Boj po vítězství Czechoslovak movie poster
Czechoslovak poster for the Soviet post-WWII spy film Boj po vítězství (Бой после победы; English: The Battle after the Victory) from 1972, directed by Villen Azarov based on the novel by Vasili Ardamatsky, and starring Mikhail Volkov, Georgy Zhjonov, and Nikolai Prokopovich.
“Boj” appears to be patterned after Blowfly Black, a typeface designed by Bruce Stainsby that was issued by Mecanorma around 1972. It’s not a direct use, though: poster designer Miroslav Pechánek enlarged the counters, made the stem in b thinner, and replaced the small circular dot on j with a wide rectangular one.
Similarly, “PO VÍTĚZSTVÍ” looks like it started out with Times New Roman. Some details are off, and probably were modified in the process. Most strikingly, O is wider and has a tilted contrast axis, and Z is narrower.
The sans at the top is the wide style of Folio. The small line at the bottom is set in a Bodoni-like style, possibly Empiriana Antikva.
Here’s a short biography of the artist, from a 2015 exhibition (auto-translated):
Miroslav Pechánek (born 1945 in Prague) graduated from the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Prague and started out as a sign painter. In 1967, he became artist of the Regional Museum in Písek, where his first posters were created. Since 1970 freelance graphic designer (member of the Association of Applied Graphics, Prague), when he mainly devoted himself to book and poster typography. His work has won many important awards, has been presented at many exhibitions and book fairs, and published in prestigious professional magazines.
2 Comments on “Boj po vítězství Czechoslovak movie poster”
Hi Florian,
Thank you so much for the additional identifications, and the added information! All those little changes don’t immediately register to the untrained eye, but they certainly add up.
Cheers!
You’re welcome! :)
For the roman caps for “PO VÍTĚZSTVÍ”: several glyphs including P, V, S strike me as typically Times New Roman. I don’t know if the designer redrew it from scratch and opted for different forms for O and Z, or whether he maybe mixed different typefaces. These two letterforms could be borrowed from Goudy Oldstyle, which was available in the ČSSR as Veneziana obyčejná.
I think we can add one more interesting font ID: I previously overlooked Miroslav Pechánek’s signature, shown rotated in the lower right part. The condensed sans with the straight-sided rounds likely is Pražské kamenné.