Engel
Artist
Hans Hillmann
Germany, 1925 - 2014
Date1973
Dimensions33 x 23 in. (83.8 x 58.4 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LinePoster House Permanent Collection
Object numberPH.905
DescriptionThis poster advertises the 1973 release in Germany of Angel, the 1937 American romantic comedy by the great director Ernst Lubitsch starring Marlene Dietrich. (It should not be confused with the German musical comedy Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] of 1930, the first feature-length German sound film and the one in which the sophisticated German actress made her name under the direction of Josef von Sternberg.) While the various posters for the original 1937 release of Angel also featured Dietrich’s name above the title, like most film posters of this era, their compositions combined illustrations or photographs of the lead actors with much printed text. This one, however, is based on a close-up photograph highlighting the luminous features of Dietrich herself, probably the only one of the actors still familiar to most filmgoers in 1973. The film-distribution company Walter Kirchner Neue Filmkunst, whose name appears on the poster at lower right, was one of several institutions that played a role in the emergence of a new German film industry after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. Walter Kirchner, established in Göttingen in 1953, initially imported high-quality foreign films that had never been seen in Germany. It later introduced early German classics. This was one of many extraordinary posters produced for the company by its chief graphic designer Hans Hillmann, whom Kirchner hired straight out of art school. It was one of the last to promote the offerings of Walter Kirchner Neue Filmkunst which closed the following year.On View
Not on view
