Movie Poster of the Week | Tony Stella in Memoriam

In a piece for MUBI's Notebook, Adrian Curry remembers Tony Stella, the artist and movie poster designer who died suddenly in his sleep on May 1st. He was only 45, and news of his death sent a wave of grief through the world of poster lovers and artists. According to Curry, Stella may not have been a familiar name to the general public, but anyone interested in the meeting point of cinema with illustration and graphic art knew and admired him. Among poster people he was a well-known figure, yet few knew much about his private life. He lived in Berlin and was in touch with film lovers around the world on social media, but many admirers of his work had never met him in person and did not even know his face or his age. Stella made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of movie posters. Some were commissioned, and many he created out of personal passion. He made part of this work in the 1990s for a film club in Berlin, posters in which he recreated the art-house cinema of the 1950s and 1960s with a rare lightness of touch. Curry writes that if Stella had been born sixty or seventy years earlier, he might today be counted among the greatest Italian poster artists. He had a striking gift for capturing the likeness of actors with the simplest and freest brushstrokes, and he was astonishingly prolific. In 2018, together with Emmanuel Sfez, the French designer known as Midnight Marauder, Stella founded the small poster design agency Alphaville. In this partnership, Stella's illustrations were always completed by Marauder's font choices and his elegant sense of space. In the second part of the tribute, Curry corresponds with Midnight Marauder. Marauder says that he and Stella met on Tumblr in 2014. Their shared love of posters and cinema drew them together, but they met in person only once, two years later, in Los Angeles. According to him, Stella worked very fast and sometimes worked and sent messages at strange hours of the night. Marauder describes their collaboration as easy and harmonious and says that in all their years of working together almost no disagreement ever arose between them. He calls Stella a kind, generous, and caring person. Marauder also speaks of Stella's tastes in cinema. He loved Japanese film, westerns, Hong Kong cinema, and filmmakers such as Fellini and Melville, and had little interest in contemporary cinema. He recalls how hard Stella found the commercial commission process, including that some clients did not realize his posters were drawn entirely by hand and assumed they could be altered as easily as a digital file. According to Marauder, one of Stella's wishes was to hold an exhibition in Japan. After his death, galleries in New York have mounted a tribute to his work, and the publication of a book and prints of his work is being considered. Marauder says Stella left behind a great deal of work that many people have not yet seen.

Read the full story at MUBI Notebook →