13 - Willy Wood () - The Death of the Pirates. 1918. 78x55.5 cm. Original poster, lithographic print, mounted on canvas. Grade A.

Willy Wood () - The Death of the Pirates. 1918. 78x55.5 cm. Original poster, lithographic print, mounted on canvas. Grade A. This extremely rare poster is a testament to an era when serialized stories were published in newspapers and later adapted into films, shown on a weekly or monthly basis. It is, quite simply, the precursor to today’s TV series. On this macabre poster, one can make out the skull of a corpse emerging from a diver’s suit. We are thus more in the realm of scuba diving than of piracy as we typically imagine it. And for good reason—the poster must be put into context. It was just after World War I, and films depicting the fight against the enemy were still commonplace. So when we say “pirates,” we should really think of “saboteurs”—and German submarines were, in fact, referred to as pirates. Nevertheless, the image evokes a world of imagination that Jules Verne himself would not have disowned. It appears that this “ciné-roman”—a spy story set between France and Germany by author René Morot—was published in the socialist newspaper *France Libre* under the title “La mort des sous marins” (The Death of the Submarines). This explains its limited circulation and, consequently, the rarity of this poster. The cast of this now-lost film, directed by Henri Voirins and distributed by Gaumont cinemas, included Berthe Jalabert and Lucien Walter.