed. Landscapes are exotic, strange or simply indicative so as to function as information connecting the title and leading actor or actress with the specific kind of movie (see also pp. 232-234).