Wide Format is a series of exhibitions in which SOCMUS presents a single poster from its collection, along with the possible stories surrounding it. The second exhibition in the series is devoted to the poster created by artist Stefan Borisov for the Bulgarian-French colour feature film It’s Raining on Santiago (1975), in which director Helvio Soto recounts the start of one of the darkest and most violent periods in Chile’s history.
Chile. 11 September 1973.
In the early hours of the morning, units of the Chilean navy seize the port city of Valparaíso. This is the beginning of a coup that would lead to nearly seventeen years of military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. Three years earlier, in 1970, Chile held presidential elections. Salvador Allende, put forward by the Popular Unity coalition, became the country’s first democratically elected president of the left. Allende carried out a series of economic, healthcare and educational reforms. Amid mounting domestic political tension and external economic pressure, Chilean society seemed poised on the brink of civil war. Seizing the moment, part of the senior military leadership prepared to bring down the government. The military junta’s takeover was formally declared after the storming of the presidential palace, La Moneda, in Santiago, and Allende’s suicide. In the years that followed, thousands of Chileans would be killed, tortured or made to disappear, and hundreds of thousands forced to leave the country.
It’s Raining on Santiago recreates precisely this story of an election victory, a coup, and the first days of reprisals against Allende’s supporters. Helvio Soto, like hundreds of other artists and intellectuals, found refuge in Europe, and in France in particular. From his years in Chilean television, Soto—who knew Allende personally—understood that if the drama of the Chilean people was to reach a wide audience, he would have to turn to “the big screen”.
Pernik. 14 May 1975.
Tanks and armed soldiers surround a massive set built in Pernik’s central square, recreating the façade of the presidential palace, La Moneda, in Santiago, close by the Palace of Culture, which opened in 1957. Its interior becomes part of the mise-en-scène in which Salvador Allende, his bodyguards and his inner circle defend the palace against the junta’s land and air forces. For a few days, Pernik becomes the capital of Chile.
Alongside Bulgarian actors including Naicho Petrov, Kosta Tsonev and Vera Dikova, the director and the French producers brought in stars of European cinema such as Bibi Andersson, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Annie Girardot. Despite premiering at the Paris International Film Festival and going into worldwide distribution, the film failed to achieve the expected success, and drove the French production company Les Films Marquise into bankruptcy.
Stefan Borisov’s poster is built on a symmetrical composition of stylised elements pointing to moments from the film. Photo-collaged bullets rain down from the upper section of the page – a direct reference both to the violence and to the title itself. “It’s Raining on Santiago” was a coded message within the film’s plot, broadcast over the radio in the early hours of 11 September 1973 as a warning to Allende’s supporters. In reality, it was a sunny day outside
The three-dimensional lettering of the title recalls the metallic sheen of military helmets, or of fencing down which the blood of the coup’s and the regime’s victims runs. The parallel lines framing the poster refer to the athletics track at the national stadium in Santiago, which was turned into a makeshift concentration camp. It is precisely this kind of experimentation with photography and typography that characterises the work of artist Stefan Borisov, as the poster shown here demonstrates.
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About Stefan Borisov
Stefan Borisov (1921–1997) began his career as a self-taught poster artist in the late 1940s. From then on he worked at Bulgarian Cinematography, the state body that held the monopoly on film production and distribution throughout the socialist period. In 1969 Borisov graduated in graphic art and applied graphic design from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. On his return to Bulgaria he was appointed art editor in the advertising and propaganda department of the Film Distribution state enterprise, which commissioned film posters for the whole country.
Stefan Borisov was among the few artists to work primarily on film posters. He took part in every General Exhibition of Applied Graphics, as well as international forums including the International Poster Biennial in Warsaw and the International Biennial of Applied Graphic Art in Brno.
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About the SOCMUS Archive
SOCMUS preserves, researches and promotes Bulgarian graphic design from the socialist era. Founded in 2011 as a “virtual museum”, the project has gradually grown into a physical collection, enriched through donations and the purchase of individual works and entire collections. The archive comprises more than 2,000 posters, as well as children’s books, periodicals, philatelic graphics and other examples of applied graphic art. SOCMUS is an independent, non-commercial project founded by Nikola Mihov, Valeri Gyurov and Martin Angelov. Michaël Bordat, Jenny Decheva and Nikol Decheva later joined them.
The SOCMUS team would like to thank the Bulgarian National Film Archive, Mariana Angelova, Rosen Spasov and Petya Terzieva of the Svetoslav Minkov Regional Library in Pernik, Vasko Vasilev and Andrés Saavedra Baraona.