Edinburgh College of Art and Filmhouse present an exhibition of original poster designs to coincide with the 2019 edition of the Italian Film Festival.
This year’s exhibition celebrates the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 – 1975) and Bernardo Bertolucci (1941 – 2018), two towering figures of Italian cinema whose careers began almost contemporaneously in the early 1960s. Both were autodidact filmmakers whose background was in poetry. Pasolini served as Bertolucci’s mentor and the latter served as assistant on Pasolini’s debut feature Accattone (1961) before embarking on his – distinctly Pasolinian – debut The Grim Reaper (1962) at the age of only 21. The pair’s artistic paths then separated, but both their careers were marked by their consistent and inventive merging of poetry and politics, aspects which will be explored in the poster exhibition.