Object of the week: The Academy Cinema’s bespoke posters for Seven Samurai and other arthouse classics
World cinema classics got their own specially designed posters at Oxford Street’s Academy Cinema in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This Seven Samurai poster is typical of designer Peter Strausfeld’s striking graphic art.
This poster was borne of a partnership initially forged in adversity. Filmmaker George Hoellering and artist Peter Strausfeld met when they were interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens in England during World War II.
When Hoellering later took over as director of the Academy Cinema, London’s premiere and longest established independent arthouse, he knew that he wanted the cinema to create its own publicity materials rather than using existing posters and designs in order to create a strong and distinctive visual identity for the venue.
Cue a reunion with Strausfeld who was brought on board to make their distinctive posters. The starkly graphic lino-cut work he did for the Academy would become a recognisable and instantly identifiable feature of the London cityscape (especially on the Underground, as well as outside the cinema itself, on the key West End thoroughfare Oxford Street) for more than 30 years.
One of the most celebrated of Strausfeld’s posters was this one for the Academy’s 1970s revival screening of the complete and uncut version of Akira Kurosawa’s “epic Japanese masterpiece” Seven Samurai (1954). Using an arresting still of one of the film’s stars, Toshiro Mifune, as a starting point, Strausfeld crafted a dynamic image to convey the action and excitement of the film.
His poster’s lino-cut technique seemed especially in sympathy with Japanese subjects, due to its serendipitous similarity to Japan’s woodblock printing tradition. Amid a restricted colour palette, Mifune’s shouting samurai, depicted in black, white and tan (with tiny blue accents in his stubbly beard – an indication of the artist’s attention to detail), stands out against the cerulean blue background, dominating the rectangular dimensions of the quad poster on its right-hand side.
On the left-hand side, under the text, Strausfeld depicts seven silhouetted figures on horseback spread out along the horizon. And while they clearly refer to the band of seven fighting men from the film’s title, might there also be a connection to another arthouse milestone of the 1950s, and another Academy Cinema favourite, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), offering a neat visual parallel for clued-up cineastes between these two classics of repertory cinema?
Strausfeld’s striking work in poster design for London’s Academy Cinema is currently being celebrated with an exhibition at New York’s Poster House museum which runs until April 2026. His partnership with Hoellering had begun in an inauspicious setting but it went onto great things – with Strausfeld’s poster for Seven Samurai being a shining example of the artist’s uniquely vivid style.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.