Vintage Polish Posters | Winda Na Szafot | Jan Lenica

Elevator to the Gallows (Frantic in the US and Lift to the Scaffold in the UK) is a 1958 French crime thriller film directed by Louis Malle, starring Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet as illicit lovers whose murder plot starts to unravel after one of them becomes trapped in an elevator. The scenario was adapted from the 1956 novel of the same name by Noël Calef. Associated by some critics with film noir, and introducing new narrative, cinematographic, and editing techniques, the film is considered an important work in establishing the French New Wave and the New Modern Cinema. The improvised soundtrack by Miles Davis and the relationship the film establishes among music, image, and emotion were considered ground-breaking. The poster artist Jan Lenica (1928-2001) was a Polish graphic designer and cartoonist. A graduate of the Architecture Department of Warsaw Polytechnic, Lenica became a poster illustrator and a collaborator on the early animation films of  Walerian Borowczyk. Between 1963 and 1986 he lived and worked in France, and from 1987 he lived and worked in Berlin. In 1974 he lectured on poster art at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. He was a professor of graphic, poster, animated cartoon for many years at German high schools and the first professor of the animation class at the University of Kassel, Germany, in 1979. Lenica’s work made one of the key chapters in the history of Polish art of the second half of the twentieth century. His fame and recognition in Poland as well as international acclaim was earned by his poster art and animated films, the two areas in which he was considered one of the world’s finest artists. He is regarded as a forerunner of modern animation.