Basically, if the paper is bright white you are looking at a reprint. Original posters have a yellow tint due to age. Cuban posters are made with cheap paper, generally acidic and inks are highly corrosive.
The one on the left is an original "Besos Robados" by Azcuy and the one in the right is a reprint made last year. Of course, the paper of one is yellow and the reprint is white, but for comparison I balanced their
colors to make them look similar. How would collectors tell in the next 5 years which poster is the original one? I am doing research photographing details of originals and reprints. Unfortunately in most cases,
movie posters printed before 1995 will have to be considered originals unless otherwise proved.
-ICAIC realized that posters were profitable when they legalize dollars in the early 90's. By the mid 90's when I started to buy posters, the store was in the 6th or 7th floor of an ICAIC building, totally isolated,
dark office were you had to ride the scariest coffin-like elevator and wait until they bring a lady from another department to show you a very poor selection of posters that you have to reserve to be picked up
next day. This lady frequently told me that poster sales were scarce with only a couple of sales a week. Why should they reprint? At that time the only reprints they had were Lucia, Retrato de Teresa, and a few
of Bachs eye catching designs and award winners. The rest were all originals.
-SOME posters were reprinted every few years but only by demand . If a group of Cuban artists were going to a movie festival in a foreign country to exhibit their works they would pick a particular design to be
reprinted and give away as promotion. In other ocassions ICAIC reproduced images that were made to conmemorate a government anniversary. During a period and to avoid dated images, let say, in one of
ICAIC anniversaries, they would reprint an old image related to that anniversary and they took the year out and instead of Azcuy-1971, it would say Azcuy-ICAIC. Cuba always overlooked the importance
these posters as collectible works of art and never kept a record of their printing.
Take a look at the folloween images to compare.
This halftone look its achieved by cutting the stencils used for the process. Each pattern is carefully cut out from a plastic sheet by hand. Original posters were made by skilled printers, most of them retiredalready for artistic reasons to the point that many times the artist himself was involved in the printing process. Now, money is the head of the game and although most of the process is still the same, quality is
often sacrificed to meet tourists demands. See the quality of tonal ranges that originals show.
Often, in reprints, typography is done bold because thinner fonts mean more hand precission when screening
Notice the change in color tones. The original red is more vibrant. This is because the printers don't have the original instructions that artists wrote in back of the mockups or original drawings were they wroteevery specific color. Newly made reprints have a lighter center in the blacks. Those of you who are collectors probably know what I am talking about. Look at the above picture and observe that the reprint has
a clowdy spot in the middle of the black that can be also seen in the typography of some of new Bachs reprints. The reason is that since red is very expensive they applied very little color.
