A History of Graphic Design: Chapter 86: A History of German Expressionist Movie Posters and Afterward.

Chapter 86: A History of German Expressionist Movie Posters and Afterward.

The liberal atmosphere of the Weimar republic that emerged after the horrors of the first world war gave birth to a powerful German cinema. Expressionists, defying the reality portrayed by the representational art, tried to capture the essence (Das Wesen) of the reality.They argued passionately in the avant-garde periodicals, such as Der Sturm, about the aesthetics and social mission of art in a world that they saw corrupt and shallow to the extreme.

Adopting the expressionism Nietzschean perspective that had emerged across Germany as a reaction to a widespread anxiety rooted in tragic human actions in an incongruous modern world with its loss of authenticity and ennoblement, film-makers' created tales of madness and terror that reflected a variety of forebodings and yearnings associated with a logocentric culture. Nietzsche's Overman symbolizing the authentic human being who enhances his own Will to Power by a process of self-creating, which involves the founding of new values and standards -- "Man is nothing but that which he makes of himself" --served as the underlying framework.

The profound philosophical underpinning of expressionist themes of the Weimar era films can be understood in Martin Heidegger’s exposition of Dasein (Being), particularly as 'being-towards-death'. The contemporary society as alienating and isolating were juxtaposed beside the horror of an imminent disaster to signify the concept of 'being-in-the-world', as a situation where the individual finds itself “in a world to which it must orient itself, and from which it can never escape or separate itself”. Heidegger’s view that human Being is a priori in a world with others; represented by the signifier of 'Being-with-others' in an intersubjective and constitutive form motivated the importance of the expressionists' narratives. These entail how the protagonist’s liaison with others in a shallow and inauthentic society constitutes its Being and determines its 'being-towards-death', as is surrounded by the anxiety of annihilation narrated in Wiemar films. This was the genesis of horror film genre.

The Survivors by Käthe Kollwitz,
The Survivors was used for a Peace Congress held in The Hague, The Netherlands in 1922. An accompanying text stated: Do not teach the children to glorify war and war heroes. Teach them to despise war.

Memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht - Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht (1919)
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

In an attempt to realize Erneuerung des Menschen, a new form of liberty and liberation for the humanity, expressionists cultivated Nacktkultur --an attitude toward the body unprecedented in its modernity, intensity, and complexity. They studied nudity as the unconcealed essence of primal emotion, and to grasp the innermost sense of Being motivated them to explore the deep metaphysical significance of intricacies of the body language, its poses, and corporal gestures. As Wolfgang Graeser stated in his book Körpersinn (1927)

"The dark, chaotic side of Western technocracy has damned the body, branded it with hell and sin. But in the luminous side, the body stands anew in unconcealed clarity. Exposed and naked is our thinking. Now we comprehend the body, uncaged and without veiling insinuations. Radiant bronze skin mirrors the light of the Olympian sun with the same pure sobriety as the sparkling pistons of clearly formed machines"

Expressionists explored the tension between Spirit and modernity, a complex relationship because of their view of relating Spirit with reason and consciousness. In his Theory of Expression, Ausdruckskunde und Gestaltungskraft (1913), Ludwig Klages asked how is it possible for human beings to comprehend, and to interpret, the manifestation of the soul? For this to be possible the authentic protagonist could not allow its Soul (seeles) to be subjugated by the logocentric Spirit (Geist). The Soul has natural affinity with the Body (Leib) and its sexuality, whereas the Spirit tries to break them apart. In this breakup, the Spirit conspires with Consciousness and Reason, and eventually would be governed by them. This reifies and debases the human authentic experience. Eventually, in an inauthentic culture, or in a Klageite "logocentric culture", the Logos may dominate the whole of the human experience.

The expressionist attitude toward the Spirit dominated world and body may be observed in such scenes as the dance sequence of the Metropolis of Fritz Lang, where a captivated group of modern elite observers are entranced in lust by the semi-naked body of the dancer. This Wiemar attitude is more clearly expressed in Wilhelm Prager and Nicholas Kaufmann’s Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit -Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur (1925), where Goethe’s admiration for the Greeks; who revered the naked body and associated it with athleticism, is contrasted against the German petite-bourgeoisie’s grotesque taste, their shallow attitude and morbid lifestyle. This is particularly evident in the film's Venus episode where the contemporary viewers of the statue are shown oblivious to her grace and instead spoil her beauty by gawking stares at her nudity. The film then reveals the essence of the lifeless marble statue by transforming it into a live human being. In the words of Max Osborne a contemporary critic:

The presence of nude bodies in the film … has nothing to do with tawdriness. Far from being treated as something secondary, the problem is taken up with great seriousness… Eroticism in its ancient sense rises up out the murky waters of the darker urges that have pulled down this godly element of our lives, sullied it and made it unrecognizable. Eros emerges as a thing apart from sex, and hence becomes the foundation for a more highly evolved free morality.

Nietzsche called the ultimate constituent of the world Will to Power and Heidegger defined it as” as “the essence of power itself. It consists in power’s overpowering, that is, its self-enhancement to the highest possible degree." The link between art and truth is embodied in Overman, revealing the essence of will to power. For Heidegger art is a transfiguration, which " creates possibilities for the self-surpassing of life at any given point of limitation. Self-surpassing "is fundamental in understanding will." For, will is command, and "commanding is the fundamental mood of being superior," not merely to others but "always beforehand superior with regard to oneself."

In the April 1923 issue of Das Kunstblatt, Carl Einstein wrote "We are tired of [all the colorful stuff of] of Gauguin and van Gogh. Enough of the Dionysian decorators ... Perhaps we save the frames for their asset value."
He wrote:

The transvaluation [of rational man] had already begun with Nietzsche, who had insisted on the primary influence of the drives, compared to which the role of reason would rather be that of a life-inhibiting force. This transvaluation was in turn powerfully promoted by Freud, who rediscovered in the dream and the unconscious the life of the drives, the forces that oppose the rational.

German Expressionism exaggerated the grim reality of the uninspiring life in a longing for a more heroic and more meaningful one. Decadence, murder, depression, the loss of innocence were used as material during the post-war years of 1919 – 1929 to revolt against the modern society that was ruled by flaccid, rationalistic, and inhumane technological advances, jingoistic chauvinism, and colonialist capitalism. As Andrew Pulver of Guardian has noted:

With its angled, distorted set designs, tortured eye-rolling, and layers of dreams and visions, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) is generally acknowledged as a landmark of international cinema, not just Germany's own. Two years later came an equally groundbreaking film, Nosferatu – an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula that enshrined some of the creepiest cinema images ever recorded.

The poster designers for these films, such as the prolific Josef Fenneker, Boris Bilinsky, Emmerich Weninger, and others were also intrigued by the promise of expressionism in its struggle against a logocentric culture.In 1926, expressionist set designer Hermann Warm stated that "the film image must become graphic art." Indeed, almost all individual shots in these movies follow a sophisticated graphic design grammar. According to the expressionist actor Conrad Veidt, who played Cesare in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari "If the decor has been conceived as having the same spiritual state as that which governs the character's mentality, the actor will find in that decor a valuable aid in composing and living his part. He will blend himself into the represented milieu, and both of them will move in the same rhythm." Although, German graphic designers largely abandoned the Expressionism in the post war era, nevertheless, one still may detect its traces in the works of designers like Fischer-Nosbisch, Hans Hillmann,Jan Lencia, and Tostmann Werbetechnik as well as others.

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Directed by Robert Wiene

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is considered a landmark in silent film history and may be the most influential German expressionist film of all times, famous for its exceptional, wildly distorted stage designs.

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920

F.W. Murnau adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1922)

Murnau (and cinematographer Fritz Wagner’s) “haunting images” — in Orlok’s castle, at sea on the “death ship” (Orlok’s presence on board causes a rat-infested plague), and in the streets of Hutter’s hometown, were manifestation of expressionism at its best.

Der unsichtbare Dieb, (1920). Directed by Siegbert Goldschmidt

Sumurun (1920), Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Henrik Galeen's the Student of Prague, co-directed by Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye in 1913 and scripted by Hanns Heinz Ewers, is inspired by a story by Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred de Musset. The main character Balduin (Conrad Veidt) is a poor student, who after falling in love with a girl of good fortune, sells his reflection to the magician Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) in order to become rich. But the reflection steps out of the mirror and take on a life of its own. The doppelgänger continues to haunt Balduin until the latter destroys the mirror whence it originated; freeing himself of his darker side but inadvertently destroying himself in process. According to Siegfried Kracauer the film was heralding the division of German society between the middle and ruling class.

Balduin has determined the value of the girl, creating a meaning for his life, along what Nietzsche has proclaimed in Thus Spake Zarathrustra that

‘Only man placed value in things to preserve himself - he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself “man” which means “the esteemer” ... without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow.’

But this leads to nihilism since “his moral interpretation of the world” as Nietzsche explains in his Will to Power “no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond” and now “Everything lacks meaning”’. The nihilism has reduced Being to Nothing. There can be no meaning of Being any longer; Being is what has been forever destroyed; Being is now absurd, it is meaningless. And as Nietzsche states in his Twilight of the Idols

'There are absolutely no moral facts. What moral and religious judgments have in common is the belief in things that are not real. Morality is just an interpretation of certain phenomena or (more accurately) a misinterpretation.’

However, Heidegger has argued that nihilism is humanity’s doppelgänger. Nihilism “unfolds itself between Being and the essence of Nothingness (Wesen des Nichts). The essence of Nothingness is the doppelgänger of being and has to be distinguished from the nihilistic Nothingness (nichtiges Nichts). Thus, the absence of Being is only self-concealment of Being. Being cannot be annihilated by the Nothingness of nihilism, since a self-concealed Being is potentially there to become unconcealed in the form of Overman.

A Nietzschean philosophical perspective underpins the symbolism of Dr. Arnold Fanck's Der Heilige Berg, (The Holy Mountain-1926). In fact, Fanck who was in a one-sided love with Riefenstahl gave her a surprise visit during her three month hospitalization, due to a knee surgery, and handed her a film script inscribed with the words “The Holy Mountain: Written for the Dancer Leni Riefenstahl.” Fanck also presented her with some editions of Nietzsche. Holly Mountain appears to keep an eye on Nietzsche's Die Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) (1889) message. Nietzsche who was alarmed by a disintegration of the natural virtues of Western civilization argued for a gallant sensitivity toward heroic styles of life that he felt was corrupted and undermined by the incessant debates of traditional moral philosophy. Mankind by trying vainly to protect themselves from unfortunate circumstances destroy their natural human desires. In Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft(Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future) he wrote:

Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED! Men with a still natural nature, (…), still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (…) in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power--they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the same as "more complete beasts").

Nietzsche believed, in an authentic noble life death is not to be feared, since it represents nothing more significant than the fitting conclusion of a life devoted to personal gain.

Thus, Fanck's Holy Mountain begins with the following notice:

The well-known sportsmen who participated in the making of The Holy Mountain ask the audience not to mistake their performances for trick photography. All shots taken outdoors were actually made in the mountains, in the most beautiful parts of the Alps, over the course of one and a half years. The big ski race is performed by German, Norwegian, and Austrian master skiers. The screenplay to this motion picture was inspired by actual events that occurred during a twenty-year period in the life of the great mountains.”

In trying to be authentic actors performed their own stunts many of whom were not professional actors and they were often credited on screen by their real names and by their actual occupations. The Nietzschian symbolism of the mountain is explained by the 1920s writings of the Italian philosopher Julius Evola who had served as an artillery officer in the World War I. According to him:

In the struggle against mountains, action is finally free from all machines, and from everything that detracts from man’s direct and absolute relationship with things. Up close to the sky and to crevasses (…) it is possible to reawaken (through what may at first appear to be the mere employment of the body) the symbol of overcoming, a truly spiritual and virile light, and make contact with a primordial forces locked within the body’s limbs. (…) In life- as has been pointed out, since Nietzsche, by Simmel- humans have a strange and almost incredible power to reach certain existential peak at which “living more” (mehr leben), or the highest intensity of life, is transformed into “more than living” (mehr als leben). As these peaks, just as heat transforms into light, life becomes free of itself; not in the sense of the death of individuality or some kind of mystical shipwreck , but in the sense of a transcendent affirmation of life, in which anxiety , endless craving, yearning and worrying, the quest for religious faith, human support and goals, all give way to a dominating state of calm. There is something greater than life, within life itself, and not outside of it. This heroic experience is valuable and good in itself, whereas ordinary life is only driven by interests, external things, and human convictions.

Hamlet, silent, 1921
This gender-busting film, starred by Danish actress Asta Nielsen as the prince. The “Art-Film” on the poster was Nielsen's own production company.

Lang returned to a familiar expressionist Nietzschean theme of the desire for a new society, a new values, and new man in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1922-24) and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1923-24) . A revolutionary Wagnerian mythical romance and compositional masterpiece in a massive retelling of the Nordic Nibelungen saga, complete with studio-constructed mountains, forests, and a full-scale fire-breathing dragon. Siegfried, in George Bernard Shaw's words represented;

the ideal of Bakoonin (sic), a revolutionary friend of Wagner that is an anticipation of the "overman" of Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and fun, dangerous and destructive to what he dislikes, and affectionate to what he likes; so that it is fortunate that his likes and dislikes are sane and healthy.

In Rings Wagner has disguised his revolutionary ideas under the cover of Nordic myths and legends to spread his revolutionary message. Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary and political philosopher interested in socialist theories, who was expelled by Marx from the anarchist movement. He spent the last period of his life in Bern, Switzerland rather close to Nietzsche and Wagner during the time that the two often spent time together in Lucerne and Tribschen. A prince who spent most of his considerable wealth on his anarchist causes, Bakunin believed the society’s establishment served only to oppress the masses that it pretend to serve and that the laws imposed by government should be overturned.

Both Bakunin and Wagner were participant in the Dresden insurrection, where Bakunin was arrested and sentenced to death. However, he was banished to Austria, instead and yet sentenced to death a second time. The Russian government demanded his return, thus preventing the carrying out of his sentences. After spending six years in the Peter and Paul Fortress as a prisoner without any trial, he was exiled to Siberia. Bakunin frequently told Wagner of his desire to see Paris burn to the ground, annihilating a tyrannical, exploitative government and liberating the world so that society could start again. An idea that became the highlight of Wagner's Ring. It is certain that Wagner confided the insight about Siegfried being an anarchist revolutionary hero directly to Nietzsche.

The Nietzschean notion of the individual creative impulse struggling for expression was largely influenced by Wagner and is a central feature of Expressionist art. ‘The young artists of this movement,’ writes Seth Taylor, ‘saw in Nietzsche’s antipolitical philosophy the material to combat the militarism, authoritarianism, and illiberalism of German society which Nietzsche is usually creditied with engendering’

According to Fritz Lang his Mabuse was the prototype of "the period after the First World War" which "was for Germany a period of deepest despair, of hysteria, cynicism, unrestrained vice. The most dreadful poverty existed side by side with immense new wealth. Berlin coined the word Raffke, , or ‘profiteer’ from Zusammenraffen des Gelds [raking in money. “

Written by Fritz Lang, Totentanz is a lost film in which a beautiful dancer's sexual allure is used by an evil cripple to entice men to their deaths. Falling in love with one of the potential victims, she is told by the cripple that he will set her free if her lover, actually a murderer himself, survives and escapes a bizarre labyrinthe which runs beneath the cripple's house".

Fritz Lang was born on December 1890 in Vienna. He grew up in that city's fin de siècle era, and affected by its intellectual and artistic heritage throughout his life. The son of a well-to-do construction magnate Anton Lang and his fervently Catholic (and formerly Jewish) wife Paula , Fritz attended the technische Hochschule before World War I. He also studied Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud’s theories, gleaning from them ideas about an authentic übermenschen and unconscious drives which would animate his films. Lang observed in an extended interview with Peter Bogdanovich, that the characters like Mabuse, Siegfried or the Master of Metropolis in his German period focused on Nietzschean Overman.

Josef Fenneker

Die Intriguen der Madame de la Pommeraye, (1922), directed by Fritz Wendhausen

The Kreutzer Sonata, (1922), Directed by Friedrich Zelnik

Josef Fenneker was one of the most important printmakers of German Expressionism. He started designing film posters in 1918, working for various Berlin filmmakers. At the age of 30 years Fenneker had already created a total of more than 250 posters.

“Die Prostitution”, Marmorhaus

Fenneker, “became the eye of the cultural and political hurricane that was Weimar Germany”. A painter, graphic designer, and stage designer, he worked in a “mixed style, strongly tinged with expressionist characteristics”, and there is the foreboding of gathering storms and imminent, though decadent, doom in almost all his work.

Born in 1895, the son of a grocer, little of Josef Fenneker’s early life in Bocholt is known. Perhaps inspired by his uncle Anton Marx, a church painter and architect, Fenneker studied at the Arts and Crafts schools in Munster, Dusseldorf and Munich, and became one of Emil Orlik’s master-class students at the school of the Berlin Arts and Crafts Museum.

Der Teufel und die Circe, Marmorhaus

First employed by Berlin theaters – most notably the Marmorhaus, the “paramount movie palace of Germany” – Fenneker designed numerous film posters, between 1919 and 1924. A “ combination of Radio City Music Hall and Graumans Chinese Theater”, any film premiering there gained “instant prestige”.

Film poster for “Der Januskopf

Fenneker was not just another movie poster designer, but THE movie posterist of his day, in whose hands the “art of the film poster arguably reached its zenith,” and in the postwar years he became “one of the most sought after designers of film posters. “ Fenneker went on to create stage designs for theater and illustrations for such magazines as Simplicissimus and Jugend.

Das Frauenhaus von Brescia, Marmorhaus

Josef Fenneker died in Frankfurt in January1956 of heart failure. In the obituaries of the regional and national press, he was noted as one of the most important and most original German set designers of the 1920s and 1930s. More than 300 works have been preserved from his vast oeuvre by the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, several more of which can be seen below the cut.

Film poster for “Carmen”

Die Tragödie eines Groben (The Tragedy of a Great Man, the story of Rembrandt van Rijn)

Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929, Directed by G. W. Pabst

Boris Bilinsky

Boris Konstantinovitch Bilinsky (1900-1948) was a Russian officer’s son who emigrated to Germany in 1920 where he worked in theater before traveling to Paris in 1923 and studying painting under fellow Russian emigré Léon Bakst. After meeting the actor Ivan Mosjoukine he started to work in the cinema as a set and costume designer and poster artist.

In 1924 he designed the extravagant costumes for Jean Epstein’s Le Lion des Mogols which made his name. His poster for that film also won the gold medal at the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts.

Die Brüder Schellenberg, Germany, 1926),Boris Bilinsky

Blitzzug der Liebe (Johannes Guter, Germany, 1925) , Boris Bilinsky

In 1927, by then a prolific cinema poster artist, Bilinsky was commissioned by the French distribution company L’Alliance Cinématographique Européenne (ACE) to design posters and publicity material for the French release of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

In 1928Bilinskywas recognized in the magazine l’Affiche de cinéma as “ one of the best” and in 1931 was called “the most famous poster designer for cinema” by Lucie Derain in Arts et Métiers Graphiques. In May 1928 he founded his own film advertising company under the name Alboris although in the 1930s he concentrated his own work more on set and costume design for Russian opera and ballet.

Feu Mathias Pascal (Marcel L’Herbier, France, 1926), Boris Bilinsky

Heinz Schulz-Neudamm

Heinz Schulz-Neudamm (1899 -1969) was born in Neudamm, district Königsberg Neumark, as Paul Heinz Otto Schulz. He worked until 1940’s in Berlin, adding Neudamm, his birthplace, to his name to be known as Schulz-Neudamm. He designed numerous posters but mainly for German release of American movies, such as Anna Karenina (1935, with Greta Garbo) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable). He died in Wiesbaden.

Tagebuch einer Verlorenen-Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) silent , Georg Wilhelm Pabst,Designed by Heinz Schulz Neudamm

Underworld 1927, by Josef Von, Designed by Heinz Schulz Neudamm

M, (1933), directed by Fritz Lang - Perhaps designed by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm

Anna Karenina (1935), by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm

Ninotoschka, MGM, (1939) Heinz Schulz-Neudamm,

Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage, silent, 1926, designed by engraver Karl Michel

Faust was produced by UFA, and directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Gösta Ekman in the title role.The above poster was the winning entry in a 1926 poster design competition. A contemporary report in the journal Reichsfilmblatt says that

“the money prizes for the best designs were rather low, which is one reason why the majority of our great and best poster artists honored the event with their absence. The first prize was 2,000 marks...Poster designs that find favor in the eyes of large industrial enterprises often bring as much as 20,000 marks.”

In F. W. Murnau's Faust (1926), Mephisto (Emil Jannings) bestows youth on Faust (Gösta Ekman) by capturing his aged countenance in a small mirror. At the end of the film, Mephisto smashes the mirror and Faust is once again deprived of his youth. In this context, the mirror becomes a transitional object connecting the old Faust with the young Faust. By destroying the mirror, the two identities are permanently separated. This act of destroying/liberating a secondary aspect of one's personality is a recurring Nietzschian theme in expressionism movies.

Der blaue Engel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich

The Blue Angel presents the tragic transformation of a man from a respectable professor to a cabaret clown, and his descent into madness. The film is considered to be the first major German sound film, and brought Dietrich international fame.

Mädchen in Uniform, Leontine Sagan (1931) , designed by Austrian artist Emmerich Weninger [1907-77]

The film eludes classification as either a product of the Weimar Republic or of the fascist state which was yet to come. Leontine Sagan, one of the first women directors in Germany, brought new and interesting cinematic strategies to her production of this film: somewhat surprisingly, many of these elements are those which, decades later, would come to be classified as typical "feminist" filmmaking techniques. It narrates the story of an emotionally unstable girl (Hertha Thiele) who is matriculated into the institution, dominated by a sense of enclosure within militaristic protocols. It explores idleness and intimacy among the girls, who seek gratification for a variety of impulses in an even greater variety of ways: pin-up photos of movie stars, love notes from other girls, officially sanctioned bullying, and perceived favoritism from the headmistress.

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), Fritz Lang

“Alexander Nevski” – Designed by Jan Lenica, Atlas Film

Dorothea Fischer Nosbisch

Dorothea Fischer Nosbisch (1921- 2009) was born in Bad Kreuznach. At the age of fifteen, Dorothea began her studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she met her future husband Fritz Fischer, with whom she founded a studio community in 1945, where together with designers like Heinz Edelmann, Karl Oskar Blase, Bele Bachem, Isolde Monson-Baumgart and Jan Lenica developed and implemented new concepts, and established the idea of der Designgruppe in 1958.

She worked mainly for Atlas film. Among her best known movie posters are The Silence (1964), The Blue Angel (1964), High noon (1959), Dear John (1965) and 7-year Itch (1966). In 1967 she separated from Fritz Fischer. She also worked as an art teacher in Frankfurt as well as a freelance artist. She died in Darmstadt.

“The Job” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“Arsenic and Old Lace” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“The Silence” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“Black Tights” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“The Blue Angel” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“The Seven Year Itch” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“Jour de Fete” – Designed by Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“Smiles of a Summer Night” – Designed bty Fischer-Nosbisch, Atlas Film

“Battling Butler” – Designed by Hans Michel, Atlas Film

“The Gold Rush” – Designed by Rambow and Lienemeyer, Atlas Film

Ferry Ahrlé

Born in 1924 in Frankfurt, Ferry Ahrlé grew up in Berlin. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts while studying acting with the later actor Albin Skoda. He designed the set for the film "Berliner Ballade" and for the literary cabaret "The Porcupines". In mid-1950s Ahrlé reside in Frankfurt, where he designed movie posters for Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Roman Polanski.

Das Siebente Siegel, Ingmar Bergmann (1957), Designed by Ferry Ahrlé,

“Wild Strawberries” – Designed by Ferry Ahrlé, Constantin Film

François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim", 1961, Designed by Ferry Ahrlé

Mutter Johanna von den Engeln, Regie: Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Constantin-Film (1964), Designed by Ferry Ahrlé

Die Tote von Beverly Hills, Regie: Michael Pfleghar, Constantin-Film (1964), Designed by Ferry Ahrlé

Fünfzig Stufen zur Gerechtigkeit, Regie: Anselmo Duarte, Constantin-Film (1962), Designed by Ferry Ahrlé

Heinz Edelmann

Heinz Edelmann (1934- 2009) was born in Czechoslovakia, and from 1953 to 1958 studied and then worked at Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts with a keen interest in print making. In 1958 he became a freelance graphic designer and by the time he was 30, he was among the most promising designers in Europe. He did innovative work for the avant-garde German magazine Twen, including drawings on the horrors of war. He made Yellow Submarine the first full-length feature cartoon in the UK since Animal Farm (1954). In 1970, Edelmann moved to Amsterdam and designed posters for plays, films and book jackets. Later he moved to Stuttgart, and worked as a professor at the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts.

Secrets of Women (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1952), Designed by Heinz Edelmann

“Hold the Bomb a Minute, Darling” – Designed by Heinz Edelmann, Atlas Film

“Too Bad She’s Bad” – Designed by Heinz Edelmann, Atlas Film

“Ladykillers” – Designed by Heinz Edelmann, Atlas Film

“Le Petit Soldat” – Designed by Jan Lencia, Atlas Film

Tostmann Werbetechnik

Das siebente Siegel, Tostmann Werbetechnik (1957)

“Last Year in Marienbad” – Designed by Tostmann Werbetechnik, Constantin Film

Viridiana ,Tostmann Werbetechnik (1962)

Die unsichtbaren Krallen des Dr. Mabuse, Tostmann Werbetechnik (1962)

“Last Year in Marienbad” – Designed by Tostmann Werbetechnik, Constantin Film

Hans Hillmann
One of the most important Modernist German graphic artists, Hans Hillmann (1924-2014) was born and died in Frankfurt. Hillmann studied at Kassel in die Schule für Handwerk und Kunst over the 1948-49 and was admitted at that city's die Werkakademie under Hans Leistikow in 1949,

After 1952, Hillmann only worked as a freelance graphic designer, first in Kassel, and later in Frankfurt. In 1959 he was appointed professor at die Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - the State Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel . In 1962 Hillmann won the Toulouse-Lautrec award of excellence at the International Poster Exhibition in Paris.

He was known as graphic designers of future generations through his work as a graphic and a professor at the der Hochschule für Bildende Künste/Universität Kassel. He designed 130 film posters between 1953 and 1974, including designs for landmark films such as Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai and Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket.

Die Dreigroschenoper by Bertolt Brecht, 1957. Hans Hillmann, Neue Filmkunst

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, 1955, Luis Buñuel, Designed by Hans Hilmann

I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, Italy, 1953). Hans Hillmann 1962

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1962, Tony Richardson. Designed by Hans Hilmann

Seven Samurai, 1954, Akira Kurosawa, Designed by Hans Hilmann

“Belle de Jour” – Designed by Hans Hillmann, Neue Filmkunst

“A Woman is a Woman” – Designed by Hans Hillmann, Neue Filmkunst

“For a Fistful of Dollars” – Hans Hillmann, Constantin Film

“Breathless” – Designed by Hans Hillmann, Neue Filmkunst

Isolde Monson-Baumgart

Isolde Monson-Baumgart: (1935–2011) was born in in Munich. She studied at der Staatlichen Hochschule für bildende Künste Berlin the National University of Fine Arts in Berlin and then in Kassel under Hans Leistikow and Hans Hillmann. Her major was the graphic design.

From Kassel she went to Paris around 1959-1963 to study at the famous Atelier 17 of Stanley William Hayter to develop her photographic skills. From 1961 she worked as his assistant. After graduation she worked as a freelance artist and graphic designer in Frankfurt, Paris, and the United States. In the mid-1960s she became a lecturer in printmaking at the American Center in Paris. She also taught at the University of Connecticut, the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and at the University of Kassel.

She married the American graphic artist Jim Monson in 1973. She died in Kassel