A propósito de uma prática que já há muito desapareceu em Macau, os gigantes cartazes dos cinemas, publico um excerto de um artigo da BBC que refere a também extinção da actividade em Taiwan...
Yan Jhen-Fa has never met a film star, but he’s painted so many he can’t remember them all. Nearly every day for the last 48 years, the 66-year-old artist shuffles onto the pavement across from the Chin Men Theater in Taiwan’s oldest city, Tainan, holding a small image and five buckets of paint.
For the next eight hours, he squats on a plastic stool and kneels on the ground in his makeshift outdoor studio, using deft brush strokes to depict film legends in surreal, film noir-like friezes of suspense, passion or pride. When he finishes, he clambers up the scaffolding and uses rope to hoist the 20-sq-m canvases three storeys into the air to hang them on the theatre’s facade.
Today, the Chin Men is the only remaining theatre in Taiwan to continue the age-old tradition of displaying hand-painted film posters. And in an era of digital printing and computerised billboards, Yan is one of the last artists in the world carrying on a craft that’s on the verge of extinction. (...)
As long as there have been movies, there have been movie posters. When silent films became popular in the 1910s, theatres around the world hired artists to convey the excitement of new releases and capture an audience’s attention before they even stepped into the theatre. By the 1940s, Hollywood studios began printing and shipping their painted posters around the globe. But in many places where skilled labour remained cheaper than billboard-sized prints, handmade paintings continued to adorn cinemas for decades to come.
Artigo BBC, Novembro 2018
For the next eight hours, he squats on a plastic stool and kneels on the ground in his makeshift outdoor studio, using deft brush strokes to depict film legends in surreal, film noir-like friezes of suspense, passion or pride. When he finishes, he clambers up the scaffolding and uses rope to hoist the 20-sq-m canvases three storeys into the air to hang them on the theatre’s facade.
Today, the Chin Men is the only remaining theatre in Taiwan to continue the age-old tradition of displaying hand-painted film posters. And in an era of digital printing and computerised billboards, Yan is one of the last artists in the world carrying on a craft that’s on the verge of extinction. (...)
As long as there have been movies, there have been movie posters. When silent films became popular in the 1910s, theatres around the world hired artists to convey the excitement of new releases and capture an audience’s attention before they even stepped into the theatre. By the 1940s, Hollywood studios began printing and shipping their painted posters around the globe. But in many places where skilled labour remained cheaper than billboard-sized prints, handmade paintings continued to adorn cinemas for decades to come.
Artigo BBC, Novembro 2018
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