Movie Posters – Emanuel Cahana, Dream Designer

The movie posters imported to Israel were designed in foreign movie studios as part of the film’s public-relations package. Their designers were usually studio employees, whose names did not appear on the posters, with the exception well-known designers who were not part of the studio team. Identical public-relations materials were sent to distributors around the world and given to the graphic designers at local advertising agencies, who were charged with adapting them to the local market and language, and to the taste of local audiences. As Haim Peled recounted, film distributors would transfer to the advertising agency what he called a “Press Book,” a booklet printed on chrome paper that contained a summary of the movie plot and information about the actors, alongside the original movie poster, 8–10 photographs (studio photographs and film stills) chosen by the producers, and matrixes for printing the images.
These materials served as the basis for creating the advertisements, posters, announcements and diapositives to be projected at the movie house. According to Peled, “the movies were an attraction,” and these items were intended to enhance the excitement.” In this spirit, and in an attempt to stimulate the imagination of viewers, not always in direct relation to the film, Cahana designed the posters and Peled wrote the texts. The collaboration between them was the secret of their joint success, as Peled later admitted. The definition of movie posters as a mass-marketing medium for movies, which belong to the category of popular culture, endowed them with a distinct character. It required the enhancement of the experiential messages presented on the posters, which were not necessarily connected to the narrative of a particular movie. These messages alluded in some cases to the film industry’s operating mechanisms (such as the foregrounding of the movie stars), while also including graphic tools – heroic perspectives, bold colors, chromatic contrasts and a powerful typography. As a mediating element, a link between the movie and its audience, the visual narrative of movie posters, whose syntax was often borrowed from comic strips, was not always compatible to the films they are meant to advertise. Rather than providing concrete information about the film, then, the posters presented a certain atmosphere by means of attractive (sexual, humorous or dramatic) images, alongside verbal texts that promised the audience a particular experience compatible with its cultural profile.
Most of the films designed by Emanuel Cahana were created to advertise foreign films, while some of them were designed for original Israeli productions. A typological survey of the posters for the foreign films will reveal their affinities with the original posters, alongside strategies of adaptation to the target audience. This survey also points to the weave created by the designer, sometimes with the assistance of Haim Peled, who provided the Hebrew title and slogans, in order to communicate to the Israeli audience of the 1960s an experiential message, without exceeding the limits of the ethical and aesthetic dictates that shaped its taste. Some of the posters preserved the original design format, which was supplemented by translated, usually partial information, alongside a range of slogans. In others, the color scheme was changed due to a combination of marketing decisions, economic requirements, and constraints pertaining to the technical possibilities available to the designer. Among these posters were ones whose narrative – created by means of the images and design – was recreated by Cahana based on the public-relations materials for the movies, in order to reveal the operating mechanism of cinematic art and to better adapt it to the needs of local audiences.
The colorful poster for Vittorio de Sica and Carlo Ponti’s film Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, for instance, was copied in full and printed in black-and-white, while obscuring a part of the star’s (Sophia Lauren’s) thighs by covering them with text, adding a title in Hebrew font, and attempting to complete the composition by means of a decorative line. The poster for the British comedy The Iron Maiden was printed in two low-cost colors, in contrast to the five colors of the original poster. By contrast, the compositional structure of the poster for the British drama The Servant, and the image originally printed in black-and-white, were preserved, with the addition of a title designed by Cahana in the Hebrew font “Haim.”

Posters such as that for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train were similarly left in the format designed at the film studio, taking care to preserve the original format and colors (red-black-white) of the poster while replacing the bottom strip of text, which featured the names of the movie stars, with a strip of Hebrew text. The text emphasized the name of the film in red alongside the logo of the Warner Brothers studio, which was enlarged in relation to the original poster. Cahana chose to preserve the portrait of the film’s creator Alfred Hitchcock, as the main visual motif in the poster, and to underscore its production by the Warner Brothers studio, which was already part of Hollywood mythology, as if gazing from Israel towards Hollywood and one of its quintessential symbols.

With the exception of the actor’s names (in Hebrew), which do not stand out, the designer omitted the list of credits, which appeared on the bottom part of the original poster. The advertising text, designed to enhance the visual dimension, announced to Israeli viewers that the film was being projected “for the first time in Israel,” reiterating this statement with the words: “Finally, in Israel.” In other words, this local premiere of Hitchcock’s film (finally) introduced Israeli viewers into the international community of film connoisseurs. Additionally, the words “for adults only,” as required by the Council for the Review of Films and Plays (the Censor’s Office), signified, according to Peled, that the film promised “something enticing, exciting, titillating that might even stimulate suppressed urges.”
Another example of this strategy of copying and changing is evident in Cahana’s poster for the French film The Seventh Juror. Basing the poster on the images from the original film poster, the designer pushed the illustrated image of the undressing girl to the foreground, while delineating the outline of her breasts, which are concealed in the French version, and distancing the photographed portrait of the man into the background. In doing so, he changed the spatial relations between the figures. He positioned the sexual fantasy represented by the

illustrated figure at the center, while relegating the photograph to the background and relying on the combination of ardent shades of yellow and red – in contrast to the more subdued palette of the original poster. He also omitted the names of the actors and credits, thus marketing the film by means of highlighting the renowned promise of French sexuality for the provincial Israeli audience.
Cahana employed a similar strategy of cropping, foregrounding the image and underscoring sexual allusions in the poster for the film Girl of the Night, which was printed in black-and-white. In the poster for Ingmar Bergman’s film The Face, he chose to cut out the expressive portrait, which resembles a woodcut, to spread it out across the entire poster, and to preserve the complementary colors (red and green) of the original poster in the text integrated into the portrait.

The original poster for The Seven Deadly Sins, a film by Roger Vadim, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, among the prominent filmmakers of the French New Wave, underscores the Christian associations of the film title, and alludes to the critical gaze cast by the filmmakers on the conventional norms accepted by the French bourgeoisie. By contrast, Emanuel Cahana chose to focus his poster on a stereotypical image of “Frenchness.” He featured the apple taken from the Tree of Knowledge, which represents one of the Christian sins, alongside a humorous, linear illustration of a naked woman alongside a domesticated snake, with the ripe, bitten apple hovering above her. Explicit sexuality, lightness and an amused take on life are among the components of French culture as seen by outside observers, much like the symbolic connotations of the adjective “Italian” identified by Roland Barthes in his analysis of an advertisement for the French pasta brand Panzani. In this manner, Cahana rejected all allusions to the narrative of the film, its innovative character and its critique of French society, focusing instead on a familiar, popular stereotype and promising the audience nudity, humor, lightness and “French” sex scenes.

In contrast to the strategy chosen for this French film, in his design for the American movie El Sid, Cahana chose the strategy of preserving marketing and structural principles. The poster for this movie, which tells the heroic story of a medieval Spanish knight, reveals the inevitable encounter between the lovers played by movie stars Sophia Lauren and Charlton Heston. Following the designer of the original poster, Cahana chose to represent a historical battlefield against the backdrop of a mountain topped by a castle, setting the film title within a perspectival arrangement that enhances its presence, while the image of the two larger-than-life stars towers over the composition.

Cahana’s technical choices – changes in scale and perspective in order to designate a thematic focal point and distinguish it from the ground, and a view upwards from below – were borrowed from Soviet film posters featured in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The two posters – the original and its Israeli adaptation – combine narrative allusions and dramatic elements that tell a story, yet are different in terms of their compositional structure and chromatic palette. As a result, the thematic focal point is shifted: the color red, identified with the god Mars, which dominates the poster designed by Cahana, shifted the presented narrative to that of a heroic war story with a dramatic love affair in its midst, whereas the rich colors and blue sky, which serve as a background for the pair of lovers in the American poster, present the film as a love story unfolding in the context of war. Yet, one way or another, both war and love were capable of drawing masses of viewers to the movie houses.

It seems that Cahana was well aware of the limits of the Israeli audience’s permissiveness in the 1960s. thus, for instance, when he designed the poster for the film Billy Liar, he chose to use an illustration of the British actor Tom Courtena‎y’s portrait, as it appears on the original poster, and to eliminate the erotic illustration of the cabaret dancer, which appeared as the focal point of the original poster. Instead, he added a collage of photographed film stars, while creating a clear distinction between them and the film’s star.

The tradition of British illustration gave rise to the humorist illustration in the poster for the British film Nothing but the Best. Yet here too, although illustrated posters had already been created in Israel by designers such as Jean David, Paul Kor and others in the 1950s, Cahana chose to forego the erotic, hedonistic illustration, presenting instead photographs of scenes that allude to climactic moments in the film’s narrative. This choice might have stemmed from the concern that the illustration in the British poster may appear to provocative to Israeli eyes, and would fail to awaken a sense of identification during the difficult period of the early 1960s.

Poster for Original Israeli Films
The posters designed by Emanuel Cahana for Israeli films draw their inspiration from two sources: from the visual language of clearly defined film genres, and from a local repository of images. Thus, for instance, the poster for the film Dalia and the Sailors
is shaped by the characteristics of maritime comedies featuring sailors, which were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s – images of leisure, sexual allusions, humor, smiling men in uniforms and lots of blue. Moreover, two years before Menahem Golan directed the movie, Cahana designed a poster for the British film Carry on Cruising, borrowing two illustrated figures – a young woman and an officer – from the original poster. He then borrowed the illustration of the young woman for Dalia and the Sailors, adding to it a humorous collage featuring the photographed portrait of the movie star. The on the ship’s staff were portrayed using a combination of photography and illustration, a technique borrowed from postwar British posters.

1964 1962 1962
Additionally, one can note a certain affinity, in terms of the atmosphere and technique, between this poster and the tourism posters designed by graphic designers such as Jean David, Shmuel Grundman and Paul Kor in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which marketed the Israeli shipping company ZIM’s cruise lines to an international audience.

Jean David Paul Kor, 1960 Shmuel Grundman

The three posters designed by Emanuel Cahana for the films The True Story of Palestine, Eldorado and echo the hegemonic story told by Israeli society. In the words of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, they represent the field of “dominant fictions.” Every community, according to Rancière, upholds preferred representations, which transmit to community members the image of the social consensus built into their identity. This is a repository of images and stories representing historical codes and conflicts, and adapted to the needs of the present. A quintessential example of this type of representation can be identified in the Hollywood film Exodus, which was the source of tremendously positive reception and identification both locally and internationally. Whereas the visual language of the film’s original poster was universal, delineating an affinity between the story of the ship and additional stories of heroism in other places and times, the poster designed by Cahana is centered on a specific historical story – the hegemonic Israeli narrative. In this poster, as in additional examples of posters for Israeli films, Cahana made use of iconic Zionist images, which had been fixed in collective memory as part of the nation-building narrative, and were anchored in national consciousness by means of posters, albums, newspaper photographs and additional propaganda materials.
In the poster for the film The True Story of Palestine, Cahana seems to have sought to reveal the ambivalent nature of the cinematic creation produced by Nathan Axelrod, Yoel Zilberg and Uri Zohar, which documents a chapter in the history of Zionism with a touch of humor directed at its sacred values. Cahana chose to focus on two different registers – the official patriotic register and the popular, everyday register. On the one hand, he assembled a selection of iconic images – a map of the land of Israel and the symbolic structure of the pre-state Tower and Stockade settlements – alongside clenched fists, in the spirit of the Soviet tradition often given expression in local posters. At the same time, he transformed the clenched fists into hands holding a coin in the children’s game “Tree or Pale(stine).” He also filled the area of the Negev Desert on the map with images of figures culled from Westerns, alluding to representations of the frontier in American cinema. The serpentine design of the film’s title thus appears as forging a connection between these two registers. At the same time, whereas the film attempts to examine the hegemonic Israeli story from a relatively subtle critical perspective, which began to emerge in the 1960s, the poster centers on the presentation of the hegemonic story and underplays the critical register. The employment of the sentence “The true story of Palestine” offers, as Barthes would say, an anchor for decoding the meaning of the heroic composition, while the dramatic palette alludes to the reflection of flames and severs the association with a children’s game.

Similarly, in designing the central image in the poster for the movie What a Gang, based on the book by Puts’u, Cahana sought to capture the liminal moment between order and chaos, between the circle Hora dance and youthful ebullience, between the image of the Palmach as a privileged military unit and the mythological experience of its members, echoing Dan Ben-Amotz and Haim Hefer’s book Bag of Lies. The warm background colors allude to the flames of a bonfire and seem to underscore one of the mythological images related to life in the Palmach, while the typography resonates with the movement of the figures in the black-and-white photograph.
Cahana also designed the poster for the first film directed by Menahem Golan, Eldorado, in 1963. At this time, a plan had been drafted for the preservation of the Old City of Jaffa, whose exotic character had been recognized, but it had not yet been transformed into a staged tourist version of this exotic locale. The poster, whose background is gray, features a combination of images capturing the site, which bears signs of historical authenticity, alongside photographs of the characters in the film. It is based on a grid and on the principles of the Swiss poster, which were widely adopted at the time. “Documentary” black-and-white photogrpahs were combined with a portrait of the movie star (Gila Almagor) overlaid by a red filter. The buildings in the background were illustrated as flat forms – a technique common among young designers in Israel, who eschewed the realistic style associated with the previous generation of designers. This poster, whose design is quintessentially modernist, represents an attempt to forge a connection with a hegemonic narrative, which appropriated the history of Jaffa and transformed the “authentic” urban landscape into the site in which the film’s plot unfolds.

In addition to the range of design solutions and unique focus in each of the posters, Emanuel Cahana devoted special attention to their typographic dimension, in an attempt to adapt the letters to the character of the poster. In a large number of posters, he presented manually created adaptations of the font Haim, formed with the assistance of a ruler. In the poster for the film The Good Earth, whose plot unfolds in China, he designed letters that bear a certain affinity to Chinese calligraphy. He also designed calligraphic letters for film titles such as Thirst and Through a Glass Darkly by Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni’s The Night and The Long and the Short and the Tall, some of which are reminiscent of the letters in posters and periodicals issued in the 1920s.

Pesach Ir-Shai, cover for the periodical Tomorrow, 1927
He also designed cursive letters for posters in which he sought to draw the viewers closer and appeal to them in a personal manner, connecting them to the human element in the film plot. In cases where he wanted to underscore the dynamic quality of the film or echo the font used in the original poster, he created titles in italic.

In other cases, as in the posters for the films Veridiana and Exodus, Cahana sought to adapt the Hebrew font to the distinct character of the Latin font. It is worth noting his design of the font for the poster of Cliff Richards’ film Young Ones, alongside the cursive font of the English title. Cahana designed the Hebrew font while integrating positive and negative forms and silhouettes into the singer’s name, in a manner reminiscent of modernist works of the graphic designer Pesach Ir-Shai as early as the 1920s.

In conclusion, in addition to representing a common marketing tool, the illustrated movie posters designed by Emanuel Cahana in the first half of the 1960s offered a solution for communicating with a society of immigrants, who flocked to the movie houses yet had difficulty reading texts in Hebrew. The design of the posters was meant to create an emotional experience, based on tools that were adapted to a wide common denominator without addressing ethnicity, cultural background or gender, in an attempt to minimize feelings of estrangement. For this reason, Cahana removed certain elements that meant little to the Israeli audience, and offered instead a larger number of visual details concerning the climactic moments in the films, underscoring certain elements of the original posters and relegating others to the margins. Ethical and aesthetic codes, which shaped the relatively conservative taste of the Israeli audience, guided the designer’s choice of the represented details. Also significant were economic considerations that dictated the number of colors in the posters, alongside marketing considerations, which sometimes influenced the composition and choice of colors. The visual tools employed to enhance experiential messages were often anchored in the operating mechanism of the film industry, and were also given expression in the choice of graphic elements – photographs, illustrations, compositional structure, perspectival vanishing point, typography, and so forth – all designed to enhance the viewer’s experience.

Emanuel Cahana chose to attend to each poster in a particular manner, and to adapt to each the means and the visual language that best fit the message. Thus, when comparing the original foreign posters to those designed by Cahana, one can identify recurrent patterns, as the formal and syntactic elements are designed anew in relation to each movie, to the local poster and to the target audience. Whereas the design of foreign film posters was based on an attempt to adapt them to local standards and taste, most of the posters for Israeli films designed by Cahana adhered to the national ideological consensus, bolstering the hegemonic center and drawing their iconography from local templates and repositories of images that were charged over time with patriotic sentiments. At the same time, it is clear that in attempting to delineate forms that would infuse certain aesthetic components of the movies with an emotional resonance, he sought to share with the viewers his own enchantment with the magical world of cinema.

Movie posters are part of an advertising campaign unfolding on city streets, on movie-house facades and in the media, whose aim is to draw audiences to the movies. In the 1960s, some of the movie posters featured in Israel were original creations, while others had been imported and translated into Hebrew. Yet others were adapted to local taste by means of compositions that combined elements copied from the original posters with public-relations photographs for the movies, sometimes with added illustrations. In most cases, the titles were translated, and appeared in specially designed Hebrew letters. In the first half of the 1960s, Emanuel Cahana designed a significant number of the illustrated movie posters distributed in Israeli cities. As a tool mediating between the audience and the movie projected on the cinematic screen, the poster was required to speak in the language of its target audience, while presenting symbolic characteristics and attractive aspects of the movie. How was this done? How did Cahana conscript his knowledge and talents to produce posters that met the audience’s standards concerning social, cultural and aesthetic conventions, while representing a wide range of local and imported films in numerous genres – including dramas, thrillers, comedies and musicals?
Emanuel Cahana was born in 1926 in Iasi, Romania, and graduated from the Nicolael Grigorescu Institute of Plastic arts (Institutul de Arte Plastice , Nicolae Grigorescu) in Bucharest. Following his graduation, he was unable to find a job, likely due to the anti-Semitic policy of Romania’s communist regime. He was thus constrained to rely on his technical skills, earning a living by doing odd jobs. In 1958, when the communist regime in Romania imposed severe restrictions on exit visas for Jews, Emanuel Cahana and his wife, Marta, joined Leon and Chaia, Emanuel’s parents, who had already immigrated to Israel, as part of a family-unification process agreed upon by the Romanian authorities. After a short stay on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, the couple settled in Bat Yam, later moving to Holon.
“Even back then [in Romania], he already liked graphics and advertising and was very talented at painting,” his wife Marta would remember years later. “He also loved classical music and read a lot. When we came to Israel, we went frequently to the omvies, which we didn’t have in communist Romania. We saw all the American movies. The Russian ones we had already seen in Romania.”
Within a short time, Cahana became part of the local advertising industry, which had begun to establish itself as a professional field. The large advertising agencies such as Tal-Arieli in Tel Aviv and בינג ליניאל in Haifa already offered their clients general advertising services – on billboards, in newspapers, on Reshet Bet, the commercial radio station established in 1960, and at the movies. He began working at Bass Advertising, moved on to Bauer Advertising, and in 1960 joined Peled Advertising. “He had his big breakthrough with Haim Peled,” says his son, Daniel. “They designed the posters for most of the movies that came to Israel. Using the meager resources available to them at the time, they attempted to present the product by means of fonts, illustrations, paintings and photographs. Every poster and advertisement had its own visual character.” Peled was the advertiser – he translated the movie titles into Hebrew and came up with what he himself called “killer sentences,” such as “Get your handkerchiefs ready, no man will remain dry-eyed,” whereas Emanuel Cahana designed the posters and newspaper advertisements and oversaw their production.
The distribution of illustrated movie posters, which was common in the country in the first half of the 1930s, ended in 1935 with the establishment of the Movie House Association, and was not renewed until the early 1960s. One of the first initiatives of this association, as the designer David Tartakover has noted, was the establishment of guidelines for uniform, framed advertisements that bore a textual message and were printed using letterpress printing. As the number of movie houses in the city grew, the size of the advertisements was reduced, and the marketing efforts shifted to the facades of the movie houses, based on the American approach to advertising at sales points. Monumental images of the movie stars, mostly illustrated from photographs, were presented on the facades, with the addition of three-dimensional decorative elements that were related to the plot, and which formed a monumental, theatrical set.
The manually painted posters created in the first half of the 1930s were based on photographs sent to the distributors by the film studios, which were processed by painters such as David Gilboa, Eliezer Ettinger, Israel Hirsch, גרצוביץ, ישראל הירש זסלבסקי וצייטלין into color linocuts. The posters were mostly composed of two parts that were glued one on top of the other; the illustrated part was printed on a sheet the size of a printer’s sheet, whereas the size of the sheet bearing the textual information, which was printed using letterpress printing, changed according to the amount of text.
This poster format, decided on by the Association of Movie Houses, was preserved over time. In the 1940s, during the tumultuous period of World War II and the ensuing struggle for Israeli independence, when paper and printing colors were scarce, advertising boards on city streets continued to feature typographic texts printed in letterpress printing. The name of the movie appeared in large letters, alongside the names of the actors, the director, the screenwriter and a slogan designed to draw crowds to the movie houses. This format persisted into the 1950s, at which point these typographic movie posters were printed in two colors – black and red.

These informational posters represented a rational-functional approach, which scholars concerned with the effectiveness of advertising associate with a culture dominated by a collective worldview and hierarchical structure. In such a culture, which is centered on ideological issues, everyday concerns are relegated to the margins as useful information that requires no enhancement. Indeed, the illustrated advertising posters for consumer products created by the first generation of graphic designers in Israel, such as Franz Kraus, the Shamir Brothers and Otte Wallish, were initially accompanied by ideologically motivated representations; this style gave way, during the 1940s and 1950s, to modest newspaper advertisements. In the 1950s, the creative energy of Israeli’s graphic designers was mainly channeled for propaganda purposes and to bolster the symbolic visibility of the young state. In addition to propaganda materials created for official institutions, there were posters designed by young designers, Bezalel graduates and newly arrived immigrants – Dan Reisinger, Jean David, Shmuel Grundman, Paul Kor and others. Their language diverged from the prevalent norm of realist representation, was devoid of heroic signs, and was accompanied by illustrations and humor inspired by British and French designers. Advertising initiatives such as large official exhibitions or the advertisements for national companies such as ZIM and El Al, whose target audience was composed of a combination of Israeli citizens, tourists, and international audiences, sought to represent Israel as a modern, cutting-age country in the. At the same time, the local newspapers published advertisements for consumer items that appeared in black-and-white and were the width of a single column, usually printed in letterpress printing and including a title, an advertising slogan, and only rarely also an illustration or a photograph.

The 1960s: The Road to the Movies
In this context, and in conjunction with the first cracks that appeared in Israel’s ideological center, the year 1960 saw the appearance of the first colored movie posters and black-and-white newspaper advertisements designed to promote movies. Haim Peled was one of the first advertisers who began to specialize in advertising campaigns for movies, relying on his experience in the movie-house business in Tel Aviv and on his connections with his father-in-law, Yaakov Davidon, the owner of several movie houses in the city. Peled recounted that he would publish entire pages of advertisements on Thursdays and Fridays in the local newspapers to promote new films released on Saturdays. “Our number of inches,” he wrote in his books, “was among the largest ever seen at the time in the advertising world.” These advertisements contained praise by reviewers who had seen the movies at press screenings, sometimes accompanied by a photograph. The advertisements were arranged by the typesetters at the newspapers with a headline in the “Haim” font and text in the “Frank Riehl” font, and featured special effects such as white letters against a black ground, or various linear decorations according to the instructions of Emanuel Cahana, who designed them within the limitations imposed by the newspaper.

Maariv, November 24, 1962 Maariv, January 17, 1963 Maariv, January 6, 1964
In addition to the advertisements, Peled’s office also began distributing movie posters throughout the city. The posters were designed by Emanuel Cahana, and printed at the printing house Dfus Eyal (Israeli Offset for Export). It was Cahana himself who found the printing house at the end of a wide-ranging search for an offset printing machine that would print posters the size of an entire printer’s sheet (70/100 cm.). “Who would have imagined that a printing house specializing in the printing and binding of religious texts would also print such promiscuous and licentious pictures,” Peled would later comment. Peled’s initiative evolved parallel to the growing role of movies as an agent of acculturation and source of information, as well as a commercial tool for activating nostalgic feelings, of the craved by the waves of new immigrants recently arrived in the country. Cahana approached this task by relying on his affinity for the world of cinema, which – as already noted – had made him into a “natural” creator of advertisements in a field which he loved deeply throughout his life.
During those years, Israel was ranked as one of the countries with the highest attendance at the movies, and as early as 1954, Haifa was pronounced by UNESCO to hold the world record of movie-going (an average of 30 visits per person). From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, the movies served as an important means of satisfying the Israeli public’s urge for nostalgic feelings and needs. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were living in the complex reality created by the traumas of the Holocaust and of expulsion. They had been severed from their cultural roots, were living under difficult economic conditions in crowded housing, and were experiencing threats to Israel’s security from without and numerous types of prejudices from within. Naturally, they sought refuge and solace at the movies. “Walking from small crowded apartments in the centers of large cities into the opulent lobbies of the movie houses built in the 1940s–1960s,” as Oz Almong writes, “the large chandeliers, monumental theaters and heavy velvet curtains triggered numerous memories. Nostalgic childhood recollections surfaced while going to the movies in Israel, even prior to the establishment of the Israeli film industry.”
The moment of exposure to advertising information, and especially to attractive images, sets in motion a process of expectations that is enhanced in the physical sphere outside the cinema – identified as an intermediate space that bridges the gap between the everyday world and the fantasy world of the movies, which reaches its height inside the movie theater. The advertising materials themselves, alongside the design of this sphere, were designed to activate an emotional mechanism and a sense of escapism. Escapism is always a double process, in which the audience enters a majestic movie theater to enjoy the magic of cinematic art, while temporarily eluding the hardships of everyday life. The mechanism of expectations activated by the film industry transforms the viewers into consumers. Movie posters are thus perceived as a component of the act of consumption and as quintessential advertisements, which market a leisure activity rather than a concrete object. According to Judith Williamson, advertisements focus on those product qualities that are meaningful to the consumer. In other words, they translate into symbolic exchange values, and thus delineate a connection between the type of consumer and the type of object, charging the object with meaning for the consumers. This mechanism is also valid in relation to values that are originally symbolic, yet in this case the consumer experiences a sense of choice and empowerment, based on the inventory available to the advertiser. Thus, the direct appeal to emotions, the lure of escapism and the invitation to revisit past moments of happiness became quintessential characteristics of movie posters, which were established as a distinct genre shaped in Hollywood and reproduced worldwide.
It is likely that Cahana’s enchantment with the movies, as remembered by his wife, also stemmed from childhood and youth experiences in the pre-communist period, and was related to the need of many to momentarily escape daily difficulties. At the same time, it is possible that his acquaintance with the communist regime’s propaganda mechanisms in Romania facilitated his replacement of one type of idealization with another – as the values of productivity and uniformity and the glorification of workers were replaced by the values of leisure and escapism – intertwined, when necessary, with signs of a hegemonic historical narrative. In the first half of the 1960s, he designed some 180 illustrated posters for films in a wide range of genres – ranging from Ingmar Bergman’s dramatic films to British comedies and American slapstick movies, historical films and thrillers, and original Israeli productions. These posters were distributed on advertisement boards in cities throughout Israel. At a time when communication between citizens and institutional and commercial bodies was channeled through the printed press, two radio channels (Voice of Israel and Reshet Bet), and advertising boards throughout the city, posters offered significant advantages as a platform for communication: images that were legible even for those who did not read Hebrew, as well as widespread distribution, visibility and exposure. In addition to the movie posters, Cahana also designed advertising materials – posters, advertisements and brochures – for various companies, which were distinguished from the movie posters in terms of their sources of influence. The movie posters he designed reproduced – with certain adaptations – the model and techniques of Hollywood posters, which had spread around the world. Other design materials, meanwhile, combined illustrations and photographs and contained humor and signs of a personal signature style, and were influenced by British and French posters, brought to the country by senior British designers and by young Israeli designers trained in Western Europe.

Posters for Foreign Movies
Local movie posters, like those elsewhere in the world, were designed for an urban audience, without addressing distinctions pertaining to social class, ethnic identity, cultural background or gender. Their design was meant to stimulate emotions, based on the assumption that the most efficient way to arouse interest among various audiences would be creating an experiential impression that would influence decision making – that is, the purchase of movie tickets. In some of the posters for he designed for foreign movies, Emanuel Cahana sought to remove certain original elements that he believed would appear unattractive or enigmatic to Israeli viewers, and to reveal a larger number of details from the movie’s climactic moments, thus rendering it more appealing and accessible to a local audience. This was the case, for instance, in the poster he designed for Ingmar Bergman’s film Thirst: he cut out the profile of the actress from the black-and-white photograph on the Swedish poster, and inserted it into a collage of photographic fragments alluding to the complexity of the plot, which were presented against a colorful, eye-catching ground. In doing so, he replaced the image of the two Swedish actors (who were well known in their homeland) and the representation of time, arrested in the instant of their encounter, with a layered narrative revealing the dramatic climax of various scenes in the movie. By eschewing the presentation of a single, static symbol, Cahana sought to represent cinematic art’s mode of operation and the temporal dimension’s role in the presentation of the plot – the linear development of the narrative alongside the ability to examine it simultaneously by means of scenes occurring in different places and at different times. It is possible that this change was also an attempt to illustrate the verbal text, likely written by Haim Peled and similarly intended to represent the climactic moments in the plot: “The balance of love in the failed game of marriage, sexual perversions and exposed erotic relations.” At the same time, it is not impossible that the attire worn by the actress in the original poster was too daring for the conservative Israeli audience of the early 1960s, leading Cahana to seek a different means of marketing Bergman’s film.

In the poster he designed for Luis Bunuel’s film Viridiana, Cahana chose to preserve the palette of the Spanish poster – green, red, black and white – as well as the artistic employment of torn paper as a support for the text – a self-reflexive tactic employed in the conceptual art that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s internationally, as well as in Israel.
As he did in the previously examined poster, here too Cahana chose to change the image in the middle of the original posture, restructuring the composition and revealing two additional scenes. These included one of the best-known scenes in Bunuel’s anti-religious film – that of the paupers invited to a meal at Viridiana’s estate, who reward her with a cruel rape whose format echoes that of Leonardo’s Last Supper. The presentation of key points in the narrative and of motifs from the history of art served as the basis for the designer’s composition, as he employed elements from the original poster and photographs of scenes from the movie in order to offer viewers a glimpse of the movie and of cinema’s magical mode of operation. In an attempt to present as much information pertaining to the plot as possible, and offer viewers a glimpse of the narrative sequence, Cahana created a collage of three central scenes in the film. Each captured from a different standpoint (perhaps as an allusion to the camera’s movement), these scenes form a visual statement that combines romanticism, horror and moral questions in a single picture.

In another poster, designed for the American movie Exodus (1962), by the popular Hollywood producer and director Otto Preminger, Cahana chose a different strategy. He removed the flames licking the hands of the fighters in Saul Bass’ iconic poster, while maintainngi the template of the raised arms holding a rifle – a familiar universal symbol of revolution – and adding to this template an image of a ship and masses of people struggling against the sea waves.
Although the movie Exodus was a Hollywood melodrama that combined historical facts and fiction, the subject and the timing turned it into a significant event in the history of Israel. While the movie was being filmed, in Israel and in Cypress, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announced at the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann had been caught and was under arrest in Israel. About two months after the opening of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the movie Exodus premiered on Israeli screens. Thus, while they tensely followed the testimonies given in the course of the trial, which reconstructed the horrors of the Holocaust, Exodus transported the citizens of Israel from the Valley of Death to the climax of the struggle for the foundation of the state – and was attended by masses of viewers. The movie was thus conscripted into the service of a national liberation movement forging a national mythology and elaborating on the myth of clandestine immigration to pre-state Israel and on the heroic aspects of Jewish life during the Holocaust, in accordance with the needs of the nascent Israeli society. Exodus underscored the narrative of “from ashes to rebirth,” which had been cultivated since the early days of Israeli statehood, while deepening the perception of the causal connection between the struggle for Israeli independence, the decisions of Britain and the UN concerning the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, the division of the country, and the establishment of a Jewish state. The film’s reception in Israel was ambivalent. Some disagreed with its overly melodramatic character, which was meant to facilitate the film’s reception in other countries, most notably the United States. At the same time, the aversion to the saccharine Hollywood overtones was accompanied by a sense of provincial enthusiasm: here is “our” story as seen by the “gentiles,” a product comingfrom the heart of the world’s cinematic empire and featuring Paul Newman, a famous and handsome actor.
The poster designed by Cahana, which was adapted to the consensus prevalent at the time, was devoid of any critical dimension, and sought to glorify the hegemonic national narrative by attempting to create a resemblance between the fictional film plot and historical events. He chose to transform a symbol with a train of historical meanings, which were not necessarily Zionist, into the story of clandestine immigration, while recasting the colorful, three-dimensional image created by Bass into a two-dimensional, negative print painted blue-and-white, the colors of the national flag, and choosing a Hebrew font compatible with the original English one. This process of appropriating the American version of the Exodus story was carefully crafted for the Israeli audience by transforming the motif of danger and heroism in Bass’ poster into the story of “our boys,” who – in the words of the Israeli poet Natan Alterman, “carried their people on their shoulders.”