Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Polish film poster

On eBay is this 1979 movie poster for the Polish release of one of my favorite films, Bliskie spotkania trzeciego stopnia. It's not clear to me that poster designer Andrzej Pagowski saw the film first, but no matter as the fantastic illustration stands on its own.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind - ORIG POLISH POSTER"

• [DZofCD]

  Did the art inspire the lower portions of E.T.?

• [Ashen Victor]

  Hmmmmm, them… Spielberg ripped  Andrzej Pagowski´s character for E.T.?
  Hmmmmm, interesting…

• [Leonhart von Stahlmann]

  Poster Art in Poland had (or even has, but not that popular as is used to be) a big reputation. There is a nice museum in Warsaw, where you can take a look at film and theatre posters. There you can see that it was common not to show anything from the movie, but to consider the poster an artistic piece by itself. The poster wanted to create a curiosity and maintain the surprise on the film.

  • [Leonhart von Stahlmann]

    101 Dalamtions by Disney for instance: http://www.cinemaposter.com/FSTalltitles.html

• [Janus Daniels]

  Much better than the movie.

• [tristan eldritch]

  Why does the ET look like a prototypical raver of the 1990s?

• [billster]

  It’s weird where the focus is placed in some of the posters.  ”Animal” is the big star of “The Muppet Move”, while Kermit, Miss Piggy and Fozzie are regulated to the bottom of the poster.  ”Blade Runner” seems to be of Zhora – but it’s hard to tell.  ”Star Wars” is all C3-PO.

  I’ve never seen “Weekend at Bernie’s” or  ”Short Circuit 2″, but I know the story lines.  The posters are interesting, but they would make me think that the movies were dramas, though.

  “Huckleberry Finn” looks like something from the back of a milk carton; “This is the last known photo of young Huck and the man believed to have abducted him”

• [allybeag]

  I love the 101 Dalmations poster – I’d love a big version of it for my wall –  but had to search for it as the link supplied didn’t work. You can find it here: http://www.cinemaposter.com/BAC101dalmat.html

• [billster]

  Oh, and Jon Voight has his daughter’s lips in the poster for “Midnight Cowboy”.

• [Morgan Willcox]

  the polish poster for Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’ is one of the most loved in my collection.

• [wagonjak]

  It literally means”Close meetings of third degrees ” but I imagine the movie is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. from the actor credits.

• [David Pescovitz]

  “Close Meetings of Third Degrees,” starring Francois Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, and Kevin Bacon as himself. 

• [DaveX66]

  Here’s a site with tons of them: http://www.polishposter.com/. There’s some really great stuff there.

• [Klaus Æ. Mogensen]

  These wonderful Soviet Star Wars posters may have been linked to before, but they deserve a repeat view: http://izismile.com/2009/12/02/soviet_star_wars_posters_4_pics.html

  • [Ben Burger]

    wow those are really cool!

• [nikosal]

  The designer read alot of Stanislaw Lem…

• [mofembot]

  What I’d like to know is whether the movie was subtitled or dubbed into Polish. If dubbed, I wonder if the dubbing was the same as the god-awful dubbing we heard while attempting to watch TV in Krakow at the end of 2003: one voice reading a script for all characters in the same dull monotone — no affect whatsoever, no attempt to *act*. The English was a dull roar in the background, just not quite loud enough to be intelligible. At first we thought it was just for the particular American show we were watching, but no — it happened for other foreign TV shows at well.

  Excruciatingly bad. I can well imagine it would be worse for a full-length feature film.

  • [disqyou]

    Yeah it’s pretty emotionless usually, you can read a little about it here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilov_translation

• [legotech]

  The guy who owns Polishposter.com is a good guy, great merch, solid prices.  I think I have this ET poster someplace even :)

• [konrad44]

  Most foreign movies in polish cinemas are subtitled only. Except for cartoons which are nowadays dubbed with separate voices for each character (and sometimes it’s event better than original voices e.g. Shrek). At the same time many TV movies are indeed dubbed with one person reading the script as described above. But… you kinda get used to that after a while (if you’re Polish) and your brain gets emotions from the original background voices. Weird but it works.

• [m m]

  More of polish film posters:
  http://www.poster.pl/gallery/?q=&categoryId=2&filmNationalityId=1

  I personally love Pagowski and Swierzy’s posters.

• [Sparg Otyebat]

  Looks like some critter from Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards.

• [Matthew Petty]

  I have this book, and it has many interesting “interpretations” of movie posters: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Poster-Tony-Nourmand/dp/1854109464