Collecting movie posters: Changes in the digital age

Abstract

While the film poster took over fifty years to become a collector's item, the alternative poster was born as such. The article has five parts. The introduction explores the acknowledgment of the film poster as a collector's item through the advent of Pop Art. The second and third parts propose a brief historical survey of the film poster and its difficult life. This survey and the presentation of some of its protagonists help us understand why the poster obtained its artistic autonomy, overcoming its function as a pure advertising medium. The fourth part analyses three posters diversified by production: (i) the Official poster distributed in cinemas and elsewhere; (ii) the Alternative movie poster created by young independent artists; (iii) and the poster created for distribution on the Netflix platform. This analysis highlights how the different contexts of use influence the structure and composition of the posters. In this sense, the development of the Alternative poster is a perfect example of what Jenkins intends as a participatory culture, made explicit by the rise of new movements born with the affirmation of technologies based on deep-learning systems.