From a 4 August Antiques Road Show; appraisal by Nicholas Lowry

From the 14 July Antiques Road Show; Appraisal by Nicholas Lowry

Documenting Egyptian Poster Varieties

People collect things for a variety of reasons. They collect film posters sometimes because they need to make affordable investments. Sometimes they collect them because they like the graphic art, and sometimes these two motivations are combined. I like to collect Egyptian posters because they are beautiful but fragile remnants of a colorful history.

Whatever the reason for its existence, a film poster collection has more meaning if the collector is aware of the subtle variations that often exist for posters advertising the same film title. Film posters can vary because they were made for different reasons, made at different times, made in different locations, made with different equipment, or made with different designs.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of owning a film poster
collection is the research that goes into documenting and understanding these variations.

In Egypt, film posters sometimes change because the companies that distribute the films change. This may involve only a minor change in poster appearance such as blocking out the name of the old distributor in the bottom border and overprinting the name of the new one. This would happen in cases where the lithograph plates used by a former distributor are still available to the new distributor.

In other cases, if the new distributor no longer has access to the old distributor's printing plates (this seems to be the most common case), he will have a new plate made that resembles the old one as closely as possible. In both cases, artists draw the poster designs directly on the printing plate. Often the signed names of the artist or artists will be different for the old and new versions, but obviously at least one of the artists is a copyist.

Here is an example of a poster variation for an Egyptian film:

Version A

Version B

Posters for the 1967 Zoheir Bekir film A Crazy Man's Love Affairs, starring Farid Shawqi and Nadia Lutfi

Information printed on the posters tells us that this transition involved changes in distributor, printer and artist. The distributor for Version A was The General Company for Film Marketing and Distribution, while the distributor for version B was The General Egyptian Institute for Cinema. The printer of the style A poster was The H.H. Gasour Arabic Cinema Printing Company, the printer for the Style B poster was the Al-Nasr Printing Company. The artist for the Style A poster was Gasour himself, the owner of the printing company. The Style B poster is not signed by an artist. Based on the loss of detail in the Style B version, I conclude that the Style A is the earlier version, but no printing dates are given on either poster so I don't know exactly how much time passed between the two versions.

Here is a similar pair of poster variations for an Egyptian film:

Version A

Version B

Posters for the 1996 Samir Seif film Of Days and Dogs, starring Nour El-Sherif and Dalal Abdel Aziz

In this case the distributor did not change. The same distributor may have needed to print more posters after reusing his first litho plate for something else. Style A is signed by the artist Sami, and Style B is signed by the artist Walid Wahig. Neither poster tells us the printer name. Distribution was done by two companies, Farid Shawqi's Artists Union Company and Mohammad Hassan Ramzi's Nasr Films Company. The fact that two distribution companies were involved may explain the existence of two poster types, but if so I do not know how or why.

These varieties have nothing to do with anything that would be called a "rerelease." They were apparently brought about because of a change in distributor in one case and a poster stocking and printing requirement in the other.

I don't think "rereleases" as we know them in the US play much of a role in the Egyptian film industry. Once a film is put out for distribution, there are usually no end dates or renewal dates for that distribution, but there are exceptions. I've seen distribution contracts where these dates were specified, but distributors usually just keep the films and the posters in stock and distribute them to cinemas as long as demand exists.

There is plenty of variation in these Egyptian film
posters, but it seems to be more more complex, small-scale and unpredictable than what I've seen in other countries.

Visit the Movie Poster Page!

Appraisal by Nicholas Lowry

The volume shown above is a 100-year retrospective on Egyptian film, published last December by Cairo's Al-Helal magazine. It is an anthology of articles covering various aspects of film and the making of films in Egypt during that period.

In looking it over about a week ago I noticed that over 70 images from my Egyptian film posters website had been included, with no acknowledgment of source!

I sent them an email (helalmag@yahoo.com) suggesting it would have been nice if they had thanked me for doing all that work for them, but got no reply. This is because in Egypt publications apparently do not credit sources for published images. They were probably puzzled that they heard from me. I looked at a few other journals and saw the same practice was being followed in them too, on all images. They just print, sometimes have a caption, but never mention the source. A couple of examples of images taken from my site as they appeared in the Al-Helal anthology:

The artist's name is Moaty

But Which "Son of King Kong"? I'm mystified and can't find any information about this one.