So far, around 4,000 posters have been photographed and are becoming available online, downloadable in “Large,” “Extra Large,” and “High-Quality” resolutions. These two descriptions only hint at the range of posters archived at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center-upwards of 10,000 in all, “from when the film industry was just beginning to compete with vaudeville acts in the 1920s to the rise of the modern megaplex and drive-in theaters in the 1970s.” So writes Erin Willard in the Ransom Center’s announcement of the digitization of its massive collection, expected to reach completion in 2019. Failing that, movie posters are at least always essential archival artifacts, snapshots of the weird collective unconscious of mass culture: from Saul and Elaine Bass’s minimalist poster for West Side Story (1961), “with its bright orange-red background over the title with a silhouette of a fire escape with dancers” to more complex tableaux, like the baldly neo-imperialist Africa Texas Style! (1967), “which features a realistic image of the protagonist on a horse, lassoing a zebra in front of a stampede of wildebeest, elephants, and giraffes.” The center expects to be digitizing for at least the next year, and possibly into 2019.įor now, there are 500 posters available to view online and download in high resolution.Who hasn’t pinned one of Saul Bass’s elegant film posters on their wall-with either thumbtacks above the dormroom bed or in frame and glass in grown-up environs? Or maybe it’s 70s kitsch you prefer-the art of the grindhouse and sensationalist drive-in exploitation film? Or 20s silent avant-garde, the cool noir of the 30s and 40s, 50s B-grade sci-fi, 60s psychedelia and French new wave, or 80s popcorn flicks…? Whatever kind of cinema grabs your attention probably first grabbed your attention through the design of the movie poster, a genre that gets its due in novelty shops and specialist exhibitions, but often goes unheralded in popular conceptions of art.ĭespite its utilitarian and unabashedly commercial function, the movie poster can just as well be a work of art as any other form. Each poster has to be carefully set up and photographed in high resolution and its metadata entered into the database. The entirety of the Ransom Center collection won’t be available online for a while, because the process involves more than just scanning the original material. View in our portal using #IIIF! /DgMMHBoQ7n There are also plenty of B-movie posters courtesy of Philip Sills, a poster dealer who donated his collection to the university in the 1960s.įrom early cinema to horror to westerns and more- the first set of 10,000 movie posters has been added to our digital collections. ![]() ![]() Films of the ‘50s and ‘60s are especially well represented. As a result, much of the collection held at UT Austin is from the 1940s through the 1970s, the heyday of Interstate’s reign over Texas theaters. Many come from the Interstate Theater Circuit, a theater chain that at one point encompassed nearly every movie theater in Texas. The posters date back to the earliest days of the film industry, and in their physical form, they range between small 14-inch-by-22-inch window cards to 20-foot-long billboards. And now, as highlights, the center is digitizing the collection to make it available online so that anyone can see and download items from it.Īs of right now, 4000 of the posters have been digitized, and the collection is slowly becoming available online. The research library boasts a massive collection of roughly 10,000 vintage movie posters that date back to the 1920s. ![]() The archives at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center are a cinephile’s dream.
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