You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know
+ Salut les cubains
Posters for two short films by Agnès Varda.
Role: Graphic Designer
Both of these posters were created for an article entitled The Affiches of Agnès, a long-form look at the posters for the French film director Agnès Varda.
Despite Varda's popularity, when I began writing the article I was shocked to discover that, unlike many of her nouvelle vague contemporaries, her films had not inspired many modern fan posters — though in retrospect, the masculinist bias of so much fan culture makes this much less surprising. (Though the article did include a number of exceptions that prove the rule.)
And so, as a visual conclusion to the article, I created posters for Varda’s short 1963 ode to revolutionary Cuba, Salut les cubains, and her 1986 tribute to the Cinémathèque française, You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know.
While I was writing the article, I attended a workshop led by legendary designer Andrzej Klimowski. Klimowski, one of the stars of the Polish Poster design movement, shared some of his techniques, and then toward the end of the session, encouraged us to use some limited materials that were on hand to make a poster by hand.
With Varda very much on my mind, I developed this rough idea for a poster that would contain all the film's credits on a graphic representation of stairs.
When I made my digital posters a short while later, I took inspiration from my rough workshop poster: the handmade aspects found their way into the Cubains poster, while I took the layout idea and applied it to a photo of the actual stairs from Stairs.
