Monday, May 24, 2004
From Poster and Movie. Eladio Rivadulla Martínez.

Rivadulla is still seducing *

By Yasmín S. Portales

The XXIV Edition of Havana Film Festival arrival to Havana serves to convoke the memory of the Cuban work at the Seventh Art. Advertisement is closely related with cinema, since its early years.

In the propaganda ateliers, born all over the world with the aim of getting close varied products from different nationality or genre, to the sensitivity of diverse publics, more than a generation of artists in design was formed. Among the Cuban younsters who, at the beggining of the century buit their own style, running from the impact capability to the plastic quality, we can highlight Eladio Rivadulla.

Eladio Rivadulla's Poster. Cuba sing and dance.Around 40th and 50th decades, Rivadulla defined his basic expressive resources and kept them along more than 50 years of career. The National Prize of Design in 1998, in its first edition, is honoring a completely unique nature within the Cuban design, a nature having expressive resorces identifiables on book covers, illustrations and other objects born from his imagination.

The movie poster field isn't virgin for this natural experimenter: during many years his creations seduced the Cuban public and made them get closer to movie. The incitement capability until recognized in our days, through these pieces, allowed La Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad, the curation of Poéticas de Seducción exhibition, gathering old cinematographic advertisement by Rivadulla created among 1940 and 1960, at Lumiere Cinematograph in Old Havana.

The posters featured in this exhibition, showed the productions of that moment achieving, by themselves, the value of artistic work. The figurative-fable inserted by the author relegate in importance the advertisement of a name could have for the public. Sympathy is awake through the history suggested by the strokes, the recognizable characters' temper, the fair disposition of lights and shadows to propose a geographic or psychological atmosphere and the effectiveness of the elements to define a historic environment.

These values, which do not trust the eternal existence of a fame, but the universal power of suggesting an image, express a promotion method setting its traces in Cuban poster history around the 60s and 70s. Rivadulla is showing the success of a closed stage in his life, but not the tricks, that is why its poetic is still seductive.

* Text published with motive of XXIV Havana Film Festival. Rivadulla's work is celebrating in 2003, 60 years of strong existence.