Bradley Cooper is pretty easy to see. A strand of brown hair falls slightly over the American actor’s forehead. Now Götz Valien takes care of the eyelashes. To do this, he pulls out a narrow brush and black paint. Because the huge film poster for the drama “Maestro” will one day hang on a Berlin cinema. Later it won’t look much different than the original poster. But there is a big difference: Valien’s posters are hand-painted – and significantly larger than the originals.
The 63-year-old is a freelance artist and makes banners for new film productions for four cinemas in Berlin as a part-time job. These include, among others, the Delphi Filmpalast at the Zoo in Charlottenburg and the Kino International, once the most important premiere cinema in the GDR. The format differs depending on the film theater – at the Delphi it is around 6 meters by 9 meters. Valien says he is one of the last cinema poster painters in Germany. There is also another film theater artist active in the Munich area.
In business for more than 30 years
The Berliner’s studio in a backyard smells of fresh paint. Colorful pots with light blue, bright yellow or red paint stand on a shelf, next to brushes in all different sizes. The Austrian-born artist has been working on film posters with a colleague for more than 30 years. The artist estimates that he has painted more than 3,000 posters so far and probably twice as many faces, including stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Penélope Cruz.
According to the German Film Institute and Film Museum, it is a slowly disappearing guild. Communication scientist Patrick Rössler from the University of Erfurt, who, among other things, deals with historical media such as film posters, sees it similarly: “Nowadays it is really an exotic bizarreness, you can’t describe it any other way.”
This is primarily for financial reasons. For many cinemas it is not feasible to additionally commission painted cinema posters. In addition, the films are released in cinemas at a faster pace. “The films don’t run that long in a cinema anymore. So you have to constantly repaint,” says Rössler. And often there simply aren’t that large of advertising spaces left.
“Titanic” as a turning point
Valien also says that until the year 2000 he painted around 20 surfaces per month – significantly more than today. There was a big impact in 1997 when the classic “Titanic” was shown on the screen. At that time there were still numerous cinemas on Kurfürstendamm. Because the film with Leonardo DiCaprio was so well received, the poster hung on their facades for around three months before it was changed. The longer a banner hangs, the less economical it is.
It takes him about two days to create a poster and he says he receives a few hundred euros for it. The difficulty: transferring the actors with the right proportions. “The only important thing is that the figures are really correct. We humans have two eyes, a nose and a mouth. It’s phenomenal that you can differentiate between people with these few coordinates,” says Valien.
The film poster consists of several canvases that are then put together. This also means that the 63-year-old never sees the entire poster when painting, but only a section. A projector helps him enlarge important outlines of the template. Of course, a painted example doesn’t look exactly like the original, he says. But this is exactly what makes it special. “It’s becoming more abstract and poppy overall. I’m like the running stitch in the stocking, so to speak. The fact that the painting is a bit off gives it advertising effectiveness.”
Film poster exhibition in Berlin
For the Yorck cinemas, which include the Delphi and the Kino International, the hand-made banners have a special charm, according to a spokeswoman. “Just as we preserve old cinemas, we also want to preserve the special features associated with them.” Film distributors often wanted the space for office space after the film was released.
The Kulturforum Berlin is also exhibiting hundreds of original film posters from the 1900s to the 2020s until March – including copies by Valien. Otherwise, the canvases are thrown away after they have been brushed over with white paint and reused several times. Then the paint makes them so heavy that they can no longer be used, as Valien says. In any case, with “Maestro” it’s not that far yet. Here he now applies black background color. This makes Cooper come into his own even more.
Information about the exhibition “Great Cinema. Film Posters of All Time”
