Cinephemera Round Trip. Postcards for and by Anselmo Ballester

Abstract

The essay analyzes the postcards by Anselmo Ballester, the famous painter, illustrator, and poster designer. His postcards are analyzed in their double role of ephemera of his personal collection, and paratexts created for his clients, in the period between the silent era, until the 1950s. The assay will examine only a limited number of postcards when compared to the extent and variety of his artistic production. The subject of our investigation will be the postcards included in the Anselmo Ballester Fund, preserved at the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione - CSAC - of the University of Parma. Comparing cine-postcards, preparatory sketches, and posters from the Ballester collection, spanning a period of fifty years, we will focus on how photographic postcards of national and international movie stars, represented the main models for the painter, aimed at creating an iconography consistent, and adaptable to multiple cinematographic genres. We aim to demonstrate how two ephemeral materials can be juxtaposed, becoming both a source and a model on which a new cinematographic paratext can be developed.