In my research, I've been struck by the aspirational quality of Eastern European posters. For instance, the
Czech New Wave film director Jiri
Menzel used Larks on a String (krivánci na niti) (1969) a movie set in grim postwar
Czechoslavakia, to critique Pollyannaish
posters. A political satire made during
the Prague Spring, the film tells the story of a labor camp situated in a vast industrial dump. Never
is the gap between Marxist theory and practical reality more clear than when a shy couple pose for a
state-sponsored newsreel; party functionaries insist that they sit before a
brightly colored poster depicting an idealized man and a woman .
In Poland, Andrzej Wajda’s 1977 film Man of Marble (Czlowiek
z marmuru), explored the underside of socialist propaganda as well. In this case, the film-maker follows the rise and fall of Mateusz Birkut, a humble bricklayer who, in the late 1940s, is mythologized as a model worker. Using newsreel footage of crowded parades, cheerful martial songs,
idealized statues (including a marble one mentioned in the film’s title) as
well as over life size posters, director Wajda also critiques the official
Soviet-style art and the scaffolding that propped it up. Individuals are submerged behind
idealized, constructed images. The rickety structure girding this system is
nowhere more clear than Birkut’s fall from favor, when he loses his
state-sponsored apartment and witnesses the massive posters of himself pulled
down.
