Throughout the century that has just passed, a brilliant marriage of Czech graphic arts and film culture combined to produce one of the richest visual traditions of any national cinema – the Czech film poster.

Artists in what is now known as the Czech Republic have long held a world-wide reputation for the sophistication and creativity of their artistic expression in the field of graphic design. When this high standard has been applied to creating film posters, the results have been spectacular. The Academy’s exhibition will display 70 posters dating from 1910 through 2000 by many of the most important artists working in this field, and will include posters created for Czech, American, Russian, European and Scandinavian films.

The dates of these posters allow us to examine the availability of films foreign to the Czech Republic under Communism, as well as appreciate the incredibly resilient national cinema which flowered in particular during the 1960s (winning two Academy Awards from four nominations for Czechoslovakia between 1965-68), and continues to this day – the Czech Republic has been nominated in the Academy’s Foreign Language Film category twice in the last decade, taking home the statuette in 1996 for Kolya.

Some of the posters that will be on view include: Nosferatu, Erotikon, King Kong, Wild Strawberries, The Hop-Pickers/Starci na chmelu, Closely Watched Trains/Ost e sledované vlaky, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Easy Rider, The Great Dictator, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Terminator and Wild Flowers/Kytice.

Click here to view a preview of posters.

The posters are from the collections of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Exlibris Prague and several private collections.

The exhibition "Czech Film Posters of the Twentieth Century" is co-organized by the Moravian Gallery, Brno, and curated by Marta Sylvestrova and Petr Stembera.