10,000 Early Film Posters Collected By UT Austin Are Now Free To Print
Images via ID 121004341 © Calvin L. Leake | Dreamstime.com and The Walt Disney Studios / IMDb
Back in 2018, when the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin first announced plans for its Movie Poster Collection, visitors could browse some 500 retro posters and print them to be pasted on their walls. Since then, the archive has expanded to feature about 10,000 high-res artworks.
Spotted by Recomendo, the archive includes digitized posters, film stills, press books and lobby cards from the pre-Photoshop days when promotional visuals had to be hand-drawn. Much of the imagery is pretty provocative, and having come from a different time—the 1940s through 1970s—many of the posters would have been deemed sexist today, with skin-baring illustrations of women being a common advertising tactic.
A bulk of the Harry Ransom Center’s collection is derived from the Interstate Theater Circuit, a chain that had overseen almost every movie theater in Texas.
While the posters can be viewed and downloaded for free, it’s worth noting that they’re only meant for personal and educational use, as the center does not own the rights to them. To incorporate the illustrations in commercial artworks, please contact the Harry Ransom Center.
[via Lifehacker and Recomendo, images via various sources]
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