We Were So Young

Interview with Rafael Morante

Jesus Vega

What does the work you did as a designer of movie posters mean to you?

Designing movie posters was one of the happiest moments of my life, because I had the opportunity to express all the interests I had at that time, in terms of the concepts and ideas I had on what design should be in general, as well as the chance to use different production techniques, although we later settled on a single printing medium: silk-screen.

How and when did you begin to work as a poster designer for the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC)?

As almost always happens, it was sheer chance, since at that time I was working for Intercomunicaciones, which was created by bringing together a group of designers who had worked for advertising agencies, and while I was working there, ICAIC needed to put out posters since they had nobody who could really do that, just some illustrators who had made some attempts to do posters in the Animation Department. All of us were trying to do something at that time, and these illustrators or draftsmen had already done a few posters, although the intention was to create a special department or at least a group devoted to making posters, not only for the Cuban movies which were being produced but also for foreign pictures which were being shown in Cuba.

When did you join ICAIC?

1961.

So you are a founder of this school of movie-poster art.

I have always considered myself a fortunate person. And I really had the great fortune to be one of the first members of that group of designers.

What do you see as the main achievements of poster design? Did the group start out with a clear idea of what was to be done, or was it left to the artists' imagination?

At that time, for all of us it was a case of the blind leading the blind. I began working with Mario RodrÌguez Alem·n, who was my immediate boss. Like all of us, he had his own amateur, not professional, views on what movie posters should be, since in 1961 we were facing something we had only dealt with as spectators. So the two of us coordinated our efforts in terms of what needed to be done, and we tried to make the end product turn out as close as possible to the joint conception we had worked out during the discussions we had in the course of our daily work.
I remember that the two first posters I designed that way were for Michelangelo Antonioni's The Adventure and Peter Brooks' Moderato Cantabile. Perhaps due to a style acquired in advertising work, and after some discussion and exchange of ideas, these two posters were based on stills from the movie; in other words, we used scenes frozen as stills using a different technique and size, and we reproduced them using silk-screen. What happened was that when I did the second poster I started asking myself whether I was doing the right thing. And I reached the conclusion that that was a dead end. It would just be a repetition of what had already been done up to that point. It's a curious thing: the thousands of political posters produced in Cuba for elections prior to 1959 were done using the same technique that I used at the beginning, not only in terms of the way of producing them but even the style itself, based on photos of the politicians who were running, which were reproduced in mechanical fashion, without contributing anything new. When it came time to design the third poster, I realized that if I kept on designing them the old way it would end up being a cul de sac.

What did you decide to do?

The third movie I had to do a poster for was a Soviet film named something along the lines of "Exploits of an Intelligence Officer." Motivated perhaps by the title, by the desire I'd always had to do illustrations for literature (such as for stories and novels), I began to think about doing things in a different way. The result was evidently an image which fooled half the city of Havana, since it was a very bad film and the poster was conceived as if it were for a high-quality movie. It was really the first movie poster I did with a personality and style of its own.

I believe that kind of thing happened on various occasions and not only with your own work, since historically there are a lot of good posters for bad films. In your view, what is it that motivates the designers?

The designer always tries to do his or her best rather than something in line with the quality of the given movie. At that time, for reasons we're all aware of, there had already started to be a shortage of films of the quality of The Adventure or exquisite movies like Moderato Cantabile, and in their place there started to be Chinese pictures with titles along the lines of "The Yellow River Flows to the Mountains," "Three Generations of Swimmers" o "Music and a Hero." So we didn't worry about whether the movie was a good one or a bad one. The important thing was the designer's responsibility towards the public at the point that you took on the job of making the particular poster. And the only option, whatever the quality of the film you were dealing with, was to do the best work you could. No serious or honest artist would decide to do a good poster for one particular movie and a bad one for another.

Once the poster was designed, what was the subsequent technical process, and how did you deal with the scarcity of materials that began to be felt in the sixties?

I have two or three anecdotes on that subject which are quite interesting and unique, and in a certain way set a pattern for a series of later styles and techniques. There was a point when there started to be a scarcity of everything: paint for the painters, colored paper, printers' inks, and in many cases just plain paper. Sometimes one of the poster printers -Eladio Rivadulla, who for me was the most important one of all and who was himself a designer and painter, and printed the posters for ICAIC- would come and tell me: "The printers' inks I have today are pink and hazel brown." So we'd have to do the poster in pink and hazel brown, which meant achieving a new tour de force: designing a poster in which these colors would be combined in a coherent way, since color is part of the design itself, just like the blank spaces and the fonts. And if on a certain day it was rose and hazel brown, it could be any other combination of colors on another.
Another day he came and told me that he only had violet ink for printing. I remember it was a poster for a very interesting East German movie called The Gleiwitz Case. So needless to say, the result was a poster in violet, which nevertheless still strikes me as quite good. Everything was in such short supply that you needed to achieve the best form of communication with the best sense of synthesis. It was quite a successful design. But one day there was a genuine catastrophe. There was no paper and Rivadulla had a brilliant idea for solving the problem: he went to the offices of one of the newspapers, I think it was El Mundo, and bought a bunch of unsold back issues; and I did a design to go with that newsprint stock, using what was already printed on it as an element of the design. The result was a strange poster, since newspapers consist of many different pages. One poster would be printed on page two, another on page five or eight, some had photos and others didn't, some were printed over the obituaries and others on the sports pages. The movie in question was Pietro Germi's The Facts of Murder. As you can see, it was the circumstances themselves that made us seek such a peculiar solution. Shortly thereafter I had to do a poster where I consciously decided to use that technique: Muerte al invasor (Death to the Invader), a documentary by TitÛn (Tom·s GutiÈrrez Alea).
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Speaking of TitÛn, you did a poster in close collaboration with him. I was wondering what experiences you that in this encounter between a director and a designer?

I had two important contacts with directors. I worked with TitÛn on the poster for Las doce sillas (The Twelve Chairs, 1962). He is a director of unquestionable taste, as well as a painter and musician. He was very interested in doing a poster using old decorative "vignettes." So we made a design using a lot of these vignettes, which we got from specialized books. Above all, 19th-century American vignettes of fingers, hands, aerostats, little angels sitting on clouds. Then we printed the poster, not by silk-screen but by direct impression, on craft paper so as to give it that old-time feeling characteristic of some works from the past, despite the fact that the movie's plot took place in the 1960s. It was a very gratifying experience, because TitÛn had very definite ideas, and we succeeded in reaching common ground and making a poster which may still be seen as quite valuable three decades later.
The other was with JosÈ Massip, for his documentary Historia de un ballet (History of a Ballet, 1962). We worked together very closely, since he also had very precise conceptions. We watched the documentary several times until we were able to settle on the exact image for the poster, which turned out to be one of the dancers in a very forceful position, with his feet planted solidly and his arms raised; and special letters were even designed for this poster on the basis of influences from the greatest foreign designers, in particular one of the best and most talented, Saul Bass. The letters used on that poster are inspired by fonts he designed.

Speaking of these possible influences, how did designers deal with the lack of information which was yet another element in the large number of scarcities that started in the sixties?

It wasn't really a case of complete disinformation. There was always some information that arrived, for example if somebody brought a magazine or book, so some things did get to us. But the most important aspect was the creativity that developed at that time, precisely because of all the shortages we've already mentioned and which represented a challenge. Of course this doesn't mean that absolute scarcity would mean greater creativity. But just as bad springs from bad, creativity generates creativity, and this made it possible to overcome so many obstacles.

Movie poster art follows an ascending curve. What do you see as its peak moments?

More than moments as such I would like to mention creative individuals who have marked the highest moments. Without a doubt, the highest peak of Cuban poster art was reached by Eduardo MuÒoz Bachs. Not only because of the enormous quantity of posters he's done but in light of their variety and quality. MuÒoz is an artist with a very definite style, and in my view this is very special, since his posters are perfectly recognizable yet not repetitive. They're different from each other, at the same time that they arise from the same creative root. It's like someone who renews themselves continuously by doing the same thing. It's a well-defined style and his ideas are so good that there's always something new. It's a unique case in the history of Cuban movie-poster design.

I would still really like to know if there is a particular moment that stands out in the history of movie posters.

The period from 1959 to 1970 is very important in the history of our posters because there was such a strong impetus and so much desire to do beautiful things. On top of that, to paraphrase the title of an Argentine soap opera, "we were so young" that everything was done with enormous vitality.

And what, in your view, is the cause of a certain downward tendency that can be observed in that trajectory over the past two decades?

It seems to me that what kills the creative impulse in any task that people set themselves is the lack of encouragement or stimulus. On most occasions those stimuli bore an inverse relation to time. As time went on there was less and less. I think there are few genuinely creative individuals. I remember that when I was a teenager I read a biography of Auguste Renoir, who at the end of his life was paralyzed and unable to move his fingers, and the solution he found was to tie the brushes to his hands so he could paint, since his desire to create was uncontainable. And that is what has led to a small number of cases in the history of Cuban posters in which creativity has not declined, while in most cases it has actually ceased to exist.

Your comments lead me to another question, since graphic design has always been viewed as a "minor art" and relegated to second-class status. This has also been the case with movie posters. What is your opinion on this?

It seems to me that one of the greatest injustices is having made such an arbitrary division between "major" and "minor" arts. In the final analysis they are all manifestations of man's spiritual life. I don't see why a Limoges porcelain cup, which is marvelous and has a very specific function, is a "minor art" work while a painting which may be quite awful is a "major art" work. What is major or minor is the quality of the work, no matter what the size, material or medium in which it's made. But given that this narrow criterion exists and is defended due to ignorance, graphic design is considered a minor or insignificant art simply because it is something which can reach millions of people - as if movies or television were also minor arts because of their ability to reach millions. While a painting may be seen by dozens of people, or in the course of many years by thousands, there's no question that a drawing reproduced on a poster or in a magazine or newspaper can be appreciated by millions.

How do you see the evolution of Cuban movie-poster art after thirty-six years?

Cuban movie posters, which were the subject of much discussion at first and are now taken up from time to time, played an important part in the concert of international graphic art. Dozens of articles were written, and issues of specialized journals were even devoted to Cuban graphics, dealing with the influences they manifested. The most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that, from my point of view, a lot of these opinions were mistaken because they referred to the influence of Polish movie posters, which really did have enormous power, or Czech posters, which were also excellent, or in some cases Japanese posters, which at that time were not as good as they are now. But I think these all had no influence at all because they couldn't, given that information on Polish and Czech posters started arriving when we Cuban designers had already made quite a few posters. And in particular I see the influence of Japanese posters as very distant, since their conception of life and the world is completely different. You can make a mechanical copy of a technique and even a concept without finally achieving anything genuine. I think influences can be assimilated over time, since no creative person is absolutely exempt from them. I would stress that Cuban posters have very unique characteristics: color, synthesis. A good example is the poster for Hari-Kiri by Reboiro. In short, movie posters are an important landmark in Cuban graphic art.

What do you view as the greatest deficiency in the history of Cuban poster art?

The bureaucrats who order posters and later reject them in order to show their authority without demonstrating what they do or don't know.

One final question: how do you see your work in perspective after more than thirty years?

If I said I'm always learning something, I would be resorting to a clichÈ. What I can say is that within the mass of work involved in designing and putting out Cine Cubano (Cuban Film) magazine, the press releases which were still done for premieres, the press books put out for Cuban movies and some cycles shown at the Cinemateca, notes for the "Enciclopedia Popular" - cultural notes which were included in movie programs - as well as backgrounds for animation, film credits, movie theater decorations for particular film cycles, making posters turned out to be the most gratifying task of all and probably the one which had the most influence on my later development as a graphic designer. Now, after so many years, I remember the enormous pleasure I got out of conceiving some of them: the 1961 Chaplin, the first Cinemateca de Cuba poster and above all The Battleship Potemkin, which I consider one of the three greatest films of all time together with Welles' Citizen Kane and Chaplin's City Lights. If I had to design it now and had never done so before, I would conceive it in the same way I did then. My work? I would like to have done a lot more than I have up to now.

Havana, June 1995.