to Pedro's eyebrows, to María Antonia's charms, to Pepe El Toro's biceps, and Katy's eyesthose eyes? Like a flower that blooms and dies in a day, few objects are as ephemeral as the poster which, if lucky, will end up yel lowing on a wall held by four tacks covered with fly excrement.But the movie poster of the 1940s and 50s-like the freeways, housing projects, dams and frauds of president Miguel Aleman's regime in Mexico was evidence of a new,modern identity which was being built: a gallery of emblematic figures that takes us back to a profound and lasting image of ourselves, beyond deceitful mirrors and deceptive studio photographs. The content of the Mexican Golden Age's movie pos ter fed on the Churubusco Movie Studio's version of Hollywood myth; its form fed on the artistic, typographical and design novelties of powerful poster making tradition of both its high- andlow-brow variants. The film aesthetic itself is nowhere to be seen . While lobby cards allude to the movie's plot and their pictures are shots taken during the filming process or photomon tages, generally, posters depended on the charm of the lead characters. As Billy Wilder said : "1 have reached a conclusion: the best posters are Polish . Why can 't we do that? The answer is that here they insist on the actors' looks and then their lawyers come to discuss even the slightest detail. " An inherent part of the star system, the mid-century posters idealize the stars of the silver screen as well as their photographs: proposing emblematic
images, pocket or wall fetishes that remind us what we could have been if we were not who we are; and I do not mean handsome or beautiful but rather paradigmatic role models: brave like Jorge, tough like Maria, evil like Miguel, whores like Andrea, pimps like Victor, mothers like Sara . A Historie Chat The unmistakeable Mexican movie poster of the mid century is an offspring of fascism on two fronts . Firts, due to Hollywood's industry crunch during World War 11, our movie industry's market broadened favoring greater investment on posters; second due to Franco's coup in Spain, a handful of graphic artists and designers such as José Espert, Ernesto Guasp, Germán Horacio Robles, Francisco Rivero Gil and the brothers Juanino and Josep Renau fled to Mexico. They found a dignified way of life in commercial illustration as well as a way of coming to terms with the vocations they had lost through defeat and exile. In the beginning it all seemed like a movie. It was 1937 and in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway, David Álfaro Siqueiros and Josep Renau were at a restaurant in Valencia, which was the provisional site of the Republic's government. They had just finished dinner and were chatting while enjoying a bottle of whiskey. Renau, who was not yet thirty years-old but already head of Fine Arts in the Republican government, was amazed by both the writer and th e painter. Siqueiros indeed awed him most, as his ideas about art coincided surprisingly with his own .
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Four years befo re, Siqueiros had completed the first Chicano mural paintings in California, Tropical America and Portrait of Mexico Today while exploring the potential that industrial technical resources represented for painting : the still photo, film documentation processes and the projector used to resolve dynamic perspective problems in murasl; fast-drying acrylic car paint; the airbrush as a substitute for the paintbrushes and the spatula . He knew his discoveries were already being used by poster makers but he did not consider it important: "Pos ter makers had of course already started to use small airbrushes and quick drying paint instead of traditional paint but they were precisely that-poster makersand those materials were used tor a minor, grotesque art, commercial ads, posters." " 15 it really a minor art, David?" Renau might have said . By that time, he was also exploring the new roads of art and had painted an anti-fascist mural in the Docker's Labor Union of Valencia using optical instruments, an airbrush and acrylics. The fact is that two years later, triggered by the rise to power of the generals, the brilliant head of Fine Arts for the Republican government would help trigger the political poster movement which would have important consequences both in terms of aesthetics and propaganda . The posters created by José Espert, Arturo Ballester, Mauricio Amster and Renau himself, among others, frequently resorted to the photomontage and airbrush techniques. A conference given by Siqueiros at the University of