We want to show completely different situations and samples to show you different tools that we have at your fingertips. For our second tutorial, let's look at country identification and dating.

I was working on updating the 1948 title Red River and received this image presented to us as an original 1948 Swedish one sheet measuring 24x33.

This immediately caused a red flag because of the size. 24x33 is not a standard Swedish size. But, if you didn't realize that, you could check the poster size under the particular country OR you can go to our International Size Chart (located in the International Section) and look up the size. When you use the International Size Chart, remember this is in inches and most of the world uses metric so there will be slight variations.

So, we know that the identification of poster is now questionable. Let's look for other markings. My favorite way is to look at the 'word' director. We translated that word into numerous languages. We have the Country Identification Chart using the director located in the International Section. BUT, unfortunately, the directors NAME is on the poster, but the 'word' isn't.

Next place to look is the bottom of the poster for clues. In the bottom right corner is a small tag that says 'Parrot-Litho' shown on the right. Well, we don't really know which country to look for Parrot Litho in, so we want to see if there has been ANY Parrot Litho markings recorded in the archive. So, we want to go the the advance search of the archive. To get there from our home page, just above the search bar on the LAMP home page says "Go to our archive Movie Poster Data Base". click on it and you're at our home page for the archive (or database, if you prefer). Look just above the search bar and you will see 'Advanced Search'. click on it and go to the Advanced Search page. This is for markings on a poster, so go down to the 'Poster Search' and click on it. On the Poster Search Page, go down the options until you get to 'Marking' at the bottom. This is to look up any marking that we've recorded on a poster. Go to the end of the line and hit the pull down button. It's alphabetical, so go down the list to 'P' and there is a Parrot Litho recorded in Denmark. You can search if you want and pull up the posters and compare the logo... and see what years have been recorded so far. Only the 1950s are showing on the record so far, so that doesn't help or hurt the dating.

Next, let's go back to our International Size Chart, and look up our size again ... and yes, Denmark is listed as the size. So, that pretty well confirms this as a Danish poster. So let's go to the Danish Member area. To get there, from the LAMP home page, click on the Member Area and look down the page to 'Countries', then down to Denmark and over the Member Area.

First, go to the Danish Printers and down to Parrot. Notice there is nothing recorded for them that early, which creates the first question of dating. So, let's go to Danish Censorship & Markings. Notice... from the early 1930s until around 1960, there was a Censor Stamp used. This poster doesn't have it... so either it's not from that time period OR it wasn't used in the theater to have been stamped.

Let's see if there's anything else to help. Nothing else across the bottom, but in the upper left corner, there's another mark that looks like an artist mark, shown on the left. I recognize it immediately, but let's look it up.

You can go 2 ways to look this up.. If you didn't know that this was a Danish country OR if the artist was NOT from the country that the poster was issued, you would go the main Member Area, in the top General Section to 'Poster Artist'. This is a chart of hundreds and hundreds of artists and their signatures that we have on file. You would have to go down each letter trying to match this symbol. BUT, FIRST, while we're in the Danish Member Area, let's look at the Danish Poster Artists. Let's go down the line and we see that it's by the artist Junovald. His early years, he wrote out his name but in later years he went to the symbol instead. The GOOD thing is that he DATED ALL OF HIS ARTWORK... Notice the year..... '71'. which explains WHY there is NO Censor Stamp.

This is a 1971 Danish rerelease one sheet.

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Until next time,

ed