Remembrance of posters past

The Jakarta Post   |  Tue, 06/16/2009 10:35 AM  |  Features

Memory lane: Artist Lukman looks through a collection of photographs of movie posters once produced as part of a local industry that no longer exists. JP/Anissa S. Febrina

Cinema banner painters are pessimistically waiting for their final day to come, but a similar profession took its last breath a decade ago.

“I can’t even remember the last time I made a movie poster,” said 55-year-old Rusdi, a graphic designer who used to do the airbrushed posters for action movies during the 1980s.

His six-square-meter studio on the upper floor of his home in a small alley in Central Jakarta’s Petamburan was once witness to the process of designing Hollywood movie posters to decorate cinemas across the city.

Photographs of the posters for Bruce Willis’ Die Hard, Van Damme’s Cyborg and dozens of the B-movies that were once hyped in cinemas are the only remnants of Rusdi’s former profession.

Differing slightly from the art of painting outdoor cinema banners, designing and finishing the master for the paper posters that were hung in cinema lobbies seemed to require more imagination, as the artists were provided only with stills from the movies.

“If the theaters used the original posters that they got from the movie producers, they wouldn’t attract visitors. They are too simple,” said Lukman, Rusdi’s younger brother, who also used to make a living from designing posters.

These artists had to transform those simple posters into ones that would catch the eye of Indonesian moviegoers.

“We usually took the images of the main characters, pasted them on a 60 by 90 centimeter piece of paper and add the backdrop and scenes by airbrushing,” Lukman explained.

For action movies, they added pictures of explosions; others mostly just used cityscapes.

“Indonesians like it like that,” said Rusdi. “An action movie poster must look really catchy and so we often made up explosions or battle scenes that were actually not in the movie.”

Part of the art of making posters lay in composing pictures of the main characters, movie titles and background scenes. Airbrushing techniques helped to make the whole into a smooth composition without too stark a difference between the background and the photos.

Once a poster was designed, it would be reproduced and distributed to cinema houses.

But that was then. Computers have now completely taken their place. Photos of the actors and actresses in action are composed using computer programs, and special effects for posters are no longer added with real airbrushing.

The title and credits for those movies are no longer hand-drawn using plastic templates, but are now typed in the desired fonts – which can be easily changed with the click of a mouse.  And so Rusdi and Lukman closed one chapter in their life and began another: screen-printing company logos onto freebies like mugs and business card holders.

“I sometimes miss doing posters,” Lukman said. “But, it’s just a memory now.”

– JP/Anissa S. Febrina

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