Who Made the Film's Face? — When Anonymous Advertising Becomes an Independent Graphic Work
When you remember a film, the first thing that surfaces is often not the story but a single image. A face split into red and black, title type placed with some kind of intent, the vertical sheet that hung in the theater lobby. The film ends, but its "face" stays behind.
"The Art of Film Posters in Japan: Revisited," now running at the National Film Archive of Japan (NFAJ), takes that face and asks, head-on, who made it. The show runs from April 7 to July 26, 2026. On the seventh floor, more than ninety posters — mostly made between the 1960s and the 1980s — are on the walls. The end is near.
The venue: the National Film Archive of Japan in Kyobashi, Tokyo. Photo: Asturio Cantabrio (Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Starting From "Anonymous Advertising"
For a long time, Japanese film posters had no author's name.
The NFAJ says this plainly: film posters "have been made anonymously under the control of production and distribution companies." Put the star's face up large, make the title stand out, announce the release date. Legibility came first, and no one asked who had drawn it. That is, after all, what advertising is supposed to be.
What makes the exhibition interesting is that it doesn't reject this premise. Instead, from both inside and outside that frame, it picks out the ones that wouldn't fit. Within the history of anonymous advertising, there really are single sheets that insist, "isn't this a graphic work that ought to be signed?" The show returns the author's name to those sheets, one by one.
The first chapter is given over to the postwar era of the "drawn" poster. Hisamitsu Noguchi, Shigemi Hijikata. While answering the demands of the star system, they tried to capture the quality of Forbidden Games and other foreign films in a painterly style. What matters here is the order of things: authorship was already germinating inside anonymous craftsmanship. The signed poster did not appear out of nowhere in the 1960s.
The 1960s: Film Crosses Into Other Genres
The decisive shift came in the 1960s.
Kiyoshi Awazu, Tadanori Yokoo, Makoto Wada, Eiko Ishioka. Not people who had trained inside the film industry, but a new generation who approached film from the side of graphic design. They didn't know the industry's conventions — which is exactly why they weren't bound by them. In the NFAJ's phrasing, they began exploring their relationship with art film through "free ideas and techniques unbound by the industry's design conventions."
The Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in Kobe. Yokoo, who also made film posters, now has a museum bearing his own name — one designer's later life embodying the exhibition's very theme, the passage from anonymous advertising to graphic work. Photo: KishujiRapid (Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)
What accelerated this was the Art Theatre Guild of Japan (ATG), which began operating in 1962. At first it was an organization distributing foreign art films, and for those releases, even in-house designers brought in expression that broke with the established norms. When ATG moved into low-budget Japanese film production in 1967, that freedom widened further.
What was happening here isn't just a story about design trends. It's that film, art, literature, and theater began to cross on the same single sheet of paper. Someone who had been making theater posters took on a film poster; an avant-garde artist got called into cinema; manga artists and illustrators stood next to the screen. The poster stopped being an appendage of the single genre called film and became a node where multiple genres met.
Each Sheet Stops Being a Summary of the Plot
Scanning the object list, you notice that each poster has stopped "summarizing the plot."
The sheet Tadanori Yokoo made for Nagisa Oshima's Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969) doesn't explain the film's content. If anything, Yokoo's own silkscreen-like image-world comes forward and stands in tension with the film. It isn't the designer serving the director; it's more like two authors facing each other across the same work.
Nagisa Oshima at Cannes, 2000 — director of Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, whose poster Tadanori Yokoo designed. Photo: Rita Molnár (Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.5)
Eiko Ishioka, credited jointly with Haruo Takino, made the poster for the Japanese release of Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1980). This image, created specifically for Japan, is remembered with a different intensity than the American version. A Japanese designer gives an imported film another "face" — you can see how the work of distribution contained something close to translation, or re-creation.
The poster Makoto Wada made for the Sogetsu Cinematheque screening program "Horror and Fantasy" (1967) isn't even for a single film to begin with. It takes the screening itself, the very place where film is watched, as the object of design. Film culture didn't live only on the screen; it moved through the design of the space around it as well.
The crossing with literature is visible too. The poster for Almost Transparent Blue (1979, directed by Ryu Murakami) by Kohei Sugiura and Hitoshi Suzuki: a novelist directs his own work, and designers with a background in book design take part. The fourth chapter lines up Genpei Akasegawa, Seiichi Hayashi, Koichi Sato — and Noriyoshi Ohrai, who painted The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Ohrai's oil illustration, made for Japan, was later used overseas as well: a case of a Japanese film poster, in reverse, making the "face" of a film for the rest of the world.
Outside the Screen, the Film Remains
This site is about what remains after a work ends. The film poster overlaps with that subject almost literally.
When the run ends, the film leaves the theater. The print goes back to the vault, and sometimes the very means of watching it is lost over time. The survival rate of Japanese films from the 1910s is estimated at 0.2%, and there is an enormous body of films that you cannot see even if you want to (as touched on in the same NFAJ's work of film preservation). At that point, a single poster can remain as the only visual trace of a lost film.
The poster is the film's afterimage. And while being an afterimage, it can hold an intensity that lets it be seen on its own. Even if you haven't seen the film, a Yokoo sheet stands as a Yokoo sheet. When the work disappears, its "face" survives, self-standing. That the NFAJ collects not only film but posters, scripts, and stills is likely a sign of the recognition that film culture extends beyond the screen.
One visitor, after walking the exhibition, wrote that "there were also many illustrated posters, the kind you don't see much anymore, and it was interesting," and noted that maybe there should be abstract posters like these today too (from a publicly posted visit note on note). Today's film posters have converged fairly firmly on arranging the actors' faces in neat rows. Legible, clean, and — in most cases — made by no one you can name. The circuit of "the poster that carries its author's name," once opened in the 1960s, may now be closing again.
A Small Reservation About Calling It "Graphic Art"
At the end, I want to pause for just a moment.
Exhibiting film posters as "independent graphic works" carries real value. It returns names to work that had been buried in anonymity and treats it legitimately as an object of design history. That is a belated respect.
Still, renaming them "art" comes with a small loss. However self-standing they look, posters were also advertising, commissioned to announce a release and pull in an audience. If you erase that doubleness — being a work while also being printed matter charged with a function — the interest, paradoxically, thins out. It would also be a shame if the craftsmanlike work of first-chapter figures like Noguchi and Hijikata, who raised the quality within the anonymous frame, were tidied away as a mere opening act for the story of "the signed avant-garde." Authorship doesn't belong only to those who have names.
So the richest way to watch this exhibition is probably this: not to ask whether it's art or advertising, but to see how far it managed to become a work while never ceasing to be advertising. It's in that swing, that range, that the heat of the 1960s–80s film poster lives.
Who made the film's face? An exhibition that answers that question with more than ninety proper names closes on July 26. There isn't much time left to see it.