Great cinemas with all novelties one can imagine haven't reached small towns and far-away city districts. In Russia, there are still a great number of small cinemas with very cheap tickets, screeching chairs and unheated halls where you can watch the movie which was on top-charts 2 or 3 years ago. Some of such cinemas are on the verge of extinction, since almost nobody visits them despite of their cheap prices - who wants to see the old movie having Internet to download it or a DVD to watch it at home? So, many of these small oldtimer cinemas have already closed their doors, having been turned into nightclubs or more modern cinemas, but a part of them still works, especially those located in far-away towns. The administration of such leisure facilities often has no money to renew their repertoire regularly and to cope with the speed new movies are shot, so they offer movies with great delays. And I must admit, it's very good if you wasn't able to see the movie when it was shown in a duplex, but still want to see it on the "big screen" of the cinema, not just on a small screen of your computer or TV set. Moreover, they often don't have opportunities to buy official movie posters, so they employ artists and painters which redraw images from photos or even invent something new.
Handmade movie posters painted by a decorator on large boards and displayed outside the cinema are well-known to many people lived in the USSR. Since there weren't any uniform "official" posters, presented by a film-maker, as it is now, an artist made any images he or she liked to. Now things are not the same and every cinema displays "official" uniform posters, but small cinemas with old repertoire cling to the tradition to draw movie posters by their own means. Artists who create such "masterpieces" have different level of skill and talent - some are really good and others draw something only remotely reminding us of actual movie settings. But there is certainly something nostalgic to see these "homegrown", often awry posters displayed on the facades of old cinemas in the city suburbs or in small sleepy towns.
Here they are:
Handmade movie posters painted by a decorator on large boards and displayed outside the cinema are well-known to many people lived in the USSR. Since there weren't any uniform "official" posters, presented by a film-maker, as it is now, an artist made any images he or she liked to. Now things are not the same and every cinema displays "official" uniform posters, but small cinemas with old repertoire cling to the tradition to draw movie posters by their own means. Artists who create such "masterpieces" have different level of skill and talent - some are really good and others draw something only remotely reminding us of actual movie settings. But there is certainly something nostalgic to see these "homegrown", often awry posters displayed on the facades of old cinemas in the city suburbs or in small sleepy towns.
Here they are:
The Fast and the Furious
The Matrix Reloaded
Avatar
The Day Watch (Russian fantastic thriller movie made in 2004 upon the novel of fantastic writer Sergey Lukianenko of the same name).
Ice Age
(O_0, this cinema has 3D! And if you look at this hand-made poster, you don't expect such technical advance present in this cinema...)
Anaconda 2
As we see, some of these posters are just redrawn from official posters, some are made by artists who have only remote understanding of what the movie is all about and others are made upon the artist's impression. So, the old craft of public decorator arts is still preserved on the local level. And who knows, may be, photos will be out of fashion and all posters as well as advertisements will be made by the hand of an unknown artist (as it was long ago).
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