An insightful look at America’s underground poster community, Eileen Yaghoobian’s Died Young, Stayed Pretty chronicles the filmmaker’s multi-year trek across the US and her fastidious quest to capture poster art’s cultural presence.
The film — which is Yaghoobian’s first feature-length project — focuses primarily on poster-art giants who are generally unknown outside of their field of work. Additionally, Died Young, Stayed Pretty addresses the prospect of posters functioning equally as advertisements, artifacts, and pieces of fine art.
In 2004, Yaghoobian set out to create a film both “transparent and true” to its subject matter. Initially fascinated by the artwork she saw on GigPosters.com, Yaghoobian felt an immediate connection with the imagery, and thereafter set out on a three-year road trip across the US in order to discover the “language of posters, and their cultural dialogue” within the landscape of America.
Yaghoobian chose to spend most of her time in smaller cities that she felt orchestrated a strong sense of community, both in the visual arts and music. Though the relevancy of posters within metropolitan areas has depleted during the past few years, their continued function as a form of communication within communities such as Austin and Seattle continues to flourish.
However, in the film, Yaghoobian also touches upon the function of posters within an ever-evolving digital culture. The development of online poster communities such as GigPosters has created a much broader forum for the conversation, as well as wider distribution for rock posters. Though styles of fliers and posters used to primarily be associated with a specific region or venue, they now reach audiences far and wide due to online exposure.
Furthermore, the physicality of posters has evolved over the years. “The paper value now has a deeper connection to the arts world,” Yaghoobian notes. Posters, within America’s highly media-saturated society, are now reaching a point where they are “collectible over functional,” and post-concert sales continue to create additional revenue for artists.
Yaghoobian reiterates that she is neither a designer nor a musician, and will likely “never make another movie about artists.” However, after her in-depth research of the poster-arts community, Yaghoobian has an even greater appreciation for “the amount of work and effort put into a poster for just a single performance,” as well as the craft of the artists who continue to produce work on the fringes of the mainstream art world.