Block-printed movie ads are a lost art. What they can tell us about choosing what to watch today

How do you decide what movies to watch? In a world of rapid-fire video trailers on our social media feeds, it can be easy to forget that we used to depend on print ads in newspapers to figure out what was playing at the local theater.

Many of those ads were created on physical wooden printmaking blocks — inked and pressed onto newsprint and posters. The ads had a lot of heavy lifting to do — for many moviegoers, these static combinations of text and black-and-white imagery were the only way for moviegoers to assess what a movie was about, and whether they might want to see it.

Many of these wooden print molds have long-since been thrown away, but at the Press Room, a printmaking shop in Austin, Texas, about 60,000 of them have been preserved. They’ll be on display at the Southwest Print Fiesta in Silver City, New Mexico, this Friday.

Travis Smith oversees the collection, and he spoke more about it with The Show.

The Press Room

TRAVIS SMITH: Our collection encompasses somewhere between 40,000 to 60,000 pieces and was used to advertise movies, as far as we can tell, from about 1938 to about 1982. These were typically used in newspapers, they were often used in lobby posters or in drive-in posters.

SAM DINGMAN: One of the things that stuck out to me in looking at just a sampling of them is, to my mind, at least as compared to modern movie advertisements, it's much more text forward.

You know, I'm looking at one for a movie called “They Came From Beyond Space,” and then there's not just a tagline, “conquerors from a dying world invade Earth,” but then, like a little summary, “they turn women into robots, enslave men and make cities into places of terror.” It's just, well, you know, so many words.

SMITH: Sure, well, you know, there's a lot of, I'm not gonna say handholding, but you know, you're, you're training a new audience as to what to expect. A lot of these genres were new and cutting edge at the time.

[MOVIE CLIP]

You might not know what a sci-fi movie is in 1958, so somebody has to tell you, it's about aliens from out of this world, you know, you gotta have a lot of excitement. The most salacious words, lots of exclamation points, you know, tight, stylized, so that's exploding or flying off the, off the page.

DINGMAN: So what made you interested in preserving these things?

SMITH: It's a one of a kind collection. I mean, there's, there's no other collection like it in the world as far as we can tell, there's, you know, there's bits and bobs of similar style print cuts out there, but to have this amount all together in one selection is pretty unique.

It really gives you a, a, a broad sampling of American cinema, the pop culture landscape of the time. Industrial history, graphic design history, it's all kind of tied into this one collection.

The Press Room

DINGMAN: Was there anything about the aesthetic of these ads that was a reaction to the fact that they had to be inked and and set on physical paper?

SMITH: There's a lot of different things that these artists and designers were doing to effectively, you know, pump up a boring black and white image. So you'll see a lot of images that are gonna be popping off the page, or maybe scantily clad women in bikinis or an alien, you know, zapping somebody.

But you're also gonna see all sorts of design choices whether it be, are you doing line arts, are you doing a half-tone image, are you doing a photographic reproduction or are you doing a hand-drawn image?

DINGMAN: Yeah, I, I'm glad you brought that up because again just referencing that, that film, “They Came From Beyond Space.” That one seems like a really good case study of what exactly what you were just saying where in the background there's what looks like the reproduction of an image from a newspaper in black and white. 

But then layered on top of that, there's what looks like a kind of hand-drawn image of the aforementioned scantily clad women that you were talking about. So they're, they're kind of trying to get all those design elements in on one poster, it seems like.

SMITH: Oh yeah, no, they, they, they, they would pull all the stops out and you know, the one thing to consider with these is the sizes, right? So, some of these are 1-and-a-half inch by half-inch, some of them are 8 by 10, so, a lot of that would also kind of influence, you know, how much real estate you have, how much data, you know.

How much information can you actually sink into this 1-and-a-half [inch] by 1 [inch], you know, half-inch square, that somebody's quickly flipping through, when looking to, you know, see where they're gonna take their date on Friday night.

DINGMAN: So beyond preserving the history of this time, as you were mentioning and just maintaining the existence of these objects, which, as you were also mentioning, literally don't exist anywhere else.

What do you do with them?

SMITH: Oh yeah, I'm like a kid in a candy store. No, I get to, like, I get to, I get to play around with them all the time, but no, we, we explore the collection quite a bit, mostly through workshops and inviting the public and to actually experience this collection.

Or they actually get to come in and, you know, create their own poster, it's always gonna look different than when you first find the block versus when you actually get that printed image. There's always this aha moment, especially if somebody's never done it before, where they finally kind of realize or understand what they're looking at.

It would be wasted sitting in an archive somewhere, frankly, you know, it, it, it needs to be experienced rather than just observed, if that, if that makes sense.

DINGMAN: In a way, these ads for these movies exist almost more than the movies ever did. I mean, I'm not to denigrate these films or the filmmakers, but, you know, a lot of them haven't necessarily survived.

SMITH: Right.

DINGMAN: You know, they, they don't occupy spaces in the firmament of film history.

[MOVIE CLIP]

DINGMAN: It's almost like these, these ads are like kind of, they stand for an era in storytelling.

SMITH: Yeah, it's, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a distillation, right? How do you get 90 minutes of a story in a, you know,1-and-a-half inch image, right?

That's, that's, that's a lot to ask for an artist, but there's ways to do it that, if you're plugged into the the cultural zeitgeist at the time, you're gonna understand certain words, certain images, right? And there's a very fast, rapid way to not only produce and reproduce these images, but to actually ingest them.

So I think that's super fascinating that, you know, and it's all to, to go to the movies, right? It's all for fun.

DINGMAN: Yeah, and that was such a different era in terms of what movies represented in terms of our ability to have a good time, because these images had to be so captivating that somebody would either see them in a newspaper or walk by them on the street and think, I'm going to physically go to a movie house and buy a ticket and sit in a place that isn't my house and watch this movie.

SMITH:No, yeah, I mean that's, that's the magic of the cinema, right? It's, we're all agreeing in this time in this place that we're going to sit together. And you know, basically hear a story and share an experience, right?

And even though we're strangers for that 90 minutes, we're all hanging out together in this one agreed upon space. There's a lot of beautiful, you know, there's a lot of beauty to that.

There's, that's, that's something that I think is missing in a way, you know, it's very, it can seem isolating to go to the movies, but I think it's really a group activity.