THE POSTER AND ADVERTISING MATERIALS COLLECTION
di Donata Pesenti Campagnoni

“We are even collecting posters now”, Honorè de Balzac declares in his novel Le cousin Pons, talking about the passion and pleasure that collecting can unleash, whatever the object being collected is. Clearly the French writer believed collecting posters exemplified how a fashion had become so obsessiv as to lose any form of selective criteria, leading to the collection of objects that have no value of any kind; like posters, in fact.
Today, Balzac’s ironic note makes us smile, even more so if we consider the market value these goods hold and the opinion expressed a few years ago by Alberto Bolaffi: “posters represent the “gold ground paintings of the twentieth century”. And Maria Adriana Prolo’s far-sightedness is once again underlined. In the period in which she had begun creating her museum and forming the splendid collection of posters many shared Balzac’s opinion and a poster – even more so a film poster – certainly was not something which would sell for a high price at the most prestigious auction houses. Prolo, in any case, swam against the current, because she knew that posters clearly contribute to the life of a film and makes it possible to tell the (hi)story of the Seventh art through “wall” pictures, often of undisputable artistic value. Not by chance does the painter Marussig write: “film posters are the Museo’s speciality and you can understand how carefully I study everything to do with this subject”. At the time her Museum had been open for only a very few days and it already offered its visitors a considerable number of film testimonials to see, and in just a short time it would continue to grow until the number of items were difficult to calculate, especially in the case of the poster collection. The collection reflects, from its very beginning, a more general interest for silent film and is characterized from the very start by the historic-artistic value of the materials found. Little by little the sound-film era was also documented with items whose present value was unimaginable only a few years ago, and that carry the signature of illustrious artists. In some cases, then, the collection includes pieces from the history of photography and archaeology of the cinema, with a series of splendid posters which go back to Nineteenth century Paris. Yet, alongside these posters, other advertising materials, of no less importance, were purchased, such as the various small posters, lobby cards and brochures which were distributed at the end of a film: these are documents which further enrich the collection and make it a more multi-faceted and truer to life reflection of the complex world of advertising.
To achieve all this, Maria Adriana Prolo constantly pursued, with the help of assistants like Roberto Radicati, an intelligent acquisition policy, which quickly brought her national and international recognition. Even after she left the scene, Prolo would continue to be an example, and her collections continued to grow.
Thanks to this policy the Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s poster and advertising materials collection has reached the extraordinary size of 341,440 pieces which document 19,530 films.
Getting to know this collection in detail has certainly not been a simple and straightforward feat. Although the collection is valued for its importance as a social and cultural record, film posters and, in general, all the goods which gravitate around film production (materials from pre and post production, film making, and everything that celebrates the seventh art and documents its growing popularity) have been objects of inadequate theoretical and methodological studies, at least for the purpose of protecting, preserving and cultivating knowledge in this field. The Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s poster and advertising materials collection has, thus, offered in these last few years a fertile terrain for establishing and studying the criteria and methodologies for the “treatment” these of these documents.