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Upon his move to Munich in 1926, Jan Tschichold (1904–1972) was commissioned by Michael Demmel, director of the newly opened Munich branch of the Phoebus Palast cinemas, to design posters advertising current screenings. Between February and December 1927, Tschichold produced some thirty posters for this cinema at a rapid clip—eight of which can be viewed here. Using consistent elements—diagonally tilted planes of color, film stills, off-center geometry, and mechanical-looking typography arranged within open compositions—Tschichold established a distinctive visual code to capture the dynamic properties of cinema. Citing the firm’s insolvency, Tschichold ceased to design posters for the Phoebus Palast by January 1928. The artist Carl Otto Müller (1901–1970) was hired to replace him and, over the course of 1928, created almost forty posters for the theater. Stylistically, Müller posters—such as the four presented here—retain certain of Tschichold’s formal devices such as the tilted typography, abstract forms, and even a circular film still (in the case of his Donna Juana poster below). But in place of Tschichold’s clean typography, Müller employed a more expressionistic hand-lettering. According to Martijn Le Coultre, Müller’s posters were executed more cheaply than Tschichold’s, as “linocuts printed in two colors on inferior paper.” One might even characterize Müller’s posters as pastiches of Tschichold’s, lacking a commitment to the principles that informed them and produced at a reduced cost.
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