Hollywood goes lubki

lubok_terminator.jpg

The Terminator

The lubki (sing. lubok), simple printed pictures coloured by hand and often called broadsides, popular prints, folk prints, folk etchings, or folk engravings, are a vivid and fascinating page in the history of Russian culture. Folk prints were known in many other countries (in the Far East as early as the eighth century and in Western Europe from the fifteenth); in Russia they appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century and survived until the beginning of the twentieth.

lubok_matrix.jpg

The Matrix

Impossible to trace the provenance of these things since the page they’re from is in Russian but they’re hilarious. I still haven’t worked out all the movies they’re supposed to be depicting but that’s part of the fun. Would be nice to have a translation of the inscriptions also.

Via BibliOdyssey.

6 thoughts on “Hollywood goes lubki”

  1. PS his nose seems a bit big (shades of Pinocchio) and he seems to be doing something inside his trousers that would be cut out of a kids film.

    Other obvious ones are Lord of the Rings, Spiderman and War of the Worlds.

  2. Of course. I got that one mixed up with Frodo having his hand cut off and thought it was another LoR but Star Wars makes more sense

    “Luke, I am your father”

    Not sure about the biog Koala Bear or whatever it is in the first one. Ditto for the crocodile/alligator playing the accordion, the guy with the pink coat on the PC, the drunks and the guy with a syringe “The old dope peddler”?
    Book burning (Fahrenheit 451?) and the seaserpent swallowing the guy and squeezing the gal with the sword

  3. The one on top is Cheburashka, the star of a Soviet-era stop-motion children’s show. The sea-serpent is the movie Anaconda, I think.

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