Cuban posters don't just flog a film, they distinguish their audience

Continuing our series examining great film posters. Today, Paul Rennie explains the origins of Cuban cinema promos
The Girl With Green Eyes poster
A detail from the poster for The Girl with the Green Eyes. Photo: Paul and Karen Rennie collection. Click the magnifying glass for the full poster

Cuban posters don't just flog a film, they distinguish their audience


Cinema and politics

From its inception, cinema was conceived as a mass-market entertainment. Film was a new and exciting form of cultural production, whose mass appeal and collective experience naturally aligned it with the struggles for democracy underway at the time. So it's not surprising that demagogues of every sort embraced film as the perfect instrument of political propaganda.


In the 20s, the Russians used photography and film to promote the popular-front politics of communist revolution. The techniques of mechanical reproduction and mass production implicit in the production and distribution of films made them especially useful for an ideology promoting international revolution. Film was a key element in the battle for hearts and minds - the propaganda trains had wagons of exhibitions and screening room wagons so news of the revolution could be circulated to the most isolated parts of the Russian interior.

Latin America

In Latin America during the 60s and 70s, cinema was used to promote the ideals of the Cuban revolution and to counter the cultural hegemony of America. While American studios drowned in resources, these groups had almost no marketing budgets and were working at a local, not international, level. So it's not surprising their posters look strikingly different from those the other side of the equator.

Printing and Political Economy

It's not just differences in economy and ideology that led to this disparity - massively different techniques of image making and reproduction were also a factor. In Cuba this meant screen-printing - a technique whose origins are connected to the stencil-cutting and vernacular signage traditions. Screens are made up of a fine mesh. Careful cutting of a top layer creates a stencil that could be supported by the mesh. This allows ink to be squeezed through the stencil and screen to create a print. The stencil screen was robust enough to be re-used.

In its original form, sometimes called seriography, this technique required few resources and was available to marginal groups. The New Deal, Works Progress Administration artists used screen-printing to create inexpensive images of America during the 30s (some of which are on view in London as part of the British Museum's American Scene exhibition).

Screen printing

Compared with lithography and letterpress printing, access to screen-printing was inexpensive and made small run posters for local events possible. In the 50s and 60s, the development of light-sensitive make-ready for stencils helped reduce the labour and costs associated with screen-printing. New printing inks and finer screens gave the prints a vibrant and solid base of colour that distinguished them from the mass of offset-litho produced advertising images.

If you look carefully at silk-screen posters, the ink lies thickly in the surface of the paper and seems a solid block of colour. The ink has a sharp edge that exaggerates the optical disruption of any errors in colour registration.

In America, campus revolutionaries embraced screen-printing to promote the ideas of the emerging protest movements. In France, the posters of Mai 1968 were made by silk-screen. So it's hardly surprising we're still subject to the global proliferation of Alberto Korda's iconic portrait of Che Guevara.


For post-revolutionary Cuba, the film poster became a means of promoting revolutionary values across Latin-America and South-East Asia. This was done through the solidarity organisations aimed at the people of Africa, Asia and Latin-America (OSPAAAL) and at the worldwide student body (OCLAE). The Cuban Film Institute played an active role in the distribution of Cuban films and various publicity materials across Latin America.

Writing in 1970, Susan Sontag itemised the values of Cuban poster art as internationalist, diverse, eclectic and as exemplifying moral seriousness and a commitment to artistic excellence. So, the Cuban film poster does much more than advertise a film; it begins to distinguish its audience.