• Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde TASCHEN cover with a wide-eyed woman's face and red and blue type
  • Russian Avant-Garde film posters book title page facing a red and black October poster with stacked faces
  • Contents page in white on black facing a red-tinted crowd with flags, from the Russian Avant-Garde posters book
  • Foreword of the Russian Avant-Garde posters book with a yellow and red poster of a face in round metal goggles
  • Essay opener in the Russian Avant-Garde posters book with a red-tinted portrait of a man smoking a pipe
  • Russian Avant-Garde posters book spread with a Symphony of a Big City poster: camera, skyscraper and legs
  • Jimmy Higgins poster spread in the Russian Avant-Garde posters book, pink and red figures and searchlight beams
  • Wide October poster across two pages of the Russian Avant-Garde posters book, tall blue Cyrillic letters and photos
  • Russian Avant-Garde posters book spread: a red and pink poster of a woman's face beside a city skyline
  • Turksib poster in the Russian Avant-Garde posters book, a steam locomotive charging forward in brown, red and black
  • Russian Avant-Garde posters book spread with a startled woman's face cut out against blue, the cover image
  • Archival film photos beside a poster of a woman's face half covered by lace, from the Russian Avant-Garde posters book
  • Man with a Movie Camera poster in the Russian Avant-Garde posters book, a woman's legs fused with a tripod camera
  • Russian Avant-Garde posters book spread with a black and white typographic poster and a small poster of a mill
  • Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm poster across a spread of the Russian Avant-Garde posters book, yellow letters on blue
  • Russian Avant-Garde posters book spread: a man in a tuxedo with a saxophone on a red and yellow film poster
  • Russian Avant-Garde posters book spread: a rider on a red horse beside a face in a cap, under bold Cyrillic type
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TASCHEN

Russian Avant-Garde Film Posters Book: Soviet Design, Typography & Cinema

Russian Avant-Garde Film Posters Book: Soviet Design, Typography & Cinema

$30.00 USD
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Before Soviet Realism became official art doctrine, there was a short window when film posters in the USSR were some of the most radical graphic design on earth.

Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde collects 250 film posters from the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, revealing a surprising world of innovative aesthetics. These designs show the experimental avant-garde of the early USSR at full strength, in the years before that freedom was closed down.

The visual language is unmistakable: bold colors, dramatic angles, and eye-catching typography. Faces are cropped and enlarged until they fill the sheet, figures tilt across diagonals, photographs collide with flat color, and lettering becomes architecture. The posters had to sell films on the street, so they had to stop people in their tracks, and they still do.

Much of this work grew out of Constructivism and the montage thinking of Soviet cinema itself. Designers borrowed the camera's tools, close-ups, extreme angles, cuts, and repetition, and translated them into print. Cinema of the period was experimenting with how images could be edited to create meaning, and the posters were doing the same thing on paper.

The influence runs straight through the century: into modernist graphic design, punk and post-punk record sleeves, protest posters, and a long line of contemporary campaigns that reach for the same energy. If you have ever set type on a diagonal or slammed a cropped face against a block of red, you are working in this tradition.

In Signals, this one is pure reference fuel: 250 lessons in composition, color, and type that never stop paying off.

Why Russian avant-garde poster design still matters

Russian avant-garde poster design still matters because it showed how far graphic communication could be pushed when designers treated type, photography, and color as raw material. Its angles, crops, and contrasts remain a core part of the visual vocabulary of designers, art directors, and filmmakers today.

Who this book is for

For graphic designers, poster designers, typographers, art directors, illustrators, and filmmakers. For the RIOT and vandal_ crowd who build bold visual systems and want to see where so many of the moves came from, and for anyone who loves cinema history told through its graphics.

Product details

  • Title: Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde
  • Subject: Soviet film posters of the 1920s and early 1930s
  • Publisher: TASCHEN
  • Edition: 45th Ed.
  • Languages: German, French, English
  • Inside: 250 film posters from the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s
  • Category: Film and graphic design, print book

FAQ

How many posters are in the book?
The book shows 250 film posters from the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s.

What period does it cover?
The experimental avant-garde of the early USSR, before Soviet Realism became official art doctrine.

What languages is it in?
This edition is in German, French, and English.

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