lobby cards

A detailed Summary of lobby cards

Zaza, the lobby card I have chosen was a film based on a 1904 French play by Francois Berton and Charles Simon. Zaza was a successful film played by nearly every major actress of the day. To quote Paramount, It is a story of 'sawdust and tears, backstage rivalries, dramas and heartbreaks'.

For this Lobby card Paramount's advertising department has ingeniously incorporated the style and feel of the nineteenth century French posters of Toulouse-Lautrec. This image came about as a distinct change of style taking place within the Paramount publicity department. They started to steer away from the now too familiar photo and text cards and started to develop cards that would eventually change everyone's conception of cinema advertising. Paramount's publicity department cut out the figures of the stars and surrounded them in completely non-realistic backgrounds and highly stylised sets drawn in the most brilliant colours.

Choice of lettering and overall layout of all lobby cards was essential to gain the correct impact need. In action films i.e., The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Ben Hur (1931), film companies used bright bold colours and garish statements in a bid to lure audiences to their films by impression alone.

As mentioned before, the poster relies heavily on the artwork of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec whose work was always highly decorative, using vivid colours and bold images. Toulouse Lautrec was born in 1864 in Albi, France, and took up painting as a child whilst nursing two broken legs. Lautrec, an accomplished illustrator, painter and lithographer, found pleasure in portraying the picturesque and often humorous side of the bohemian nightlife of late nineteenth century Paris. Lautrec's regular night-spots included the Moulin Rouge, the circus, the theatre and several Parisian brothels and he captured his impressions of these places and there inhabitants in portraits and sketches of striking originality and power. Some good examples are La Goulou Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892), Au Salon de la rue des Moulins (1894) and Jane Avril dancing (1892), all of which are shown below.

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However with films like Zaza, they used a different concept of design all together, using fine art as a template.

>From this point on, all the major production companies began to experiment around the old fashioned square photo and block text method of work. Some companies chose to take the look of photography to a higher plane using Ariel, circular and eventually panoramic images while some experimented w

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Approximate Word count = 923
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Arts