Pakistani cinema had streets, walls, billboards, and cinema entrances long before a YouTube trailer or social media existed.
One year after independence, Pakistan entered cinema with its first film, Teri Yaad, which ran for five weeks on cinema screens, as per British Online Archives. The country officially saw the dawn of the Golden Age of Lollywood, when a film's marketing involved hand-painted posters. Lahore and Karachi became the primary filmmaking hubs, where hyper-vibrant, hand-painted posters defined the era's visuals.
The art, technique, Urdu typography, visual styles, and cultural influences that make these posters distinctive have changed over time. For clarification, let's take the poster of 1979's Maula Jatt and 2022's The Legend of Maula Jatt. The 1979 poster (above) has an unmistakable look of classic Lollywood hand-painted artwork, where the hero, Sultan Rahi, is painted with strong colors and a larger-than-life presence. The Urdu/Punjabi lettering is a dominant typography, with no female lead in view.
On the contrary, The Legend of Maula Jatt poster (above) infuses modern typography in a digital poster design. The actors are actually present on the poster rather than merely painted. The imagery is darker and more polished, with all the characters shown on the entire poster. The rivalry between the ensemble is evident as all the major characters receive visual attention, including the female characters.
Obviously, the typography is differently stylized, but minimal fonts are used, and that too, in English, so that international audiences are catered to. Through the costumes, weapons, and action-film appearance, it remains almost the same to let the atmosphere dominate. Bilal Lashari's film poster makes the story feel stronger and more legendary, in contrast to the raw aggression in the 1979 poster portraying a violent Punjabi who is eager to fight his enemies.
The bright, saturated colors in the 1979 poster, compared to the darker, cinematic palette, are unmissable. Though the cultural element, Gandasa, takes center stage and serves as a visual hook in both, the 2022 film poster aims to keep cultural influences intact; the world-building is deliberately unique in the latter.
Modern Pakistani film posters are indeed more artistic, and it would be wrong to say Pakistani art has declined over time, since both versions of the posters serve different cinematic eras and audiences' visual preferences. Pakistani film posters have become more polished but less personal. The exaggerated faces, poses, colors, and typography weren't just promotional information; they were the visual identity of the movie. Sultan Rahi's towering figure not only tells who is in the film but also what the film feels like.
Almost five decades later, The Legend of Maula Jatt does the same but relies on Photoshop-style composition and established blockbuster aesthetics. Clearly, the hand-painted design is shunned in favor of leaning heavily into digital designs. The dramatic effects are now made mandatory to achieve a refined illustration in contemporary film posters.
Classic movie posters used exaggerated versions of the actors, their physique, facial expressions, and surroundings to communicate the film's genre on a billboard. Today, photography has changed the way films are conveyed on social media, multiplexes, and television. Rather than saying that it led to the decline of traditional poster art, it would be more accurate to say the digital design tools now allow designers to create technically sophisticated posters, which is not inherently bad.
This also points to another interesting observation: Old film posters seemed to embrace heightened and excessive elements of filmmaking. The loud dialogue deliveries, overdone facial expressions, dramatic physical movements, and over-the-top gestures during dance or confrontation scenes reflected the same energy. All these "imperfections," and by imperfections I don't necessarily mean flaws, became a defining feature of the poster's charm and identity.
To prevent traditional poster art from disappearing, unofficial custodians known as collectors buy, store, restore, and catalogue the surviving posters. Since the physical posters could be easily lost, damaged, or discarded, these records of Pakistani cinematic history are evidence of how different eras marketed the films that were never systematically preserved before.
For this purpose, digitizing posters and making them accessible to researchers and audiences is now undertaken as a serious job. Princeton University Library partnered with Mushfiq Khwaja Trust in Karachi to digitize over 3,000 vintage film posters, and The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) maintains a digital repository preserving over a hundred historical Lollywood posters to protect the aesthetics and visual evolution of film promotion.
Film posters are not merely promotional material but an important part of the country's cinematic and cultural history, which represents either progress or loss, depending on what we value in a poster. The distinct local artistry or the technical precision? Either one signifies a visual language that makes these posters alive in their own way.
Echoes is an opinion column on film and television from the perspective of a writer based in Pakistan.