written by Wioletta Kazimierska-Jerzyk (08.11.2020)
translated by the Editorials Team (31.12.2020)
A poster is said “to have to do something”: to talk, shout, appeal, persuade, exhort, sing (we have quoted this Jan Lenica’s deep truth about a singing poster more than once…). This poster is laughing!
Let us try to imagine the situation that Jerzy Treutler (on the artist’s work see: Jerzy Treutler. Grafik Projektant. Retrospektywa oraz Mój pies Wulkan) outlines in an interview conducted by Ewa Reeves1:
The Film Rental Center (the monopolistic distributor in the times of the Polish People’s Republic), when obtaining another film, organizes a screening for graphic designers. The reader reads the dialogues. None of the artists knows who will receive the commission to paint the poster. So it is better to make sure earlier what they will display, at least for general gist. Because maybe it is better not to come at all…
Jerzy Treutler – a lover of American cinema – goes to the screening of The Pathfinder, a film made in 1969, based on the adventure novel by an American author, James Fenimore Cooper. This title is the third part of the famous The Leatherstocking Tales (in Poland more commonly known as The Hawk’s Eye Pentalogy). The Pathfinder has been present in Poland since 1928, when the first translation of the book was published. Treutler gets a commission for a movie poster.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the film is a Franco-West German-Austrian-Romanian co-production. Moreover, it was extracted from a four-episode television series (broadcast in West Germany and France) and was shown in the cinemas in Eastern Europe as a single picture. Romanian co-director, Sergiu Nicolaescu, whose name appears as the second on the Polish poster – otherwise a very effective and, of course, a regime-supporting artist – was not mentioned at all in the German and French TV versions. Polish film magazines wrote briefly about the film at the appropriate time2. To find out more, you have to look for the titles given by the local European distributors, because the film is known under various titles: Aventura in Ontario (Romania), Dobrodružství v Ontáriu (Czechoslovakia), Indiankaland Ontarioban (Hungary), Die Lederstrumpf-Erzählungen, Teil 3: Das Fort am Biberfluss (West Germany / TV), La legende de bas de cuir, episode 3: Aventures en Ontario (France / TV). As you can see, only the German title emphasizes the adventures of the main character, not the charm of Lake Ontario, which is sometimes said to be the strongest point of Cooper’s novel. The TV series was said to be an exciting production at the time, prepared as a Christmas gift for viewers and able to get especially young people off the streets3.
Of course, not everyone got caught up in this tale of the myth of American masculinity, which is about being both civilized and wild in a frame of self-conscious transformation4. So we will not find Leather Stocking (the main character of Natty Bumppo) on Treutler’s poster. The entire composition is filled with a pale face… adorned with an Indian plume in which every other feather is red! The Indians painted them in this colour only when they decided to commemorate an outstanding militant act. However, the poster does not show the expression of a honoured warrior at all. Instead, we can see the shape of a white head filled with a toy figurine of a British hussar, who is about to fall backwards being struck by an Indian arrow – this is probably Major Dunham (whose daughter Mabel is more important for the plot than he himself). The main colours of the composition – of course – remind us that the action takes place during the colonial war between Great Britain and France: the former are the allies of the main character growing up with the Delewars, the latter conspire with the Iroquois (Dunham falls on their arrows).
What to do with this poster which looks like an abstract composition, formally most resembling the rhythmically arranged decoration of the Tutankhamen mask? Well, for Treutler as a poster designer, the main challenge was to add his own contribution to the film5. As in the case of The Stagecoach, the artist saw in The Pathfinder “a dramatic story, but intended for big children”6. There is no point in looking for a “real Indian” in this composition, as well as Juliette Villard’s (Mabel) beauty or the landscapes glorified in the novel. Perhaps it looks like “a square peg in a round hole”, which the artist himself gladly admitted7. But that is good for poster lovers. The poster was not able to either help or harm the distribution of the film at the time, but it entered the history of the Polish School of Posters under the slogan “this is how posters about the wild west are made in Poland”🙂. The quality of this graphic proposal and the difference it makes can be seen on the website dedicated to spaghetti westerns. All the posters created for The Pathfinder are published there. And which one would you choose? None of the serious ones. Am I right?
This movie might have been liked in the 1970s, yet I am only interested in this poster. But not only because it is a kind of ironic representation – as it seems to me – referring to the protagonists’ stereotypical character, especially their aesthetic representation; not only because Treutler makes fun of the boyish solemnity of the European western. I like the puzzle the artist created and how much it says about posters of the time. When we think of the Polish School of Posters as a accumulation of brilliant ideas, we should also remember how complex they were conceptually.
By the way, the “real” Indian was used by Treutler a year later in a social poster entitled Apply health and safety rules and it won’t harm a hair on your head. This poster is laughing too. And so hard!
1 Ewa Reeves, Rozmawiając z Jerzym Treutlerem…, w: Jerzy Treutler. Grafik Projektant. Retrospektywa, red. Ewa Reeves, Muzeum Plakatu w Wilanowie, Warszawa 2020, s. 128–147.
2 „Filmowy Serwis Prasowy” 1971, nr 17 , s. 19–20; „Film” 1971, nr 41, s. 15.
3 allerlei2013riffmaster, James Fenimore Cooper – Ledertrumpf – Teil 1: Der Wildtöter (Film – ZDF) (1969), 23.03.2017, https://meinsammelsuriumblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/james-fenimore-cooper-ledertrumpf-der-wildtoeter-film-zdf-1969/.
4 Colin A. Clarke, Like a Mirror Reflecting Itself: Natty Bumppo, The Virginian, and the Fate of the American Frontier, James Fenimore Cooper Society Website, https://jfcoopersociety.org/articles/SUNY/1997SUNY-CLARKE.HTML.
5 Ewa Reeves, Rozmawiając z Jerzym Treutlerem…, s. 137.
6 Tamże.
7 Tamże.