Here is another masterpiece from the golden age of Czech cinema posters and winner of the 1973 Cannes International Film Festival Grand Prix for the Best Poster. It was created by the Czech artist Olga Poláčková-Vyleťalová for Robert Bresson's A Gentle Woman (1969). The Czech title itself adds yet another layer of beauty and meaning . . . Něžná or Tenderly.
Bresson's first color film, A Gentle Woman—adapted from the Dostoevsky short story A Gentle Creature—tells the heartbreaking story, in flashback, of Elle, the beautiful but smothered and disaffected wife of a Parisian pawnbroker. Told in the classic ascetic and expressionless style of Bresson with non-professional actors (includig the sad and beautiful Dominique Sanda), A Gentle Woman confounds attempts at communication and diversion. The film sutures the viewer into the perpetual state of Elle's ennui and growing sense of isolation and discontent.
The poster alone is a work of art: Magritte meets late-sixties ad art. It manages to simultaneously capture the moods of objectification and hiddenness; elegance and suffocation; radiance and impending doom. Moreover, the image does not simply attempt to "sell" the movie, but rather to convey the idea, the abstraction, of the film's tragic protagonist. This attests to Bresson's film being something more than a thing to be consumed; rather, it is an idea to be contemplated, a world to be experienced.
The time is out of joint ...