Kafe Fankoni by Yakov Ruklevsky 1927- The owner of the Odessa “Cafe Fanconi” – Korova – he is also a contractor of the cooperative for cleaning steam boilers. Often he used port street children, who could crawl into narrow steamboat pipes. Often they lost consciousness in the pipes and died.
These exceptional movie posters come from the pre-Stalin days of the Soviet Union and before Soviet Realism took over typical graphic design. This period of avant-garde artistic freedom in the Soviet Union was relatively brief but for many some of these posters are perhaps the greatest ever created.
Glaza Andozi by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg 1926 – directed by Dmitri Bassalygo and starring Olga Tretyakova
Vesolaya Kanareika (The Happy Canary), 1929 poster designed by Semyon Semyonov
Luch Smerti (The Death Ray) unknown artist, 1925 – In a capitalist country, workers are heavily repressed but manage to get a “death ray” to fight back. (A part of the movie is lost.)
3 Mushketera (The Three Musketeers) Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, 1927
Tamilla – designed by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg, 1928
Saba, Anatoly Belsky 1929 – The film recounts the tragedy of an alcoholic who takes it out on his wife and child.
Mertvaya Petlya (Looping the loop) Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg 1928
Oblomok Imperii (fragment of an Empire) Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg 1929
Vesolaya Kanareika (The Happy Canary) Losif Gerasimovich 1929
Kafe Fankoni by Yakov Ruklevsky 1927- The owner of the Odessa “Cafe Fanconi” – Korova – he is also a contractor of the cooperative for cleaning steam boilers. Often he used port street children, who could crawl into narrow steamboat pipes. Often they lost consciousness in the pipes and died.
These posters, many of them from the private collection of Susan Pack, can be found in Taschen’s Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde by Susan Pack.
Susan Pack graduated from Princeton in 1973. For 10 years she worked in advertising, latterly as senior copywriter at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York. She began collecting rare advertising posters in the 1970s, in due course acquiring one of the world’s foremost collections of avant-garde Russian film posters.
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