“Cinematographic posters are like popular songs,” the filmmaker Federico Fellini said. “They take you back not only to the film but to their seasons, the atmosphere, and the taste of an era.”
No one understands this concept better than Tony Nourmand. Growing up in Tehran in the 1960s, he went to the cinema once a week with his dad or uncle. While the credits rolled, and the adults went to another room to sip tea, Nourmand would hang back and flick through the movie-poster pile. He developed a ritual: every week he carried one home and stuck it on the wall, replacing the one from the week before.
Nourmand wouldn’t pay for a poster until 1979, the year he moved to London. The film was Apocalypse Now, and the sheet features Marlon Brando’s haunted face, lit orange by a hot and scary sky. Nourmand had it framed for his house and then set out to look for another favorite—Chinatown (1974).
It took countless calls to more than a dozen companies before Nourmand landed on a fellow named Jose Ma. Carpio, who worked at Cinemonde, in San Francisco. Yes, Carpio had the Chinatown poster. He also had originals for Casablanca (1942) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).
But it would cost him. Nourmand was in his mid–20s, and the posters were going for a couple hundred dollars each. He got himself a credit card and instead bought a Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) poster, which he then sold to Tiffany & Co.
Nourmand realized posters weren’t just posters; they were historical artifacts. Take Cleopatra, a silent film from 1917 that was destroyed in the 1937 Fox vault nitrate fire. All that remains of the film is some stills, costumes, and 50 seconds of tantalizing fragments. But then there’s the poster, wonderfully stylized and colored. Dressed in ancient-Egyptian garb, Theda Bara stands with her arms folded, her stare boring into the viewer.
Nourmand wasn’t the only interested party. By the 1980s, posters were in vogue. In 1989, Christie’s held its first sale of movie posters, and soon Nourmand began advising the auction house. He opened the Reel Poster Gallery in 1991, dedicated to original pieces. Then, nearly 20 years later, he began collaborating on projects with his good friend Bill Gold, the 20th century’s most inventive poster designer. In 2010, Nourmand left the Reel Poster Gallery to found Reel Art Press.
In the exquisite 1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times, Nourmand shares a wealth of his own favorites as well as Gold’s. These 1,001 “stories” include the surreal Polish and Czech posters of the 1960s, Peter Strausfeld’s woodblock and linocut images, and minimalist graphics by Saul Bass and Paul Rand. The volume is thick and arguably the most comprehensive review ever published. “The posters in these pages,” Nourmand writes, “are occasionally distasteful or offensive, sometimes kitsch or curious, but always effective.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at aIR MAIL
