When did the movie poster first appear? It was in France! Yup, it was the year 1896, and the film was Cinématographe Lumière; it was the world’s first-ever public movie screening. movie posters

From that point on, the movie poster has taken on a life of its own, with artists taking liberties in creating contemporary tableaus that conveyed the mood and feel of the movie they represented. The great director Stanley Kubrick described the art of the movie poster as the ability to reduce what the film director portrayed in 350,000 frames in just one picture.

In Egypt, it was Alexandria that first witnessed the beginning of the art of cinema, it also witnessed the beginning of the art of advertising films using the paper plate, on which some of the scenes, heroes and different situations from the film were drawn.

This was the only means of attracting the audience to the cinemas at the time, widely known to this day as affiche (French for poster). movie posters

It was mainly a handful of Greek artists, part of the larger Greek community of Alexandria at the time that became known as the best affiche artists in cinema. Most famous of them was Khawaja Nicholas, who established the first advertising workshop in all of Egypt, and who produced generations of painters and calligraphers, and the art of movie poster was established. movie posters

The famous film production house Studio Misr was established in 1935 as one of the projects of the Misr Company for Acting and Cinema (founded by Talaat Harb in 1925), the cinematic weight moved to Cairo, and with it many of the affiche artists who established workshops there.

Among the most famous workshops in this field were huge advertising workshops, such as the Announcing Al-Thaghr workshop (originally owned by Khamis Al-Thaghr Al-Sakandari), Muhammad Muftah’s workshop, Abdo Muhammad’s workshop, Ali Jaber’s workshop, Al-Masry’s workshop, owned by Waheed Shaer, and the Arab Cinema Presses by the artist Jusoor, responsible for posters for hundreds of films. movie posters

Ahmed Mourad talks about his book 1919 made into a Film