I’M AN ELEPHANT MADAME

Original British 30 inch x 40 inch Quad Poster for the 1968 Peter Zadek German Comedy I’M AN ELEPHANT MADAME (ICH BIN EIN ELEFANT, MADAME), based on the novel by Thomas Valentin and starring Wolfgang Schneider, Günther Lüders, Tankred Dorst, Heinz Baumann, Peter Palitzsch, Robert Dietl, Werner Dahms, Ernst Rottluff, Ingrid Resch, Christine Philipp and Margot Trooger.

The film follows a class of high school students in 1968 Bremen during their last year at school, their lessons, their protests, their private life. Focuses in particular on the troublemaker & provocateur Rull (Wolfgang Schneider) who in his apolitical chaotic way takes on both the authoritarian school administration and the leftist protesters.

The poster art is by Peter Strausfeld. Strausfeld was interned in the Isle of Man at the Onchan Internment Camp during the War where he met the Austrian producer George Hoellering. In 1947 Hoellering opened the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street and invited Strausfeld to produce some posters for the cinema which he did in wood and lino-cuts till his death in 1980.

The Academy Cinema, built in 1913, was saved from conversion to a shopping arcade in 1928 by Elsie Cohen of the original Film Society, who proceeded to run it as an arthouse which is how it was ran till it’s closure in 1986.

The posters became a London landmark, in fact very few were used outside of London, resulting in very small print runs of 3-500. Most of these posters were printed at the prestigious Westminster Press and Ward & Foxlow.

The poster is in very good unfolded (rolled) condition.