Look up. This billboard is not printed. It is painted, by hand, by a person. Hand-painting movie billboards was once ordinary work, found in every town. When…
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Look up. This billboard is not printed. It is painted, by hand, by a person.
Hand-painting movie billboards was once ordinary work, found in every town. When printed posters became cheap, the craft vanished from every street. Only here did it not stop.
On a stretched cloth, the outline is first sketched in chalk, then filled in one stroke after another with oil paint. When a film's run ends, white paint is brushed over it, and the next feature is drawn in its place. Beneath a single sheet of cloth lie dozens of films, layered one atop another.
There was once a boy who skipped school to come to this theater. He would later become the director Ang Lee. In later years, he himself said that it was here he learned about cinema.
This was a small second-run house, showing double features of foreign films at a low price. Not a place to see a new release first, but a place people went afterward, when they had missed it the first time.
The craftsman who has painted these billboards has taken on an apprentice. It makes little sense as a livelihood, and yet someone has chosen to carry it on.
The work now hanging here will one day be painted over in white. If you wish to photograph it, now is the only chance.
