Movie Poster of the Week | Tony Stella in Memoriam

Дата публикации: 19-06-2026 08:00:00

Pictured: Tony Stella’s studio with a work-in-progress painting of “Cora” from The Underground Railroad (Barry Jenkins, 2021). Photo courtesy of Midnight Marauder.When the news came that movie poster artist Tony Stella had died unexpectedly on May 1st it sent shockwaves through the world of poster design. While not a household name, Tony was known and admired by anyone interested in the intersection of cinema with illustration and graphic art. He was a passionate advocate for the former, and a brilliant practitioner of the latter. But he was known and yet not known. He engaged in conversations around the world with fellow cinephiles on social media (so many people in their tributes to him wrote things like, “I was talking to him just last week about…”) but very few people I knew had met him in person (he lived in Berlin) or knew how old he was or what he looked like. Fans and acquaintances went immediately to his Instagram when they heard the news and saw a post from April 30 with a photo of a bearded man in front of a large canvas in a studio with the caption “RIP” and immediately—inevitably—assumed it was a photo of Tony posted by somebody close to him. But it turned out to be an old photo posted by Tony himself of the German-Austrian painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz who had died that day at the age of 88. Tony was 45 years old, it turns out, and passed away in his sleep that night.Tony Stella made hundreds if not thousands of movie posters, some commissioned, most self-generated. I have interspersed this article with some of my favorites, including these for Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936).I first became aware of Tony’s work on Tumblr in the early 2010s. In 2014, in a short piece on his work for Notebook, I wrote, “Stella’s gorgeous designs, many of which were created as one-off posters for a Berlin cinema club in the 90s, reimagine the art-house cinema of the ’50s and ’60s with a rare lightness of touch. His poster for The 400 Blows [1959] is the only one I’ve seen that captures Antoine Doinel’s joie de vivre.” Some time after that Tony was visiting New York (where, I found out recently, he had spent some time in his youth immersed in hip-hop, jazz, and graffiti culture) and made a surprise visit to my office at Zeitgeist Films on a day, unfortunately, that I was out. But he left a printed copy of his 400 Blows poster which remains one of my favorites of his thousands of designs.In 2018 Tony joined forces with the designer Emmanuel Sfez, better known as Midnight Marauder, to form the boutique movie poster design agency Alphaville. As I had done with Emmanuel earlier that year, I asked Tony to select his ten favorite movie posters, resulting in a beautiful collection of mostly 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s posters by artists from Bob Peak to Moebius that was a fascinating glimpse into his influences. I started to work with Tony myself in 2019 when, in my newish capacity as the design director at the distributor Kino Lorber, I commissioned Alphaville to design the poster for our release of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (2019). Their illustrated poster had just started appearing in cinema vitrines when the COVID lockdown began.We worked together on two other posters, for the re-release of 1959’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day (my personal favorite) and Mondocane (2021), and we kept in touch sporadically. I was thrilled to see how Tony became the go-to artist for so many distributors, but I’m surprised that he didn’t get more mainstream attention because of it.Posters for Thief (Michael Mann, 1981), Mayor (David Osit, 2020), and Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Aram Avakian, Bert Stern, 1959) created by Tony Stella and Midnight Marauder for Alphaville.If Tony had been born 60 or 70 years earlier he would have been renowned as one of the great Italian poster artists, like Anselmo Ballester or Ercole Brini, or like his hero Averardo Ciriello whom he called, when selecting his poster for Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) as one of his all-time favorites, “one of the best artists to ever work in movie posters,” and said, “like his Venetian forefathers he was masterful in capturing likenesses with the simplest, loosest brushstrokes.” The same could be said of Tony himself. He was remarkable at capturing likenesses of actors and yet he seemed to do it almost effortlessly. Tony was astonishingly prolific, almost superhumanly so, and I wish I could have seen him at work, to see how he produced such realistic yet stylized images and such elegant, eye-catching compositions in such a high volume. As much as I regret never having seen him work, I regret even more never having met him in person. I wish I’d been in the office the day he dropped by. But of course I thought there would be more opportunities in the future. Tony's self-generated posters for Nagisa Oshima’s Boy (1969) and Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl (1966).To find out more about Tony following his death, I corresponded over email with Midnight Marauder. Tony and Emmanuel made a perfect duo: Tony’s beautiful artwork was always elevated by MM’s elegant font choices and sense of space. NOTEBOOK: When and how did you meet Tony? And where did you first meet him in real life?MIDNIGHT MARAUDER: If I recall, we met on Tumblr in 2014. I came across his poster for Herzog’s Aguirre [1972] with a Japanese twist and was so impressed. I thought it was some sort of lost relic or a poster I’d never seen from the late ’80s. I immediately went to his Tumblr site which served as his main website for years and found a Klaus Kinski portrait poster for the same movie. His site showcased his early loose style. Fellini, Kurosawa, Lumet. You showcased most of them in your column on his work. Not only was his work strong, but it covered a wide range of world cinema. I was really blown away with all of it. I reblogged a ton of his work and I think he DMed to thank me. And slowly we started chatting. We had a mutual love and artistic passion for movie posters and cinema.We only met once, two years later, in Los Angeles for lunch and I think we hung out at Amoeba in Hollywood that afternoon. He brought me a poster we had made for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [1966]. I will cherish it. Tony Stella and Midnight Marauder’s poster for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966).NOTEBOOK: Did you ever see Tony at work? Everybody who knows his work was struck by his prolificacy and the fact that he was able to produce such high quality work seemingly so quickly. I said in my Instagram post, “Every one of his paintings looks like it should have taken a week, but given his output I imagine they may have only taken an hour. Either that or the man never slept.” Is either true?MM: I never saw him at work. We did zoom quite a lot, but it was never a live feed with him showing me his work station and his work. I know that he was super quick on his feet and if his schedule was clear, he would send over stuff the next day or two. He did have weird hours and I imagine that he had some trouble with his sleep. He would write to me at all sorts of odd hours and I would insist that he get some rest. In the early days of our collaboration he did send over some very crude sketches. But that was super rare. In fact, whenever I was expecting a piece of his I was incredibly excited. It was so refreshing to have a close collaborator like him. We both remarked how happy we were working together. With his brilliant skills and talent, the possibilities were endless and so thrilling. Tony Stella posters for Il Bidone (Federico Fellini, 1955), The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961), Kes (Ken Loach, 1969) and Il Sorpasso aka The Easy Life (Dino Risi, 1962).NOTEBOOK: What can you tell us about Tony—his upbringing, his education—while preserving the privacy he cherished? MM: We were close certainly, but I can’t say I know much about his education or childhood. He did talk about his early cinema memories and great love of Japanese cinema and his graffiti days. Tony Stella loved Japanese cinema and his posters for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Kihachi Okamoto’s Blood Type: Blue aka Blue Christmas (1978), Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989), and Masahiro Shinoda’s Ballad of Orin (1977) are among my favorites of his works.NOTEBOOK:  Do you know which of his works he was most proud of, most happy with?MM: For Alphaville: Criterion’s Claudine [1974]. The If Beale Street Could Talk [2018] soundtrack. I know he loved some of the early work he did for Malick’s A Hidden Life [2019]. Of his solo work: his covers for Christopher Frayling’s The Hollywood History of Art and Sergio Leone By Himself for Reel Art Press; his work for the Japan Society in New York. But I know that if he had been able to work solely on westerns, Japanese and Hong Kong cinema, and some of the masters like Fellini and Melville, he would have been content. He didn’t dig contemporary cinema. It wasn’t his bag.Tony Stella’s unused early concepts in collaboration with Midnight Marauder for Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019).NOTEBOOK: One of my last text conversations with him was about his frustration with the commission process and with overly demanding clients. I think every designer and illustrator has experience with that—it comes with the territory—but did he have a harder time with it than most? I would imagine that on the one hand his fluidity and speed would give him an advantage in that he could come up with new versions relatively easily, but that on the other hand a client could easily abuse that facility.MM: He did have a tough time with endless notes that made no sense to him and constant revisions. He walked away from Amazon and Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad [2021] about six times and six times I had to beg him to come back and finish. I’d been on the project six months prior to his participation. The art directors had been on it for two years. We all worked our asses off on that one. Barry was amazing with us and championed Tony’s work all along. I know it wasn’t easy for Tony to tweak his beautiful work. So yes, he did have some issues with that. I think some of the clients we worked with didn’t understand that his work was done by hand. They thought it had a digital angle to it and could be fixed and tweaked with a click of a button. NOTEBOOK:  Is there anything you can tell me, or would like people to know, about how you worked together? Did you critique each other’s work or choices?MM: Just how easy it was; we just gelled so well. I can’t remember us having any disagreements when we worked on anything, ever. Maybe once or twice he wasn’t feeling a font choice I made. But that was on me. I was always so happy to work with him. He was incredibly kind and supportive of my work, even when he did his own thing and we couldn’t line up a budget to work together. He was always checking in on me and, of course, I would check on him as well. He was generous and caring, a true mensch. NOTEBOOK: I know it’s still very early but what are the plans for Tony’s work and archive?MM: It’s way too early, nothing real solid right now. Posteritati and Vinegar Syndrome just did a tribute show for his work, which was incredibly kind of them. More gallery shows; his dream was some kind of show in Japan. A book or books. Some prints. Who knows. He had so much work that people have never seen—that I have never seen. A mock-up by Tony Stella of a proposed book of his work.Many thanks to Emmanuel. You can see more of his collaborations with Tony on the Alphaville website and much more of Tony’s work on his website.

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