¡Viva la libertad! (Long Live Freedom!)

Enrique Herreros, an illustrator, film-maker, draughtsman and comic, developed his self-taught, interdisciplinary career initially in graphic art, producing advertising posters with Carlos Escrivá de Romaní. As a poster artist he joined, in 1931, Selecciones Filmófono, a company that championed independent films from European cinema and soundtrack productions. This latter advance marked a difficult time for the film industry, which required strong investment to adapt infrastructures in trying circumstances at the start of the Second Republic in Spain. The films of Filmófono were associated with the programme of the Cine Palacio de la Música on Madrid’s Gran Vía — the main showcase for this film company — for which Herreros would make in excess of fifty posters. These copies, which Ernesto Giménez Caballero considered “industrial painting”, in a positive sense, would become figureheads of modernity, creations in which Herreros employed a design that expanded beyond the constraints of the box-office film posters of the time, conjugating word and image by way of an alluring, and at times rebellious, avant-garde language. Electric light, geometric forms, cropped silhouettes, colour contrasts and the importance attached to typographic design would represent for film poster design a bona fide spirit of renewal.

José Manuel Lara Oliveros