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"Konfrontace", the title of the catalogue, refers to the title of many poster exhibitions in the socialist countries before 1990, that were held more in the spirit of comparison or meeting, and less in the literally translated "confrontation".
Pavel Rajcan, the author of the catalogue and initiator of the exhibition at the Museum of Cinematography in Poland's movie capital Lodz, has a huge collection of more than 10'000 czechoslovak movie posters, runs a poster shop "Terry Posters" in the lobby of the cinema Svetozor in the center of Prague, has an excellent web site with lots of information and pictures about czechoslovak posters, and has organized a number of exhibitions of his treasures.
When he met polish collectors, among them Michal Poniz, his collecting horizon expanded to polish posters and so it was only natural to compare posters from the two countries for the same movie. The next step would of course be to do this on an international scale: Imagine to compare polish, czech, french, italian, cuban, mexican and chinese posters on exactly the same subject!
I find the result of this exercise very instructive: For the connoisseur of both the czech and polish poster world, it gives new insights on the similarities and differences in the character of the two poster schools. It also shows that the czech movie poster, allthough less well known than it's big brother in Poland, stands up quite well in a direct "confrontation". Finally, the movie fan can now decide which artist comes closer to his own image of the movie.
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