Posters and Advertising Materials

The collection amounts to about 540,000 items, ranging from posters, playbills and various promotional materials produced for film launches. It documents the history of cinema and film-poster design, from the silent era to the most recent productions. From the painterly style of the great illustrators to the latest developments in graphic design, cinema from around the world comes to life on paper, offering a fascinating overview of film advertising and promotion. Among the most valuable posters in the collection are several devoted to pre-cinema, evoking the magic of forms of entertainment that preceded the birth of the seventh art. Rich and diverse, the collection as a whole highlights the importance of the advertising poster as one of the most significant artistic and cultural phenomena of our time.