Situated at the corner of Stadiou and Christou Lada str., in the basement of a building also housing the ATTIKON and APOLLOmovie theatres (in the ground and basement floors, respectively), G.Vakirtzisv atelier was a hub of artistic creation. An average production of 50 to 60 square meters of painted surfaces per week added up to tens of thousands of square meters of cinema posters that came out of the Lada basement posters that, placed on the façades of movie theatres such as ATTIKON, APOLLO, REX, PANTHEON, KOTOPOULI and EMBASSY, livened up the movies and their heroes in the years between 1946 and 1968. G.V. uses the primary material provided by the movie distributor, that is the “documents”:
- Shots of the movie protagonists or of the film’s most representative scenes, black and white photographs at first, and then color photographs.
- Occasionally some posters and, more rarely, the advertising leaflets that were imported in Greece along with the foreign films.
In some cases the painter uses the photographic theme, enlarging the photographs through grid drawing methods and adding color – as appropriate for each film – and synthesizing or isolating film scenes. And yet in others, he creates the giant poster themes purely out of his imagination.
…So that all this accumulated data turned into motifs and, out of their alternating sequence, symbols and abstract forms yielded what was the only practical and aesthetic consideration: meaning… (see “Documents and décors”, in Giant posters of Cinema by George Vakirtzis, p. 71).
This theme or meaning must, in all cases, draw the attention of the passers-by as they stop in their tracks on the sidewalk across and, under the neon lights of the cinema entrance, make up their mind which film to watch.
On some of his compositions, one can make out the use of patterns from specific, singled-out film frames on a limited area of the total giant poster surface, even though the painter had not watched the film himself…
F. 23
FF. 22
The ATTIKON cinema façade with the Giant poster for the film THE ROBE (see VGM.120). Photos taken during the day (left, FF.23a) and at night, under the spotlights (right, FF.23).
