Typotheque Taking Credit Film Title Sequences, 1955-1965

Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / Acknowledgements by Emily King
23/08/12 18:35
Essays, 2004
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by Emily King
Emily King's acknowledgements for her dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
Acknowledgements Thanks: to Saul Bass, Trevor Bond, Bob Brooks, Sydney Cain, David Cammell, Alan Fletcher, Pat Gavin, Bernard Lodge and Richard Williams for their very useful contributions to my research; to Jeremy Aynsley and Christopher Frayling for their tutorial advice and support; and to the staff in the library and film archive at the British Film Institute.
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Kathy Blackmore, 25 April 2012, 4:07 AM
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The relationship between graphic design and film is not as obvious as one might think. I like how she explores the ideas behind them, and effortlessly gives us a greater understanding of the true relation. Name
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 1 Contents by Emily King
23/08/12 18:34
Essays, 2004
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by Emily King
Emily Kings contents (part two of ten) for her dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
Contents 1 Acknowledgements 2 Introduction 3 Visions in Motion: the American graphic designer and modernism. 4 Abstracting the Essence: The Man With A Golden Arm, 1955 5 Spiralling Aspirations: Vertigo, 1958 6 Musical Statues: Spartacus, 1960 7 Sex and Typography: From Russia With Love, 1963 8 Popcorn and Pop graphics, Whats New Pussycat?, 1965 9 Conclusion 10 Bibliography
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3Jane, 21 January 2011, 6:51 PM
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I'm glad you are writing about film title sequences. To me, they are an important part of any film.
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 2 Introduction by Emily King
23/08/12 18:36
Essays, 2004
2320 words
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by Emily King
Emily Kings introduction to her dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
Introduction While those engaged in film studies have for the most part ignored title sequences, historians of graphic design tend to treat them purely as graphics which through cinema technology have taken on a temporal dimension. Film has been the subject of widely respected academic study for more than thirty years. Over that period much has been written on the history of the cinema, but the most complex debates concerning the medium have taken place at a highly abstracted, and generally ahistorical, theoretical level. Most still address the auteur, a concept first developed in the late 1950s, either by rejecting the idea of authorship in favour of structuralist approaches, or by attempting to redefine the auteur as a construct reconcilable with more recent theoretical stances.[2] Writers on set or costume design in film usually attempt no more than chronological surveys. Few have taken a historically analytical approach to film design or tried to establish links between issues raised by the study of design in film with the other debates active among film theoreticians and historians or design historians. A vast amount of work could be done within this gap and by making a detailed study of film title sequences in the decade between 1955 to 1965, rather than filling a single isolated academic hole, I hope to establish a sensible methodology for this kind of enquiry. From the mid 1950s until the late 1960s there was a vogue among mainstream movie-makers for opening films with title sequences that were related in style to fashionable static graphic design. The credit sequences that were part of this fashion were quite distinct from traditional Hollywood movie titles. A vernacular graphic language had been developed in the major studios at the outset of the twentieth century. This had been used, with slight alterations to accommodate sound, colour and other technological developments, to title mainstream North American films until the mid 1950s. In their heyday the Hollywood studios would have had title-makers on the payroll. The first titlers hired by the film industry almost certainly were trained sign-writers because from the start film credits were set out in templates derived from nineteenth century hand-lettered signs. These formats were so dominant that they were adhered to even in memos between members of a movies production team regarding credit (fig.1). This is not to say that the titling of Hollywood films was uniform. Within the Hollywood-vernacular there was variation, though little subtlety. While Westerns were titled with the kind of typeface that would have been used on Wanted posters for hardened bandits in Hollywoods version of the Wild West, the opening credits for romances were often written in letters that appear to be fashioned in pink ribbon and those for slapstick humour in paint-stroke typefaces that suggest hastiness and incompetent workmanship (fig.2). But, while these Hollywood-vernacular typefaces were appropriate and communicative, no thought was given to the on-screen relationship of word and image. The two might well have been designed entirely independent of one another. The words of the credits generally appeared, drop-shadow, against a background of a single static image or a short sequence shot from an immobile camera pointed at an attractive background, such as a rippling sheet of silk or a rural landscape. Of course there were some notable exceptions to the rule, such as the titles of Sunset Boulevard (1950) which appear to be painted onto a road in the wake of a speeding car, but rather than relating to contemporary graphic styles, this unusual title sequence makes a witty filmic joke. Just as Hollywood developed its own style of film-titling, it also developed a native poster format. While in Europe modern graphic styles had always been used on film advertisements, until the 1950s American film posters nearly always took the same format of the films title above realistic portraits of its major stars or a depiction of its climactic scene. An article on Exemplary Film Publicity in Graphis of 1964 described the traditional film poster as lurid and loud and dismissed the indigenous Hollywood graphic language by claiming that film publicity deliberately chooses a cheap graphic idiom in order
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to attract the masses. Between them the major studios created the vernacular visual vocabulary for the Hollywood film in the first half of the twentieth century and unlike parts of the French and German film industries they never whole-heartedly embraced international modernism. Modern design played an integral part in the structure of a number of European films in the 1920s and 30s. In The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), a German horror movie intended for a mainstream audience, modern design was an important element of the films innovative theme, and in LInhumaine (1924), a French film also intended to appeal to a wide audience, experimental modern sets were intended to complement ground-breaking photographic techniques. Although by the mid 1920s major Hollywood studios were hiring full time designers to create the look of the modern, to American filmmakers it was never more than a fashionable decorative style. As such it was heavily laden with narrative meaning, for example the Hollywood-modern sets for What A Widow (1930) carried clear messages about the high class and progressive character of Gloria Swansons lead character. Modern art and design continued to be used in this way by the Hollywood studios into the 1950s. While in High Society (1950) we are meant to assume that the Bing Crosby character is a modernminded man because of a small Picasso on his wall, Hitchcock set most of his film North by Northwest (1955) in streamlined trains and Wrightian buildings to imply the extreme sophistication of his fictional international spy network. In exploring the introduction of modern graphic design into mainstream English language films from the mid 1950s, it is important to discover whether it is simply a new element that was absorbed into Hollywoods visual language or if it reflected some fundamental change in the relationship between mainstream film and modern design. Although Hitchcock both wrapped his films in modern graphic packages and set them in Hollywood-modern interiors, the relationship between the two is not straightforward. While the sets conform to conventions of Californian film-making, the title sequences were something quite new. By examining the visual and cultural context of title sequences which break from the Hollywood tradition in their use of upto-date graphic styles I hope to clarify the shifting relationship between design and mainstream film in the period between 1955 and 1965. I have approached this task through detailed case studies of five mainstream English language films of different genres chosen from throughout the period. These are: The Man With The Golden Arm (1955); Vertigo (1958); Spartacus (1960); From Russia With Love (1963); and Whats New Pussycat? (1965). Each of these films, to a greater or lesser extent, attracted popular and critical attention at the time of their release and each has a title sequence which relates closely to static graphic styles of their period. While the first four speak the modern graphic language derived by American designers from the early twentieth century European modernists, the last has a retro-Art Nouveau sequence. This inconsistency reflects shifting fashions in graphic styles over the decade. An independent graphic designer was responsible for the design of the title sequences of each of these five case study films. Rather than being on the payroll of the production companies making the films, they were simply brought in on contract to design the opening sequence. In each of the case studies the designer of the opening credits is acknowledged within his own sequence. Because Saul Bass remained the only graphic designer to be producing important work in mainstream film throughout the 1950s, the first three case studies of the thesis concentrate upon his work. The last two examine the work of other designers whose credit designs were part of the phase pioneered by Bass. These last two case study films demonstrate increasingly close links between the mainstream British and North American film industries. The Bond film, although made in Britain and produced by a British company, was funded by American dollars and represented largely American interests. Whats New Pussycat? was made by an American company, but filmed in Europe with an English director. The changing structure of the mainstream English language film industry in the early 1960s makes it appropriate to view these European-made films as the heirs of the Hollywood film-making tradition. The two decades after the second world war saw dramatic upheavals in the North American film industry. Box office takings by mainstream American films reached an all time high in the years immediately after the war. But in 1948, the same year that major studios were making record profits, they were involved in a legal battle, the outcome of which would significantly weaken the hold of the big five on the international movie industry. At the close of the Paramount Case in May 1948 the United States Department of Justice insisted on the complete divorcement of the affiliated circuits from their production and distribution branches. Major studios were forced to let go of their theatre circuits in which their films had been automatically guaranteed exhibition. Cinemas began to rent from distributors on a movie by movie basis, judging each picture on its own merits. This led to a fall in the number of films produced by the Hollywood studios. But while releases in North America by the major studios fell from 234 in 1945 to 215 in 1955 and plummeted to 167 by 1966, releases by independents increased, particularly by those companies importing films from abroad where they worked in cheaper studios with relatively low-wage technicians. In 1945 143 films made by independents were shown in the United States, in 1955 independents released 177 movies and in 1965 releases by independents outnumbered those by the major studios by
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118. The stranglehold of the major studios over the mainstream English language film-industry had been almost completely broken. But despite increased opportunities for independents, overall the late 1950s and 1960s were years of crises for the North American film industry. Movie audiences dwindled. In 1945 the film industry took 23.6% of the dollars spent in the United States on recreation while in 1955 it took only 7.3%, So while on average corporate profits in the United States flourished, box office receipts were falling and all film-makers experienced hard times. Potential film-goers were increasingly choosing to stay at home and watch television. Asked in 1959 what were the most encouraging and discouraging developments in film of recent years, the director Elia Kazan answered the triumph of television to both. We have to be good or big to survive - at least we have to try. While the Movies Are Better Than Ever campaign run by a major studio in the late 1950s tried to convince Americans that films were good, it was on big that the big five chose to concentrate. Writing on Blockbustering in 1963, Penelope Houston defined a blockbuster as a film running not less than a hundred and fifty minutes, shot in colour, or in some big screen process, or both, shown initially on a "hard ticket" or "roadshow" basis. The term first came into currency in the mid 1950s and by the early 1960s blockbusters were being produced systematically. Houston argued that the saturation of the market with high budget, intensively advertised movies was self-defeating. Because these films targetted those who went to the cinema on a once-a-year basis it seemed unwise to release several each month. Cleopatra took $25 million in rentals in North America in 1963, making it the eleventh most successful film at the box office that year, yet, having cost $38 million to produce, it cannot be regarded as a commercial success. But despite the risks involved in blockbustering studios film-makers continued to adopt the strategy through the 1960s. Graphically adventurous film title sequences flourished against the background of a generally ailing film industry, coinciding with the realisation by film-makers that they must develop strategies to attract increasingly reluctant audiences into movie theatres. As well as blockbustering, increased attention to advertising and attempts to shape a product which was sufficiently differentiated from television to tempt people into theatres, but would still appeal to a primarily television watching audience, were parts of the campaign to win back audiences. Through my case studies, I address the relationship between changes in attitude towards design by some film-makers and the protean structures within which films were being produced in the period. Trying to place film title sequences within a wide context, I have drawn on a variety of material for evidence. Films have been my most important primary resource, but I have also systematically looked at movie publicity material and graphic design journals. Existing texts on cinema have been useful in establishing the cultural status of mainstream film and I have explored notions of intended or unconscious cinematic meaning through literature on named directors or films. To discover how the title sequences of the case study films were read at the time of their release, I have looked at contemporary reactions both in reviews and critical essays. Establishing the place of the title sequence in practical terms relative to production of the body film had to be partly guesswork, though all speculation has been based on reliable sources. A detailed archive on the production of Spartacus made it clear how Basss sequence fitted in to the production of that film and interviews with designers have given me a fairly accurate impression of the schedules in which other sequences were produced. Interviews with graphic designers, animators, set designers and film-makers proved an invaluable source of otherwise completely unrecorded information and helped me root abstract ideas in practical thought. To bridge the histories of graphic design and film, I have been required to make unfamiliar connections between disparate sources of information. By bringing the subjects together, I hope to throw light on both.
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dennis dorney, 17 August 2010, 9:09 PM
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interesting article and subject matter. Do you know which font was used for the Main Titles in Truffaut's 1959 Les Quatre Cents Coups?
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 3 Visions in Motion by Emily King
23/08/12 18:39
Essays, 2004
2171 words
4;ECHA #L?>CN &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZV^[Z X 6CMCIHM CH -INCIH

by Emily King
Part three of ten of Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century. here she lays down the modernist roots of her work.
1: Visions in Motion: the American graphic designer and modernism. The generation of graphic designers practising in the United States in the 1950s were confident of the importance of their role in modern American life. An editorial in Print magazine described the States as a land of a fast-increasing population, with fast-increasing monies to spend and suggested that it owes its present progressively grounded status in large part to the Graphic Designer ... who has reached into all corners of our way of living to point out new avenues of thought, expression and methods. A robust belief in modernity partnered with a firm faith in the importance of the designer in the process of progress was inherited by the American graphic designer from their adopted ancestors, the European modernists. The 30th anniversary issue of Print, published in 1969, chose to concentrate on the Great Graphic Designers of the Twentieth Century . Fifteen great graphic designers were discussed. Beginning with El Lissitsky, the magazine went through, among others, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes and Paul Rand, until it ended up at Saul Bass and Milton Glaser. Through this genealogy, the professionalised graphic designers who edited and subscribed to the magazine elected themselves the heirs of the European tradition. Laszlo Moholy Nagy (1895-1946) and Gyorgy Kepes (b.1906) played an active role in forming the American designers who followed them. Moholy Nagys influential text on the Bauhaus preliminary course The New Vision was translated into English and published in America in 1932, spreading his ideas to the United States five years before he was appointed as Director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago 1937. At the New Bauhaus, renamed the Institute of Design in 1944, he became directly responsible for teaching many of the designers who were among the most influential practitioners of the 1950s and 1960s. Gyorgy Kepes, a Hungarian-born graphic designer who had worked with Moholy Nagy in Berlin in the 1930s, played a similarly important role in educating the graphic designers who would become the most prominent of their generation. Between 1938-43 he taught at the Chicago Institute and from there he went on to teach at design schools along the East Coast until his retirement in 1974. Kepes published a number of texts which brought the principles of the Bauhaus to designers and design students schools throughout the United States. Traditionally the American counterpart to theoretical European modernism has been seen as non-ideological. Lorraine Wilde in her essay Europeans in America has suggested that When Modernism was finally integrated into common design practice in America, both its aesthetic and conceptual basis were significantly altered and that the process involved the transference of the visual aesthetic as opposed to the ideological framework. She concludes that where the European design was theoretical and functional its American counterpart was pragmatic and visual. While it is true that American designers did not adopt the beliefs and aims of the European modernists wholesale, it is inaccurate to view the generation of practitioners working in the 1950s and 1960s as unideological. Many of the American graphic designers of this period took a consciously theoretical approach to their work and grasped opportunities to write about their ideas in magazines and discuss them at conferences. An editorial in Print magazine of 1960 believed it spoke for the American graphic designer when it crowed, Articulate we have become, and the men and women who have raised their voices and given us the privilege of their talents are among the most respected in the world of creative effort. The editorial went on to list these talented and forthright individuals, placing the most theoretical of European modernists (Laszlo Moholy Nagy and Herbert Bayer) alongside designers born and bred in the United States (Saul Bass) without comment. While not entailing an unquestioning espousal of the views of the European modernists, this juxtaposition implies a belief in a continuity between the voices of the Europeans and their own.
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The conclusion that American modernism was merely pragmatic and visual rests on the assumption that the pursuit of commercial ends is necessarily a non-ideological goal. However many post war American graphic designers did not see commerce in opposition to ideology but embraced it as part of their theoretical base. In general, the designers writing in Print and speaking at the International Design Conference in Aspen believed that commerce was the route by which their ideals would be best achieved. There was shared a commitment to the notion that good design would flourish in the free market: If the salesmen didnt understand modern art, they did discover that it nonetheless markets the product. This meant they had to turn to the person who understood this art: the Designer, the artist. Thus what began as coterie acceptance became mass acceptance. The coterie referred to in this passage are likely to have been the securely professional readers of magazines like Fortune, a journal for businessmen, and Scope, the periodical of the pharmaceutical company Upjohn. These magazines were among the first to employ art directors who were committed to the formal ideals of modernism (fig.3.). Wilde argued that both periodicals assumed a fairly sophisticated degree of visual awareness on the part of the reader. But while the art directors working on these magazines might have admitted that their work was reaching only an elite, they believed that modernist design would eventually play a beneficial role at every level of society. Will Burtin (1908-72), a designer who trained at the Werkschule in Cologne and emigrated to America in 1938, worked as art director on both Scope and Fortune magazines in the 1950s. He argued, To convey meaning, to facilitate understanding of reality and thereby help further progress, is a wonderful and challenging task for design. The writer, scientist, painter, philosopher and the designer of visual communication, in commerce are all partners in the task of inventing the dramatic and electrifying to a more comprehensive grasp of our time. The scope of this professional function goes beyond the aims proclaimed by the pioneers of the twenties. Burtin, while undertaking to improve understanding through visual communication, the primary end of the European modernists, commits himself to the means of commerce. This faith in market forces ran directly against the beliefs held by the European modernists from the Bauhaus. In his book Vision in Motion, published posthumously in Chicago in 1947, Moholy Nagy insisted that the artist has to take sides and proclaim his stand. He defined his ultimate aim: To redirect the industrial world towards a balance between a biologically sound human existence and the present industrial society, and to create a planned cooperative, economy. Moholy Nagy denied that pure commerce would lead to the best possible outcome, arguing that, The silly myth the genius has to suffer is the sly excuse of a society which does not care for its productive members unless their work promises immediate technological or economic applications with calculable profit. Obviously this stance is opposed to the free market ideology of most American designers in the post-war period. But Moholy Nagy spun the ideological thread that bound the American graphic designer to the European modernist more strongly than any other when he went on in his text to commit himself to the ideal of a modern universe in which technology would be fully employed in pursuit of appropriate ends. It was Moholy Nagys desire to exploit the latest technology that brought him to film making in the 1920s. He suggested that "Painting, photography, film and television are parts of one single problem although their techniques may be entirely different, and engaged himself in exploring the characteristic visual, perceptual elements that arose from the technical peculiarities of film. In Painting Photography Film, first published in German 1925, Moholy Nagy argued that The camera has offered us amazing possibilities, which we are only just beginning exploit and continued, It seems to me indispensable that we, the creators of our own time, should go to work with up-to-date means. Kepes shared this enthusiasm for working in a contemporary fashion with modern media. In the Language Of Vision he suggested that The invention of the motion picture opened the way to a hitherto undreamed scope and flexibility of rhythmic organization, but complained, The new possibilities of the synchronization of the temporal and spatial structure of the vision are, however, still barely touched upon. Saul Bass (b.1920) had been taught by Kepes at Brooklyn College in the early 1940s and has suggested that The Language of Vision had an important as a influence upon him. In the light of his design education, Basss extension of his graphic work into the medium of film can be seen as a natural step. Partly through his work in film, Bass became one of the most important graphic designers practising in America in the 1950s and 1960s. He was particularly prominent as one of the most articulate designers of his generation, and frequently wrote articles about his work in design journals, including Graphis and Print. At the ninth Aspen Conference held in 1959 Saul Bass, who was acting as a moderator, was described in literature about the conference as a native New Yorker but firmly implanted on the West Coast... His schooling and preliminary work experience began in New York. It is the mixture of East Coast ideas brought to West Coast practice that is most characteristic of Basss work. While Bass retained many of the beliefs that he would have learnt from the modernists whose influence was pre-eminent in the design schools on the East Coast and in Chicago, he unashamedly embraced elements of West Coast culture. Significantly he was enthusiastic
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about the Hollywood film, having no reservations about its non-modern narrative structure, a form which both Moholy Nagy and Kepes believed to be inappropriate to the medium. Bass might have been prepared for his work within film by what he had learnt from his modernist teachers, but he did not share their vision of its future. Bass formulated his own theories regarding the validity of his work within film. He has repeatedly stressed in interviews that his titles were intended to serve the movie. He believes that a pictures content should be addressed in its opening sequence to establish emotional or historical context and to create a rapport with its audience. Bass has dismissed graphically adventurous title sequences that do not deal with the substance of the film as irrelevant tap dances. Bass's conviction that his work within film must properly fulfil a function was derived from a European modernist's faith in simple, effective and appropriate forms of communication brought to a native enthusiasm for the North American film. In an article that began, That much abused and greatly overused adjective, versatile, takes on a full dimension of meaning when applied to Saul Bass and his work, Bass remarked, I seem to enjoy working on a variety of problems. But actually one creative problem helps me solve another. The underlying ideas and emotions of one problem can validly be related to another. Bass argues that his talents for working in both moving and static graphic media are not strictly related because film-making requires a distinctive temporal awareness. But while he has suggested that it is purely coincidental that he is so able in both fields, he does not deny that the they are connected in some ways. Talking about his work in designing corporate identities, Bass explained that, The transition from the film metaphors to corporate identity was really quite logical because to the extent that the symbol for the film was a metaphor for the film the trademark for a company is a metaphor for a company. After Bass became well known for his work in cinema, design critics became keen to spot the filmic elements throughout his work. A review of Henri's Walk to Paris, a delightful new children's book written by Leonore Klein and designed by Saul Bass, claimed that Bass brought to it a certain cinematic flavor and expanded, From page to page he seems to close in on the characters until suddenly he breaks the sequence with a long range shot. It is possible to argue that Bass's static graphic images relate to his filmic work without stretching the movie metaphor too far. An article in Print suggested that Bass took a non-static approach to all areas of design. The implications of this remark are borne out by Bass's ability to establish visual rhythms in a static trademark (fig.4.) and create a sense of suspense in a single shot (fig.5.). The same article went on to remark that Bass drew on a compendium of visual experiences to arrive at appropriate design solutions. Bass used certain elements from this compendium in both his static and mobile designs and so created a recognisable visual vocabulary that runs through his work in all media (fig.6.). To draw valid conclusions about the precise nature of the relationship between Bass's mobile and static graphic designs one must look in more detail at specific examples.
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Purity, 18 February 2010, 10:15 PM
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Could you help me. The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet. Help me! I can not find sites on the: Air conditioners ratings. I found only this - automobile air conditioner. Air conditioners, this maintained commons for more fuzzy and wet fleet and seat sources. Mechanism summers are a potential operation between hybrid way and a persistent, outdoor example, air conditioners. Name Thanks for the help :confused:, Purity from Honduras. Email
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 4 Abstracting the Essence by Emily King
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Essays, 2004
4058 words
4;ECHA #L?>CN &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZV^[Z Y !<MNL;=NCHA NB? %MM?H=?

by Emily King
Part four of ten of Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
2: Abstracting the Essence: The Man With The Golden Arm, 1955 Bass began designing film publicity material after he moved from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1940s. In interviews he has implied it was inevitable that, as West Coast graphic designer, he should become involved with the film industry as movie-making was one of California's most economically important activities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Bass designed a number of film posters and advertisements. He was often employed to design a movies trade advertisement while the body of its publicity, which was aimed at attracting a mass audience, took the conventional film poster format. In the early 1950s the film industrys approach to marketing through design was not sophisticated. The graphic confusion of the studios own correspondence and publicity material suggests that despite the trend for coordinated corporate imagery which was sweeping America, the movie industry had not embraced the fashion of adopting a recognisable cohesive visual identity. The filmic identities of individual studios, which appear on the front of each movie, have remained virtually unchanged since the mid 1930s. In the early 1990s their archaic visual charm is an asset. That they have been retained in their mid-twentieth century form implies a recognition that going to the cinema in the late twentieth century is a nostalgic act for a large part of the movie audience, who have chosen to leave their videos at home. But to have kept these identities in their pre-war form in the protean environment of post-war America, when the movie industry was making a serious bid for a substantial share of modern American life, suggests that those in the film business, unlike much of the rest of American industry, did not have faith in the link between sophisticated design and modernity. Saul Bass has said that in the course of his work for the film industry he encountered the legendary Otto Preminger. Bass was Premingers son-in-law, which might go some way towards explaining how this encounter developed into a long term working relationship which allowed a graphic designer to carve out an unprecedented role in the film industry. Preminger (1905-86) suggested that his relationship with Bass germinated from a need to take control of the publicity of his films. In his autobiography he claimed that, 1951 was a turning point in the history of films. Independent producers could at last make pictures and have them exhibited....I was one of the first to take advantage of the opportunity. By choosing the year 1951, Preminger put his film The Moon Is Blue, a controversially sexy comedy, at the vanguard of independent movie making. Preminger went on, I made an unprecedented contract with United Artists for The Moon Is Blue. I demanded and received complete autonomy and the right to the final cut of the film. Nobody could overrule my decisions. I had at last the freedom I had always wished for. United Artists, while giving Preminger the freedom to produce the film as he wished, retained responsibility for its publicity Preminger was outraged when he saw the advertising campaign for his film which he believed suggested that it was pornographic. And at that point Preminger called in Saul Bass, the best graphic designer I know, to create an appropriately modest campaign. After The Moon Is Blue, Saul Bass was asked by Preminger to design the publicity for Carmen Jones. Bass created the films graphic identity, a rose within a flame. At this point Bass recalls that he and Preminger looked at one another and asked Why not make it move?. The flame behind the rose was animated and the symbol appeared upon the opening credits of the film. Bass insists that his revolutionary role in film-making sprang from an impulse that was really as simple as that.
http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_4_abstracting_the_essence
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On Premingers next film, The Man With The Golden Arm, Bass was employed to create both the films graphic identity, which Preminger intended to dominate its advertising campaign, and a self contained credit sequence using this graphic identity which would open the film and so tie the publicity to the film in a graphically coherent way. Despite the increasing power of the independent film maker in the sphere of production, control over the ways in which their films were marketed and distributed remained elusive for most of them. Preminger made films for a number of different studios in the 1950s and 60s under a variety of contractual conditions. In each case Preminger's bargaining power with the studio who were distributing the film is reflected in the advertising campaign. Preminger hoped Basss complete graphic schemes for the marketing of his films would secure him an upper hand in the battle for control over publicity. Bass's strong instantly recognisable designs also evinced Preminger's apparent control over every facet of production and distribution. During the period of exhibition of The Man With The Golden Arm movie theatres asked for posters with an image of Frank Sinatra, but Preminger refused, allowing only Bass's image of the disjointed arm to be used. In this case the film was being distributed by United Artists who allowed independent film producers a high degree of autonomy. Preminger, who had already been able to seize control of the publicity of The Moon Is Blue, was able to get his way. However, the press books for his films would suggest that he did not always have the control he aspired to over the postproduction of his films. Certainly he appears to have had very little influence over the way his films were marketed abroad. The British press book for Anatomy of a Murder, Columbia, 1959 (fig.7) offers British movie theatres posters which have completely lost the graphic symbol Bass had devised for the movie. On these posters the film's title, written in a typeface clumsily derived from the one designed by Bass, appears above the standard film poster portrait montage of the picture's big stars, James Stewart and Lee Remick. Bass's overall graphic scheme for the marketing of the movie survives only on tiein promotions, such as the cover of the record of the sound track by Duke Ellington and sheet music, which were almost certainly simply the original American versions imported into Britain. Similarly, the British press book for Bonjour Tristesse, Columbia, 1957, (fig.8) suggests that Basss graphic symbol for the film, which was animated in the movies opening credit sequence, virtually disappeared in the British promotion. Again, the poster offered to British theatres used an adaptation of Basss typeface, which was superimposed upon an image of two intertwined pairs of bare legs, one male and one female, sticking out from under a parasol. These posters give the film a 'summer movie' image which is very different from that suggested by Bass's original design (fig.9), which one graphic design critic believed referred to three thousand year old Japanese writing and quoted from a source as aesthetically respectable as Sergei Eisenstein. Columbia studios had no confidence that Bass's graphics would sell Otto Preminger's films to a mass international audience and had the power to choose not to use them. In spite of the patchy success Preminger had in marketing his films in the manner he wished, he seems to have been effective in marketing himself as a man who Shapes All Aspects of His Films. Suggested press copy distributed by Preminger to coincide with the release of his 1961 movie Exodus read, Preminger is an independent producer who jealously guards his prerogatives. He negotiates his own business deals with the distributors and sets the tone and approach of the advertising campaigns. He was successful in creating this image of himself and in his obituary, which appeared in the New York Times on April 24, 1986 he was remembered as a man who, KEPT A FIRM HOLD ON FILMS. The piece elaborated: In his more than three decades as an independent producer and director, Mr Preminger developed a Barnum-esque reputation. Much that he did in turning out a motion picture, other independents would have delegated, but Mr Preminger kept a firm hold on subject selection, script writing, the selection of cameras and other equipment, and post-production supervision of publicity and advertising campaigns. As well as being a sign that he was in complete control, Preminger seems to have believed that the cohesive corporate image he aimed to create for The Man With The Golden Arm would indicate that it was a movie aimed at a modern audience. This is analogous to the belief shared by many American industrialists in the 1950s that a modern a coherent graphic identity signalled up-to-date business practises. Throughout his career Preminger concentrated on making movies he believed to be of-their-time, which for him implied challenging and adult. He had already fought a battle with the film industry's self-censorship body, the Motion Picture Association of American, over The Moon Is Blue and quite knowingly rekindled the flames by producing The Man With The Golden Arm, a film that dealt with drug addiction. When the M.P.A.A. refused to offer the film their Code seal Preminger, who admitted that he was not surprised by the decision, called the Production Code definitely antiquated and claimed that it had no influence on the American movie-going public. To release the film, United Artists were required to either leave the M.P.A.A. and so free themselves from their voluntary observance of the Code or to risk a $25,000 fine. Choosing
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to back Preminger, U.A. resigned from the Association. Discussing Preminger's legal history, his obituary in the New York Times, cynically suggested that he might have been frequently embroiled in fighting movie censorship ..... out of a desire to drum up publicity for his independently produced and directed films, but nonetheless they credit him with hastening revisions of the stiff morality rules of the Production Code Administration. In Britain The Man With The Golden Arm became the first film that had been given an X certificate by the British Film Censor to be exhibited on the Odeon Circuit. John Davies, from the Rank Organisation who distributed the film in Britain claimed that though the 'X' certificate has been commonly associated in the public mind either with horror or pictures depicting sex it was intended to cover all types of film entertainment considered suitable for adult audiences. In an article about film advertising printed in Graphis, Saul Bass discussed his graphics in relation to a film's substance: It is important to note that there is relatively little creative and mature film advertising produced in the United States. That which is produced, comes about sporadically, and does not grow out of a consistent attitude or policy of any business organization. There are many reasons for this, but they all focalize in the lack of confidence of the advertiser in maturity and taste of the audience. This attitude can be traced back to the film itself. Certainly the men who make films for insensitive audiences (as many film makers see it), would hardly be expected to abandon the cliche in the material that is devised to bring the audience to the film. Where a more creative approach to the advertising is undertaken, it is usually as a result of attitudes that were expressed first in the film. In the same article Bass lamented that film makers still remained generally unwilling to accept a grown-up audience. The films graphic identity (fig.10), devised to attract the mature audience that Bass and Preminger believed themselves to be among the first to acknowledge, was intended to act as symbolic of its substance. In Bass On Titles, a short film made by Bass's own production company Pyramid Films in 1982 Bass explained the symbol: The film is about drug addiction, the symbol, that is the arm, in its jagged form, expressed the jarring disjointed existence of the drug addict. It is likely that both Saul Bass and Otto Preminger saw Picasso's Guernica when it toured the United States in 1939. Bass would have still been at art school in Brooklyn when the painting was on show in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Preminger, along with a large part of Hollywood's film-making community, may well have attended a preview of the painting in Hollywood on 10 August 1939, sponsored by The Motion Picture Artists Committee for Spanish Orphans. The painting received widespread media coverage and became the centre of numerous debates conducted both between artists and art critics and among a wider public. In the late 1930s graphic designers and film makers would have been aware of the imagery used in Guernica and the discussions surrounding the work. Fifteen years later the arm symbol Bass derived for the film The Man With The Golden Arm is strongly reminiscent of the outstretched arms and twisted hands of the character at the far right of Picasso's painting (fig.11). Writing a review of Guernica in an issue of Art Digest appearing in 1939, Henry McBride claimed that, Picasso is continually inventing. Apparently for every new set of emotions that creeps into his life has to have a new set of symbols, and so we behold him prodigal, on the present occasion, with a group of revolutionary forms ...... all of them compelling an authority that demands their acceptance into the new language. Bass in adopting one of Picasso's motifs implicitly accepts McBride's analyses and employs Picasso's new language. Bass's use of Picasso's symbolic language reflects the belief, held by many American graphic designers of the period, that design and fine art shared a purpose and so could have a common language. This position was inherited from the European modernists. In 1960 the editor of Print asserted that Today, mindful of the indivisible unity of all the arts, PRINT recognizes the relationship and indeed interdependence of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, the film, television, the cartoon - all visual expressions of our three-dimensional world, he concluded optimistically, Barriers of intellect, snobbery, and use are being eliminated. Many of the debates surrounding Guernica concentrated on the issue of abstraction. Social realism, seen as the favourite art form of the European dictators, was in disrepute among American avant garde artists. Abstraction had been established as the only appropriate form of modern artistic expression. Some felt that Picasso's work in not being abstract enough became merely propaganda. While Clement Greenberg insisted that Guernica aims at the epic and falls into the declamatory, Ad Reinhart argued that It is a painting of pain and suffering. It symbolizes human destruction, cruelty and waste, not in a local spot but all over our one world. The consensus of opinion lay with the latter view. John Berger expressed what had become the accepted reading when he wrote in 1965, Guernica is not a painting about modern war in any objective sense of the term... the Picasso might be a protest against a massacre of the innocents at any time. The film The Man With The Golden Arm is based upon Nelson Algren's social realist novel of the same name which was first published in 1949. At the beginning of the film Frank Sinatras character, the drug addict Frankie Machine, has just
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emerged from a sanitarium, temporarily clean, and is determined to give up his old life of heroin and gambling. The presanitarium Machine had earned his name and his living through his skill in dealing for the local crap games. The postsanitarium Frankie hope to turn his golden arm to drumming and so make an honest crust. The film that follows concentrates on Frankie Machine's personal struggle between good and evil. Machine's dilemma is abstracted from the Chicago slums, where Algren's book was so firmly set. A reviewer writing about the film in Time admitted that Director Otto Preminger has dulled the sociological backdrop that Nelson Algren daubed so brilliantly but went on to claim that this abstraction has edged his major characters more starkly against the mass. As a result, the picture is no intellectual slumming party but a hard-eyed study of human character. In the politically apolitical atmosphere of post war America an examination of human nature in the abstract was seen as intellectually a cut above a study of the social problems festering in urban America. Representing an abstract view of human cruelty and suffering was assessed as a more worthwhile project than protesting against real hardships. It is appropriate that Bass chose a symbol that represented universalised human suffering to symbolise the substance of a film that abstracted the pain of drug addicts in the slums of Chicago and presented it to the movie-going audience as an allegory of good and evil. The title sequence of the film (fig.12) lasts for under three minutes. On the first beat of the second phrase of Elmer Bernsteins jazz score a white bar appears from the centre top of the screen and cuts through the plain black background to the middle of the frame at a slight angle. The text, OTTO PREMINGER presents written in a simple sans serif type, appears along the centre of the screen at either side of the end of the bar. Throughout the title sequence proper names are spelt out in upper-case type and the rest of the text is written in lower-case. In time to the next phrase of music three more white bars emerge from the centre top of the frame and cutting across each other at diagonals jut down to the middle of the screen. The names of the films big stars, who were its major selling point, appear beneath these bars. Both the words and the abstract forms which make up the graphic images in this sequence appear on the screen in time to the beats of the title music. The length of time a particular image sits upon the screen is prescribed and contained by the score. The images and the music work symbiotically, one emphasising the other so effectively that they appear inseparable. The films title appears after the names of its major stars. Written in capitals slightly larger than the type of the rest of the sequence it appears to be held in place at the centre of the screen by four white bars which jut out from the middle of each of the edges of the frame. The more important credits appear either in pairs or singly, framed by abstract compositions of white elongated rectangular forms. The major body of the credits appear in text blocks which either descend from the top or emerge from the bottom of the frame at either side of the screen as white bars slash across its centre in time to the increasingly frantic pace of the music. As the title theme reaches its climax a single bar, wider than the others, appears from the top of the screen and juts down to the middle of the frame. This bar then transforms itself into the geometrically stylised arm motif. The fingers of the hand curl tensely and the image is frozen at the moment that Premingers directors credit appears across the centre of the screen. The style of the sequence is very similar to that of pioneering animation produced by Oskar Fischinger (1900-67) in Germany in the early 1920s. Between 1921 and 1925 Fischinger produced a series of films which he called Studies. In these short films he animated white forms against a black background in time to pieces of well known classical music. In Study No 8 blocks and crescents dance upon the screen to Paul Dukas's The Sorcerers Apprentice and in another Study, which was subtitled a modern artist's impression of The Glory Of Music and repackaged to appear as a short film in British movie-theatres, the same crescents elongate into sinuous lines to translate Brahms's Hungarian Dance onto the screen. Fischinger, who used the symbol of the Buddhist prayer wheel as his logo, believed in a quasi Buddhist doctrine regarding the correlation between the visual shape of an object and its auditory shape or sound. He reckoned that there was nothing of an absolute artistic creative sense in realism in motion and his films were made in pursuit of absolute cinema. Music was central to Fischinger's notion of absolute film, he explained that, The flood of feeling created through the music intensified the feeling and effectiveness of this graphic cinematic expression and helped to make understandable the absolute film. In the late 1930s, Fischinger had come to Hollywood. Fellow emigres helped him find a job at the Disney studio working a sequence of Fantasia, but his relationship with Walt Disney was not successful and at their parting Disney is reputed to have told Fischinger, You want to make art, Im looking for entertainment. After this experience Fischinger was voluble in his criticism of commercial film, appearing to have forgotten that he had pursued and achieved a degree of popular success in Berlin just before he fled Germany. In the catalogue of the exhibition Art in Cinema held at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1947 Fischinger took the opportunity to attack the Hollywood system:
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No sensible creative artist could create a sensible work of art if a staff of co-workers of all kinds each had his or her say in the final creation. The creative artist of the highest level should always work at his best alone, moving ahead of his time. He should not care if he is misunderstood by the masses...... Consequently, there is only one way for the creative artist: To produce only for the highest ideals - not thinking in terms of money or sensations to please the masses. After Fantasia, Fischinger did no work in mainstream film and by the mid 1940s he had virtually given up film making altogether. In his last years in Hollywood Fischinger concentrated on painting, a medium where he could maintain complete creative control. Basss sequence for The Man With The Golden Arm is like a Fischinger Study, both in the style of animation and also in the close sychronization between visual and auditory rhythm. Mike Weaver, writing about Fischingers work just after his death in 1969, claimed that he turned the screen into a graphic score the visual rhythm being subordinate to auditory. This is also true of the Golden Arm sequence. Bass animated the sequence to the existing score, which was unusual in that period, when composers were almost always asked to create music to accompany existing celluloid images. Fischingers work was shown occasionally at art museums on the West Coast and Bass and Preminger might well have become aware of it through these exhibitions. Fischinger did attract a small following, which Malcolm Le Grice considered substantial enough to label the West Coast abstract school but as Le Grice went on to acknowledge the formal aspects of abstraction made only small impact. Basss sequences for The Man With The Golden Arm and for other Preminger films, such as Anatomy Of A Murder and Bonjour Tristesse are the most visible evidence of this schools impact on mainstream film. Despite Basss use of the formal aspects of abstract film in these early title sequences, he had no sympathy with the project of the absolute film. Fairly early on in his career, he turned towards live action rather than animation because he felt that it was more central to the idiom of film. It is unlikely that The Man With The Golden Arm sequence was particularly expensive to produce in terms of the overall production costs of the film. It was animated under a rostrum camera, using no innovative techniques. Bass would have been assisted in the animation by specialists from one of the Hollywood post production facilities, which were just beginning to emerge in the wake of the collapse of the studios. But in spite of being technically unadventurous, the sequence was a radical departure from the conventional Hollywood film title which took the form of typography superimposed upon the centre of a static image. By doing something so innovative at the start of his films, Preminger announced that he was making a new kind of film for a modern audience. The films jazz score reinforced that impression, jazz being the favourite musical style of the up-to-date urban American in the 1950s. Premingers believed his films to be at the vanguard of modern film making, and so he chose to promote them using modern graphic styles.
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 5 Spiralling Aspirations: Vertigo, 1958 by Emily King
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Essays, 2004
3705 words
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by Emily King
Part five of ten of Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century. Saul bass, Hitchcock, Clement Greenbrg, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood: the American avant garde and kitsch...
3: Spiralling Aspirations: Vertigo, 1958 Vertigo was the second Hitchcock movie Saul Bass worked on, having previously designed the opening sequence for North By Northwest. A year after the release of Vertigo, Bass went on to design the credits and work on sequences for the film Psycho. It seems likely that Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was responsible for employing Bass. Years later in an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock admitted, the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on the screen. Bass after his early work for Preminger had made a name for himself as a creator of a certain kind of over-all visual impact. Like Preminger, Hitchcock used Basss input both to maintain control over post-production of his films and to promote the idea of his own complete creative vision. It seems ironic that employing another individual to design a sequence within a movie should be used as a device to signal sole authorship. By designing distinctive sequences Bass gave Hitchcock and Preminger brand images, which audiences could recognise from one film to the next. Robert Kapsis has developed a thesis which suggests that throughout his career Hitchcock was actively engaged in the shaping of a recognisable and marketable artistic identity for himself. Kapsis has argued From the beginning of his directorial career in England in the mid 1920s Hitchcock used publicity to promote himself, his films, and idea of directorial preeminence and authenticity. At a British Film Society meeting, Hitchcock told the assembled group, Film Directors live with their pictures while they are being made. They are their babies just as much as an authors novel is the offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created by one man. The idea that only the work of an autonomous creative individual can be of artistic value anticipated the auteur theory. This theory, which came to dominate serious film criticism, was derived from a bunch of loosely connected opinions expressed in articles written by French critics/directors including Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema, a magazine launched in 1951. Andrew Sarris, the American film critic who was the first to formally express the theory in the early 1960s, argued that the value of a film lay in the qualities that could be attributed to its auteur, who he assumed to be its director. He identified these as the common features within a single auteurs body of work, such as a distinctive camera angle or sequence of images. Kapsiss thesis is important because he implies that a director might be commercially, as well as artistically, motivated to create a recognisable identity for his work. Hitchcock actively promoted himself in the press as a film-maker who was in complete control of all phases of the production process. In 1939 he signed a contract with the American production company, Selznick International. Hitchcocks long term contract with Selznicks studio granted them his non-exclusive services on two pictures in the first year. Though Selznick retained the right to prepare the final cut of the films and was in charge of post-production of all films made by his studio, in interviews Hitchcock claimed that Rebecca, the first film he directed for Selznick, would reflect solely his personality. This view was reinforced rather than contradicted by the material released by Selznicks own publicity machine. Hitchcock was not only promoting the idea of himself as the sole author of his films he was also successfully turning that idea into a marketable asset. From the mid 1950s Hitchcock appeared frequently in the media instructing people on how to view his films. He used advance notices, press releases, staged interviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, reportedly authored by
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himself, to instruct audiences what to expect of a typical Hitchcock feature film. Reviews of Vertigo suggest that he had successfully instilled in his audiences the feeling that they should be spotting his authorial input. After spending more than a column summarising the films plot, a piece in Film In Review concluded, Vertigos credits have the best titles Saul Bass has done to date. To them and the really beautiful photography, and creative photographic effects I add for praise the Hitchcock directorial "touches". It is really those, I suppose, that enable Vertigos 126 minutes to be a pleasant evening. The reviewer never got more specific about what these touches were. It is significant that he mentioned them in the same sentence as the Bass title sequence, which was something he would have recognised as a common feature of Hitchcocks films. The reviewer in the Motion Picture Herald claimed that the film was Fortified with ... the identity of Hitchcocks direction, but again the only cinematic devices he chose to mention are the clever main titles designed by Saul Bass, and John P Fultons special photographic effects which brought The mood of the somewhat lengthy screenplay... into immediate focus. Jack Moffitt, who reviewed the film in The Hollywood Reporter, recognised the problem raised by identifying one mans work as the mark of the creative genius of another, and neatly got around it by claiming, The measure of a great director lies in his ability to inspire his associates to rise above their usual competence and Hitchcock exhibits absolute genius in doing this in Vertigo. The animated spirals of Saul Basss title designs create an effect of dizziness and audience participation at the very start. Other reviewers failed to recognise Basss input completely. The critic of Film Daily admired the opening sequence but, giving Hitchcock sole credit, observed, The producer-director makes excellent use of Miss Novaks beauty, even to the extent of using her large eyes as part of the main title backgrounds. This is not to claim that Hitchcocks 'directorial touches' were in any way fictitious, but just to suggest that it is easier for an audience to recognise a screen-filling graphic device than a subtle camera shot. Stanley Donen made a series of suspense mysteries in the mid 1960s in a consciously Hitchcockian manner. To enable his audience to recognise his homage, he borrowed Hitchcocks favourite actor, Cary Grant, and employed Maurice Binder to give the title sequences the Bass feel. The Donen/Binder team was a self-conscious imitation of the Hitchcock/Bass partnership. Though Bass had not set out to create a complete graphic scheme for Vertigo, he designed a newspaper advertisement for the film adapted from his title sequence (fig.13). Kapsis argues that the idea for this advertisement was Hitchcocks and Paramount reluctantly went along with it. The studio blamed these ads for the films failure to attract large audience in its first few days, Kapsis suggests that the Bass design implied Vertigo was a more poetic and less mainstream film. Within Vertigos first weeks of exhibition Paramounts East Coast marketing office had put together a new design, which put more emphasis on the films stars. Kapsis argues the impact of the new campaign was negligible, Vertigos box office takings continued to decline after the new promotion. A variety of posters were offered to movie theatres through the American press book for Vertigo. While some use an adaptation of the Bass spiral, none keep to the original Bass design created for the press ad which borders on the abstract, a stylised figure of a man falling into the eye of a geometrical figure. The posters that are illustrated with the spiral were intended to emphasise the Hitchcock Sell. The face of the master of suspense looms out from the top left of the design and the text reads Alfred Hitchcock engulfs you in a whirlpool of terror and tension (fig.14). Other posters completely abandon the spiral motif to concentrate on the films stars or its major dramatic scenes. One design shows Kim Novak in bed, James Stewarts face contorted with passion and pain in the foreground and a phallic tower looming behind (fig.15). This poster promises a sexual frisson that audiences might have been disappointed to find missing from the film. While, as Kapsis argues, Hitchcock effectively managed the marketing of his own personality and took an interest in the campaigns to promote his films, he had no dominant idea about the visual approach to this promotion. Despite having commissioned Bass to create the press advertisement for Vertigo, Hitchcock, unlike Preminger, cannot be seen as a champion of modern graphics. Hitchcock chose to promote Psycho with a poster of Janet Leigh in only her underwear. Though the films title was written on this poster in a slashed typeface derived from a Bass design, its style was one that most movie-goers of the early 1960s would have associated with pornographic films. This poster, along with other effective marketing ploys, such as instructing audiences that if they arrived late they would not be allowed into the theatre, were responsible for the films immediate success. Hitchcocks strategy for managing publicity was derived from his instincts as a popular entertainer, rather than any single sophisticated graphic concept. The audience, having been drawn in to see Vertigo by one of the number of devices employed to promote the film, might have held widely varied expectations. Within the movie theatre, an instant impression would have been created by the first suggestively mysterious notes of Bernard Hermanns score, which begins as the Universal pictures logo fades from screen.
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Immediately after this opening, the first image of the title sequence (fig.16) fades onto the screen. In the opening seconds of the sequence the camera moves to the left, drawing our eyes with it, until it rests on a black and white close-up of the face of the films star, Kim Novak, already in character as Madelaine/Judy. The camera then closes in on her mouth. Our gaze is concentrated upon this single feature which is blown up to fill the screen. The mouth twitches slightly as if its owner were nervous under our concentrated examination. The opening words of the title ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS expand onto the screen until they fill the womans upper lip. The credits are all written in serif capitals. The larger titles in the first part of the sequence are in outline type through which the image beneath can be seen. The main body of the titles are in solid black capitals of the same typeface. The camera then moves our gaze upwards to the womans eyes. Again as if in response to our gaze, she moves her glance from side to side in swift panicky movements. The names of the films big stars, Kim Novak and James Stewart, expand onto the screen in the same manner as the first credit to fill the forehead of the woman. The camera then concentrates our gaze upon the right eye of the woman. At the slightly spooky sound of a bell in Bermanns score the screen is suddenly stained red. The films title expands from the womans pupil to fill the centre of the screen. The changing colour of the screen signals that the images are no longer examining the external signs of identity but dealing with the inner being. The camera draws us into the psychological depths of the woman through her pupil. As the camera dives into the depths of the womans nature the music becomes increasingly uneasy and mysterious. The mathematical figures expand to fill the screen. Our gaze appears to penetrate the eye at the centre of the each figure, suggesting a process of delving down through complex layers. As our gaze appears to move through one figure it is met by the next, which in its turn appears from the cinematic distance and expands to fill the screen. The body of the text in the sequence appears in blocks to the lower left and lower right of the screen as the camera travels through the geometrical figures. The sequence ends as a rotating circular form fades into an image of the womans eye and Hitchcocks directors credit emerges from its pupil. This image then fades out entirely. The technology used to trace the geometrical figures onto the screen in the Vertigo sequence was developed by a West Coast experimental film maker, John Whitney. The Whitney brothers, John and James, were part of the small resurgence of interest in the experimental film on the West Coast immediately after the war. They were included in the 1947 San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition Art in Cinema. In their catalogue entry for that exhibition they commited themselves to the idea of abstract film, speculating, Perhaps the abstract film can become the freest and the most significant art form of the cinema. But also, it will be the one most involved in machine technology, an art fundamentally related to the machine. They claimed that, like Mondrian, they sought a truer vision of reality by destroying the particular representation and went on to assert that, By a mechanical destruction of the particular we believe it possible to approach anew this problem. The technology used to create the Vertigo sequence was adapted from the radar equipment used in the second world war. This equipment had first come to the attention of graphic designers in the early 1950s. In an article in Graphis of 1954 (fig.17), Ben Laposky reported on an exhibition of electronic abstractions which had travelled to twenty eight museums in the United States. He described: abstract art forms, traced by intricate electrical waves on the screen of a cathode-ray oscilloscope. They are originated and fashioned by the electronic circuits and displayed by the glowing beam of the electronic picture tube; they are recorded by means of a 35mm camera and the use of fast films. He went on to speculate, To the mind these creations seem to have a particular fascination. Although purely abstract in origin, and so nonrepresentational of many material things, resemblances to many natural forms may be seen. To a generation of graphic designers committed by their Bauhaus ancestors to the pursuit of technological progress these electronic abstractions offered an exciting new possibilities. In 1957 an article in Print (fig.18) reported on Morton Goldsholls work with electronic abstractions, suggesting it was directly connected to the graphic designers concern with light, as it accurately reflects the growing use, first in avant-garde circles and then in the commercial work. The use of light pioneered by the Whitney brothers was possibly the first mobile graphic device which was subsequently adapted to static use, reversing the conventional route of graphics into film. By employing Whitneys technology in the opening sequence of a narrative feature film, Bass again showed an interest in the means, but a lack of sympathy with the ends, of the project of the absolute film. But John Whitney, unlike Fischinger, was no enemy of commerce. In the early 1960s he and his brother made a short film, Catalog, which was intended to show prospective customers the kinds of graphics they could produce for use within commercial film or television. The most famous use of Whitneys technology in mainstream film is within the Stargate sequence in Kubricks 2001.
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Basss sequence at the beginning of Vertigo is symbolic of the films substance. Robin Wood in his book Hitchcocks Films, the first analysis of Hitchcocks complete oeuvre written in 1965, suggests the films theme was unstable identity and argues, Hitchcock is concerned with impulses that lie deeper than individual psychology that are inherent in the human condition. This concern with human psychology was widespread in the mid-twentieth century, when the unconscious was on everybodys mind. The association of intricate geometrical figures with complex psychology states was made by the Whitney brothers, who listed among their interests Jungian psychology, alchemy, yoga, tao, quantum physics, Krishnamurti and consciousness expanding and associated the patterns they derived with the view from the inner eye. Bass did not only the employ the technology of the West Coast experimental film-makers in the creation of the opening sequence of Vertigo, to some extent he adopted their ideology. By the early 1960s the association of the geometrical form with the mental state had become a graphic convention (fig.19), and these figures appeared as cover illustrations on virtually all of the numerous popular psychology texts that were published in the period. The score accompanying the Vertigo sequence does not marry visual beat to auditory beat but is loosely synchronized to the images. It is likely that Hermann would have composed the music to counts of the title sequence and a outline of the storyboard. Bass has said that, with the exception of The Man With The Golden Arm, In every case, I did the visual material first and the composer wrote an original piece of music to accompany it. Probably both music and the title sequence were put together at the very end of the production process, once the body of the film had already taken shape. This was the conventional film production schedule that had evolved under the studio system and was adopted unrevised by independent producer/directors. Bass made the credit sequence for Vertigo with the help of Harold Adler, a movie advertising artist and title design letterer who worked for National Screen Service. Adler later went on to cooperate with Bass on the titles for Psycho. Discussing that collaboration Adler observed, I dont think [Saul Bass] was too technically involved or oriented at that time. One of the reasons he came to us at National Screen was that we tried to contribute to that concept and not let him make any mistakes. He went on to recall that Basss storyboards were complete and precise but that he needed help to interpret them into film. Among others involved in the production of the Psycho sequence were a cameraman and an animation director. Making even a short film sequence requires a team of people working in different capacities. The teamwork involved in the process of producing graphics for film distinguishes it from that of producing static graphic images. Rebello in his account of the making of Psycho records that out of the $806,947.55 it cost to produce the film, Bass was paid $3,000 to design the opening sequence, which cost $21,000 in total to produce. Hitchcock employed the crew from his television series to make the film, bringing in only the editor George Tomasini and Bass. In this case the opening few seconds of the film accounted for a relatively large proportion of the production costs because, at only $800,000, Psycho was a very low budget film. By 1960 the small budget B movie had its day and the average cost of a feature film produced by the major studios was $2 million. Psycho was produced on such a low budget only because Hitchcock had not been able to attract financial support from the major studios for the project. Therefore, while Bass might well have been paid a similar amount for his work on Vertigo two years earlier, against that movies overall production costs the title sequence must have been fairly inexpensive. Vertigo was a major release by a large studio and would have been produced on a budget commensurate with that status. Despite being of little financial significance, the opening sequence of Vertigo might have been intended to play an important role in the films bid for cultural gravity. Kapsis suggests cynically, Throughout the 1940s Hitchcock continued his practice of including unusual shots or sequences in his films for their calculated effect on the more serious critics. The most famous of these is the dream sequence within Spellbound, which was designed by Dali and is little more than a transfer of his paintings onto the screen. The emphasis in this sequence appears to be to create easily recognisable Dali images on screen rather than an effective filmic sequences. After arriving in the United States in the early 1940s, Dali had quickly achieved notoriety and by the time he collaborated with Hitchcock he was already a familiar name beyond art circles. He had designed window displays for Barneys, a major New York department store, and appearing in numerous, widely circulated American publications. By employing Dali, Hitchcock was making a statement to which a large part of his audience would have been able to respond. But, while Hitchcock arguably always played to a crowd, it is unlikely that he was unaware of the effects his films were having on serious critics. Spellbound, among other films by Hitchcock, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art when Selznick donated his collection to the Film Library in the early 1950s. By the late 1950s Hitchcock, canonised by MOMA and firmly established as the icon of the Cahiers Club, the emergent band of serious film critics, was highly aware of the relationship of his films to art. By using a style characteristic of the experimental art film in the opening sequence of Vertigo, Hitchcock possibly hoped to reinforce the status his oeuvre in the cultural hierarchy. Richard Griffith, curator of MOMAs film library in the 1950s, actively encouraged the collection of
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American avant garde film of the period. Hitchcock must have been aware that the films of John and James Whitney lay in the collection alongside his own work of the 1940s. The term Hollywood Film was often used both within the United States and throughout the world as a generic term for cultural junk. Clement Greenberg in his article Avant Garde and Kitsch that appeared in the Partisan Review Fall 1939, defined Kitsch as popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies etc, etc,. The films made by Hitchcock in the United States are undeniably Hollywood products, and as such would have attracted the scorn of Greenberg. Though it might have been more productive for Hitchcock to reject completely the terms of this debate, in the post war period it had become the dominant framework in which to discuss cultural issues. Champions of all sorts of popular culture began to argue that their particular cause, fashion, music design etc, was art. The design of the opening sequence of Vertigo was one of Hitchcocks attempts to ally himself with the avant garde rather than the Kitsch.
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Stan Wood, 25 January 2009, 7:21 AM
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I don't believe that is Kim Novak's face during the title credit sequence. The woman is annonymous. C, 11 March 2009, 12:49 PM how much did it cost to produce Vertigo? Email Michele Johnson, 18 September 2009, 2:23 PM
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I have read somewhere that the face of the woman in the title sequence belongs to Joanne Genthon who plays Carlotta in the dream sequence. This adds another layer to the matter of female identity.
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 6: Musical Statues: Spartacus, 1960 by Emily King
23/08/12 18:40
Essays, 2004
3710 words
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by Emily King
Part six of ten of Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century. Saul bass, Hitchcock, Clement Greenbrg, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood: the American avant garde and kitsch...
4: Musical Statues: Spartacus, 1960 In the late 1950s and early 1960s the production of epic films was at its height in both America and Europe. Derek Elley, author of The Epic Film, suggests that Ben Hur, made in 1959, marks the zenith of the Hollywood cycle. This puts Spartacus, which was released in 1960, at the cusp of the genres decline. Kirk Douglas (b.1916), star and executive producer of the film, was the controlling presence on the production, to the extent that Stanley Kubrick (b.1928), the director, claimed that he was nothing more than a hired hand on the set. Douglas sacked the films original director, Anthony Mann, and most of the production crew after the first few days' filming. Saul Bass was one of the few members of the original production team to survive the change-over. He had been hired in the earliest stages of the production to design the opening credits and to create the films climactic battle scene. In an interview Saul Bass described the evolution of his role on the film: I was working on the battle, because at first, it wasnt going to be a big epic picture, just reasonable... 2 or 3 million dollars. So they thought it would be very interesting to do a symbolic battle, and they thought symbolic battle... thats Saul Bass, so they called me in and I was working on a symbolic battle. Then things started getting a little out of hand, budget rising - it was now about 4 or 5 million - so they said, lets have a little more... lets do an impressionistic battle. So I redid the whole thing. Well, they were enlarging the picture, putting more and more things in, and finally they said - Well gee, we cant go down the line and then have somebody look through the window and say "Thats a helluva battle going on down there what we need is an all out battle. So by this time I was the battle expert, and thats how I wound up doing what for me is this most unlikely thing. That Spartacus was originally conceived as a film with a relatively modest budget differentiates it from the plethora of epic movies. It was traditional to advertise the record breaking budget of an epic film as a selling point, so spending money was an activity justified in itself. Central to the 1959 remake of Ben Hur was the absurdly extravagant chariot race. Andrew Marton, who directed that scene, became keenly sought after in Hollywood as a man who could blow millions to great effect. Along with the symbolic battle, Basss opening title sequence was part of a package of relatively low budget features intended to distinguish the film. The opening credits of Ben Hurappear in a classical typeface over a static image of a detail of Michelangelos Creation of Man. Similarly, the titles of other major epics are in the traditional Hollywood mould of typography over appropriate static image. Basss modern graphics would have set Spartacus apart from the rest in its first few minutes. The opening sequence of the film lasts 5 minutes 17 seconds and credits 57 separate individuals and companies. Bass himself suggested that film makers were paying more attention to credit sequences because they were becoming so long. He explained that, In spite of all efforts to control the situation, the lists of credits on films grows larger each year.... Since trade requirements demand these extensive credits, it seems that this usually neutral interlude should be converted into a positive introduction to the film. After the studio system broke down the entire production team of a movie would be hired on contract. Whenever possible the contractee would include a clause demanding a screen credit. Visibility on screen had become key in the industry where your next job depended upon how prominent you were able to make yourself in your last. By the mid 1950s the length of the credits at the start of films had become the subject of jokes shared by film-makers and
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audiences. In A Star Is Born (1954) the James Mason character is told that his career is finished in the time it takes for the credits on the film he is watching to roll. Significantly, this climactic scene is played against the background of a baseball game on television, making the connection between lengthy credits and the decline of the movie industry. It was the shifting power structures in Hollywood, which many believed would hasten the collapse of the film industry, that were responsible for extending credit sequences. In many cases, when and where and in what form credits appeared seems to have been up for constant renegotiation. Between January and August 1960 memos regarding screen credits on Spartacus flew back and forth between members of the production team (fig.20). The complete list of credits was revised several times before the final version was reached in mid August 1960, after shooting of the titles had already begun. Saul Basss own credit appears to have been the source of debate. A memo dated July 14, 1960 announced, The Saul Bass title has been resolved. He will be the first name on card 17 and the credit will read as follows: Main titles and design consultant ... Saul Bass. The memo concludes wearily, We all hope we shall resolve the other credits within the next two weeks. I will let you know. Alex North, the composer of the Spartacus score, was sent the final counts of Basss sequence on 10 June 1960 (fig.21). On 19 July he was sent the revised counts (fig.22) and nine days later a schedule was drawn up which projected that his score would be completed by 12 August. Despite the repeated delays in the production of Spartacus, to the extent that by early 1960 the film was nearly a year behind its original schedule, the post-production work on the film was completed to extremely tight deadlines. In the sequence as it appears on the film (fig.23) Alex Norths score opens with a harsh trumpet fanfare just before the first image appears on the screen. Described in the counts sent to North as Hand Entering Field at Right, a sculptural hand points authoritatively from right to left and the first credit, for Bryna Production Company, fades in over it. Seconds later a manacled hand tightly clenched in a rebellious fist breaks through from the left of the screen and Kirk Douglass credit appears in elegant serif capitals [Slaves Hand - Static]. Next, Laurence Oliviers credit is superimposed onto an image of the head of an imperial sceptre [Eagle]. Jean Simmons, the only female lead, is given a credit against the background of an image of a hand holding a water jug [Hand With Pitcher]. The images and text of this part of the sequence fade in and out within regular time intervals. The doom-laden drum beats of the Spartacus theme keep time, but the auditory and visual rhythms are not synchronised in any detail. Each of the films principal characters is given this style of solitary credit. The photographed fragments of apparently classical statutory juxtaposed against their names are intended to symbolise their role in the production. After six individual credits, which take up the first 74 seconds of the sequence, the films title appears in the centre of the screen in the same typeface as the major credits, but in slightly larger script. It is superimposed onto an image of two sword blades which appear to challenge each other. This symbol is accompanied by some dramatic trumpet flourishes in the score emphasising it as a key point in the sequence. After the films title, other acting credits and minor technical credits appear in text blocks of smaller type superimposed onto either fragments of classical statues or blocks of Roman script. The respective authors of the screenplay and original book, Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast, are credited in the same frame, their names superimposed onto a screen filled with Roman script, which must refer to the process of authorship. The men who had an overview of the films production, Kirk Douglas and Edward Lewis, the executive producer and the producer, are given their credits at the end of the sequence over the profiles of classical busts. Stanley Kubrick, the films director, is given the last credit, superimposed over the centre of a full face view of the sculpted head of a young Roman man. After Kubricks name disappears from the screen the statue appears to age. Cracks appear in the marble [Head Starts Cracking at 293] and eventually the statue crumbles [Cracks Occur At 294; Ear 295; R.Cheek 296; Jaw 298; etc]. After it has virtually fallen apart, the head fades from the screen [Cracking Completed At 307; Dolly In Starts at 309; Dolly Completed at 315]. At the last glimpse the audience catches of the bust, its noble face is reduced to mere fragments of a nose and an eye. Bass looked for statues to photograph for the sequence in the Los Angeles County Museum, the Getty Museum and the Anthropological Museum at Berkeley. If he could not find the right statue to symbolise a certain role he would commission it from Sylvestri, a craftsman who specialised in 'classical' statuary. Almost certainly the manacled fist of the slave, the symbol of defiance in captivity, was made for the sequence rather than found in a museum. The nobility and strength of the slave was not a theme explored in the statuary of ancient Rome. This emphasis on research in tandem with a cavalier approach to the facts is characteristic of the production of the entire film. Liberties taken by the film, both with the facts known about the true Spartacus story and with what was known about life in ancient Rome, were motivated by the desire to draw parallels between the politics of the Spartacus fable and those of the mid-twentieth century. Derek Elley called the film a misty meditation on freedom and claimed that while Howard Fast, who wrote the novel Spartacus on which the film was based, saw the story as a fable about equality, Douglas saw
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Spartacus as an opportunity to make a large-scale Zionist statement. Douglas described the theme of the film as the individual, fighting against society and went on to remark, its always obsessed me ... it doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or a bastard. What matters is that you won't bend. What Kirk Douglas has ingenuously described as his linguistic scheme is possibly the device that conveys the films most blatant political message. Romans, upholders of a decaying political order, speak with English accents. Slaves, who seek to overthrow Roman authority and establish a just society, have American voices. Jean Simmons, the only exception to this rule, was cast as a slave from Britannia. Hers is the only English accent that the audience is not intended to associate with a rotting society. This scheme was common among Hollywood epics and the message, that modern American society was challenging the degenerate European establishment in the new world order, was reinforced again and again through these movies. Manipulation disguised as attention to detail was not motivated solely by politics. The battle scene was advertised in the publicity around the film as the first time audiences may view the unique formation which military experts call historys most efficient. Bass describes his design for that scene as a highly interesting mechanistic expression of the Roman army, where their centurian groups operated like Venetian blinds, he was aiming to give the impression of a terribly machinelike, efficient, frightening kind of thing. Though Bass has claimed that little of his work on the battle survived in the movie, it is obvious from his descriptions which scenes are to his design. While Bass was using the formation of the 'army' to create a graphic impression on the screen of mechanistic efficiency, the publicity was selling his design as an accurate representation of Roman military efficiency. Publicity released with the movie boasted, All the research was not aimed solely at visual effects. Alex North, for one, was concerned about authenticity for the ear. In an interview North claimed, What I tried to do in the picture was to capture the feeling of pre-Christian Rome using contemporary music and techniques. Because the struggle for freedom and dignity, the theme of Spartacus is so pertinent in todays world, I tried to combine research and period authenticity with contemporary composition. 'Authenticity' is not a straightforward concept in regard to the music of an extinct culture and can often be identified in the score of Spartacus by jarring brass fanfares. Among other 'contemporary music and techniques', North used elements of jazz music. The surprising juxtaposition of jazz and togas must have been intended to wake audiences up to the immediate relevance of the Spartacus fable. It would be unfair to claim that the political content of the film Spartacus was fabricated entirely by movie makers adopting historically questionable devices to draw arguably spurious contemporary parallels and that its message amounted to nothing more than vague ideas about freedom from old world orders. However, the most pertinent political message of the film lay not in its substance, but in the credits appearing in the opening sequence. On 1 August 1960 it was finally agreed that Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast would be openly acknowledged for their roles in writing the film. Both were writers who had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era. For Trumbo, who had been working in Hollywood under pseudonyms for many years, it was the first time his role in the production of a film had been acknowledged since the hearings of the Un-American Activities Committee. The Hollywood Reporter, while suggesting that the employment of blacklisted writers might prevent the film being accepted, admitted that there is nothing more subversive in Spartacus than contained in the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. As well as the opening credits and the battle scene, Saul Bass designed a graphic symbol for the film Spartacus (fig.24). He returned to Guernica as a source for this symbol. The figure of the gladiator, head thrust back, arms upstretched and sword in hand, is a more defiant version of the unarmed figure at the far left of Picassos canvas. In drawing on the visual language that had been derived from the painting, Bass was communicating a metapolitical message about liberty that would have been widely understood. By 1960 Guernica had come to epitomise the appropriate way to visually express the abstract rhetoric which dominated the political language of United States. North Americans were not only exposed to 'misty meditations on freedom' through their films, they were also hearing them from their President. John F Kennedy delivered a speech concluding, My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man, at his inaugural address only three months after the release of Spartacus. With minimal changes, Kennedys speech could have been slotted quite comfortably into the script of the film. Basss symbol for Spartacus, though expressive both of Americas political conscience and of the films message, did not appear in any form in the credits. The visual language employed by Bass in the sequence suggests a completely different source. The surrealists had been engaged in exploring the psychological and subconscious impact of classical imagery through their paintings and films since the 1920s. The images of fragments of sculpture appearing in the Spartacus titles are reminiscent of this recurrent motif of avant garde art. While European designers working in both Europe and America, such as Cassandre (1901-68) (fig.25), had already brought the language of surrealist art into graphic design, it seems likely that Bass was directly informed by the medium of film. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), in The Blood Of The Poet, 1930, had let
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the camera linger on brightly lit statuary and subsequently the imagery had made its way into mainstream film. In Citizen Kane, 1940, German Expressionism met Surrealism in the halls of the mythical mansion, Xanadu. Kanes bizarre collection of antiques included classical, medieval and Renaissance statues which stood out against the eerie shadows of the Great Hall. Basss use of classical motifs in the Spartacus sequence obviously makes sense in terms of the films subject. But, while the use of classical sculpture in the opening sequence of a film about the Roman Empire could be seen as prosaic, the style of the sequence implies more than a straightforward visual representation of the films historical context. Tantalisingly incomplete images are left on screen for merely a few seconds. It is impossible to view this collection of fleeting images simply as a gallery of remnants of a bygone age. Bass described the image used to symbolise Tony Curtiss role in the film as Friendly Hands. This suggests that the sequence was intended to convey emotional as well as symbolic messages. The statues are not the inert artefacts of an ancient culture but collectively become the communicators of complex meanings. No element of Basss title sequence for Spartacus was used in the advertising campaign for the film. Basss graphic symbol appeared as only a small trademark on the American posters and not at all on those offered to British theatres. The film was the object of a coordinated world-wide promotion, but Bass was not responsible for any part of its design. The poster format which was adhered to consistently in both America and Europe was a series of mix and match portrait medallions of the films major stars against a plain background (fig.26), a style which followed the conventional graphic formula of most blockbuster advertising. At this point Bass was no longer confined in his film-work to post-production packaging and publicity, he had defined a role for the graphic designer at the core of production process. The publicity material released worldwide by Universal Studios as part of the coordinated campaign emphasised how much the film did eventually cost to make. Over the years it had taken to produce Spartacus the budget had grown to conventionally epic proportions. A promotional book titled The Portrait of a Production claimed that Spartacus was the most expensive motion picture ever made in Hollywood. The press excitedly repeated the rumour that the films budget was $12 million. Within that budget, the less than $39,560 it cost to make the titles must have seemed insignificant. Graphically interesting title sequences were not part of the blockbuster culture. Unlike Basss other credits of the same period, the Spartacus sequence received no attention from contemporary reviewers, who instead concentrated on the films Vast Panoramas, Superior Acting and Marathon Length. The modest budget for the titles would have met the fee charged by Saul Bass & Associates for the original design and the costs of actually shooting the credits under Basss supervision at National Screen Service. The responsibility for the opening titles of Spartacus as they appear on screen lies with a team. As well as the technicians from National Screen Service, some of the credit for the sequence must go to Basss colleagues from Saul Bass and Associates, chiefly Art Goodman who designed the typography and Elaine Mack who appears to have been responsible for a substantial amount of the research behind the sequence. By 1960 the work of Saul Bass and his team had become well known and popular. They had designed opening sequences for 9% of the films which grossed over $5 million at the box office in the period between 1951 and 1960, as well as those for a number of films which were successful on a smaller scale. From the late 1950s, Bass increasingly used live action within these sequences and became more involved in working on scenes within films. In a filmed interview made by his own production company in the early 1970s, Bass explained that although he had begun his work on titles by animating graphic symbols, somewhere down the line he felt the need to come to grips with the realistic or live action image. Sometimes Bass used these live action sequences symbolically: the titles for Walk On the Wild Side (1962) posit a fight between a black and a white cat as a metaphor for the gang wars on the streets of Chicago (fig.27), and the closing sequence of West Side Story (1961), which wanders round an urban landscape finding credits in the graffiti, symbolises a tale which was supposed to have been plucked from the citys streets (fig.28). Other times Bass made what he called totally integrated titles. Explaining this development Bass said it occurred to me that the title could make a more significant contribution to the story telling process, it could act as a prologue. The opening sequences to The Big Country (1958) and Grand Prix (1966) function in this way. The continuity between these live action title sequences and the films they open may appear seamless. However Bernard Lodge, who has designed graphics for television since 1962, suggests that the sequences are evidently the work of a graphic designer, arguing that what characterises a graphic designers eye for film is looking for shapes and patterns. Lodge, explained that having seen Saul Basss work in the early 1960s he realised that there was a graphic designers way of shooting live action which has become a common language. Discussing Basss use of a telephoto lens to shoot the opening sequence of Grand Prix he observed that you get instant super-graphic images using one of those things...... You get an instant composition ...its very much a graphic designers look. Lodge went on to complain that this style of film making has become cliched suggesting that, One almost wants a stringent ungraphic thing now.
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Throughout the sixties, graphic designers became increasingly involved in the production of films. The positive reception of Saul Basss work in the late 1950s must have encouraged film-makers to employ graphic designers to work on the opening credits and other sequences within their movies. Making a feature of the titles and creating sequences within films with that distinctive 2D graphic look became common elements of mainstream movies in the mid to late 1960s.
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 7: Sex and Typography: From Russia With Love, 1963 by Emily King
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Essays, 2004
4404 words
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by Emily King
Part seven of ten of Emily King's dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century. Bond titling sequences and the invasion of British design...
5: Sex and Typography: From Russia With Love, 1963 In the early 1960s London emerged as a newly fashionable focus of activity for both design and film-making. Americans who were already established in both fields migrated there and simultaneously took advantage of and added to the flourishing creative scene. Alan Fletcher, a British designer who was working in the United States in the late 1950s, returned to London at around the same time as American designers such as Bob Gill and Lou Klein were arriving. Fletcher suggests, A lot of the designers came to England because it was like virgin territory. It was beginning here, there was a romance. Charles Rosner reported in Graphis of November 1960 that, The reputation of British design as a whole was considerably enhanced in the summer of 1960 when the British Exhibition was held New York, and went on to cite soaring advertising expenditure and a rapidly growing public interest in the visual arts as factors behind this improvement. Throughout the 1950s British advertising budgets had grown in line with disposable income, consumer spending had increased and new potential new markets were being identified and exploited. While Alan Fletcher remembers London as a grey blanket in the 1950s, he suggests that it was a city teaming with an immense number of creative bright people by the mid 1960s. Post war affluence hastened social change in a plastic cultural climate. Robert Hewison has argued that anxiety and excitement prompted by the breakdown of long-standing social and political structures led to a shared sense that society was at a turning point. The feeling of being on the edge of a nuclear precipice and on the brink of major social upheaval, in tandem with the facilitation of mass communication through television, was reponsible for what was effectively a transformation of the most visible aspects of British culture and society in the early 1960s. The American graphic designer, Robert Brownjohn (1925-70), came to London in 1961 at the suggestion of Bob Gill. Brownjohn, who had trained at the Chicago Institute, had already enjoyed a certain amount of success as a partner in the New York design group, BCG. He left the United States because of the breakdown of his working relationship with Ivan Chermayeff and Thomas Geismar (C&G) which was a result of his addiction to heroin, a drug he first took as a student. Like most of the American designers who came over he had no problem finding well paid work, and within a few weeks of arriving in London he was employed as an art director at J. Walter Thompsons. Katie Homans has suggested that though family connections and a thriving advertising industry made London an obvious choice for Bj, he was motivated most urgently by the fact that heroin and other hard drugs were available by prescription through clinic in England at this time. While Britains advertising industry was employing some of Americas brightest designers, its film industry was attracting significant dollar investments. Small British studios had been making movies from the earliest days of commercial film production. Having switched largely to turning out propaganda during the second world war, these studios returned to producing entertainment films in the late 1940s and 1950s. American talent or investment played an important role in a large part of post-war British film production. Alexander Walker has argued that in the mid 1950s, because of falling domestic audiences, British film-makers were forced to concentrate on foreign markets and had become more akin to exporters than producers. In 1954 the film critic John Gillett, reporting on the State of the Studios, had noticed that there are only four feature films on the floor in British Studios, and three of them are being made by American directors. While Gillett went on to speculate that a different name on the credits is no assurance of a different line of approach, with the benefit of hindsight, Walker has suggested that the specifically British character of the films produced under these
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condition was nebulous and that they were sometimes indistinguishable in look and tone from the product turned out by the home studios in California. British studios were able to attract American film makers by offering film lots and skilled labour at prices which greatly undercut their Hollywood equivalents. Sydney Cain, who worked in the 1950s as a draughtsman at Warwick films, an important London based company, recalled that he has almost invariably worked for American directors. Cain observed that as well as lower rents and wages these directors might have been attracted to Britain by the skill of her technicians. Arguing that British crews were put through the mill, Cain suggested that, unused to working with large budgets, he and his colleagues would exert themselves to produce effective images at the lowest possible cost. The post-war years saw an Anglo-American film industry established on predominantly American terms. In spite of this, between 1959 and 1967 British independents were able make several films that were notable international successes. These films, as well as earning money for companies representing British interests, also appeared to encapsulate a characteristic Britishness. Ranging from the relentlessly gritty Room At The Top to the costume comedy Tom Jones, these film do not reflect a homogeneous style but their relationship to contemporary British theatre or their ironic humour clearly announced their origins to an international audience. Harry Saltzman (b.1915), who teamed up with Albert Broccoli (b.1909) to make the Bond series, played an important role from the start in the mini-Renaissance of British cinema, finding funds to film Osbornes Look Back In Anger among other projects. Broccoli had also had several years experience in the British film industry pre-Bond, having co-founded Warwick films he successfully produced a number of movies with the financial help of Columbia Pictures international division. Broccoli and Saltzman, operating as Eon productions, persuaded United Artists to fund the first Bond movie, Dr No, securing a budget of a $1 million to produce the film. The first four films of the Bond series were the most financially successful movies produced by the British film industry in the 1960s. But while they were made by a nominally British company all the interests represented were American. Walker has argued that the Bond films self-parodying humour relates them to British films like Tom Jones. It is probably because Bonds irony differentiates the series from the misplaced, low-budget Hollywood productions of the 1950s that the films have been seen as the commercial heart of the brief 1960s revival of British cinema, rather than as cuckoos in the British nest. After the box-office success of Dr No, Broccoli and Saltzman had little trouble eliciting a much larger budget from UA to film its sequel, From Russia With Love. Alan Fletcher suggests that Brownjohn was commissioned to design the titles for the second Bond movie because he was part of the scene of the moment. Saltzman and Brownjohn met at a Chelsea dinner party at a period when designers and film-makers in London all knew each other, and used to meet in the same restaurants. A friend of Bjs remembers him as a charismatic youthful crew-cut slim American character who wore sneakers and was quite different to anyone else I'd ever met. Though he had never worked with film, being a charming mercurial figure at the heart of the closely knit Anglo-American London scene qualified Brownjohn to be offered what, after the success of the first Bond film, had become a prestigious, high budget commission. Maurice Binder (1918-1991), designer of the titles for Dr No, had already effectively created a brand image for the films. Binder, another American emigre, had met Broccoli and Saltzman through the British branch of National Screen Service, where he had worked designing titles and trailers since the late 1950s. The titles for Dr No, like much of Binders work bear traces of the influence of the modern European graphic aesthetic (fig.29). But, possibly because he was trained primarily as a film-maker, Binder appears to have felt free to animate abstract elements, employed in a strictly formal manner by European-influenced graphic designers, to create playful modernistic cartoons. Work by designers such as Noel Martin (fig.30) and Will Burtin (fig.31) must have been the inspiration for the titles of Dr No. But Binders dancing dots, which were made by animating price tags, mock the seriousness of these designers. From the outset, Broccoli and Saltzman appear to have conceived eye-catching, suggestively modern graphics as part of the Bond package. Probably this was because by the time the Bond series was being planned film-makers were competing primarily against television for their audience. From the earliest days of television, channels had used screen graphics to introduce and punctuate programs and animated two dimensional designs were becoming increasingly common in television advertisements. Even though Bass had been creating movie title sequences since the mid 1950s, by the early 1960s most people would have become familiar with animated graphics in their living rooms rather than at the movie theatres. However the quality of television transmission was still very poor and screens were usually small, so the exciting Bond lead-ins gave audiences something television offered but could not deliver. Binder, in cooperation with Brownjohn, topped and tailed the titles for From Russia With Love . Binders famous gun barrel sequence opens the film by putting the audience inside the shaft of a gun as the weapon scans the screen. The figure of James Bond appears within the white circle of light that represents the view from that position. Bond crouches and fires, leaving a red stain which runs slowly down the screen (fig.32). This sequence was lifted straight from Dr No and was
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subsequently used to open every James Bond film. It was remade several times to accommodate a range of James Bonds wearing a variety of trouser widths. While the title sequences were part of the Bond brand image, it was this sequence that became the trademark. After the roving gun barrel device, the film is introduced with a short hook sequence. This structure was borrowed from television. Program-makers hoped that a short dramatic burst of action, usually ending in a car crash or a murder, would stop people switching channels during the credits. Within a film, whose audience has already paid its money, this kind of lead-in is a stylistic, rather than a directly commercial ploy. The action-packed introduction sequences to From Russia With Love and all the following Bond films are further evidence that films were competing against television for their audience. Film-makers were learning that in order to survive they had to adjust to meet the expectations of a predominantly television watching audience, rather than merely compete with what the small screen had to offer. Brownjohns credit sequence begins after the audiences thirst for action has been temporarily satiated by a violent murder. After the initial credit, written in white on a black screen, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli present, the sequence opens with a belly dancer moving against a black background with a series of coloured lights playing across her body (fig.33). The lights are a projection of the words Ian Flemings James Bond in From Russia With Love written in multicoloured script, which at this point are entirely illegible. In the second image of the sequence this same credit is projected onto a flat background and the dancers arms play in the light of the projector, she acts as a screen which catches and distorts the type. Throughout the sequence the credits are written in the same brightly coloured sans-serif capitals. In the third image, a womans wide staring eyes appear through the double OO of Bonds OO7 identity. The projection of the coloured numbers is whisked down her body, rests for a few moments on her girating hips, and disappears. The credits of the leading players, Sean Connery and Daniela Bianchi, are projected respectively onto the dancers rippling belly and closed thighs, the credits of their co-stars appear upon the her inner thighs and so on so until each part of the dancers body has been appropriated by text. The main bulk of the technical credits are either projected onto the undulating back of the dancer or onto her shimmying front. In every case, credits distorted to the point of illegibility by womanly curves are reprojected against a flat background. At the end of the sequence, the names of Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, the films producers, get a prime site within the dancers cleavage and Terence Young, the director, gets the last credit on her gently swaying left flank. Sex and typography was the title Brownjohn chose to give an article in the British journal Typographica in which he described the ideas and processes behind this sequence (fig.34). Beginning by outlining other ways in which he had employed the female body in his work, Brownjohn suggested, I think I must have become rather obsessed with that particular solution because when, a few months later, I was asked to design the titles for the James Bond film From Russia with Love I extended that idea. He goes on to rationalise his obsession by explaining, On this type of the film the only themes to work with are, it seems to me, sex or violence. I chose sex. In fact, rather than focussing in immediately on either sex or violence as the theme of the titles, Bj had originally thought of using the symbol of a chess game within the opening sequence as a metaphor for the films storyline. Likening the films plot machinations to a complex strategic game would have produced a cool metaphorical solution, similar to those arrived at by Bass during his first phase of title making. By eventually deciding to concentrate on the passive female form Brownjohn established the model that was conformed to in every subsequent set of Bond titles. Brownjohn had correctly identified the semi-clad female as the most important ingredient of the Bond films. From the very beginning, when Venus-like Ursula Andress strode out of the waves wearing only a bikini in Dr No, audiences expected Bond films to be littered with naked female flesh. The 1960s are often looked back on as years of a sexual revolution during which women were liberated by sophisticated methods of birth control and relaxing moral codes. The impression created by the Bond series suggests that rather than freeing women, the sexual revolution merely made them appear the increasingly available object of mens fantasies. The source of Brownjohns inspiration for the form of these sexually charged titles has become the subject of myth. John Brimacombe, Brownjohns assistant at the time, remembered that Bj had become fascinated with images of still type on moving bodies when people arriving late for one of his lectures had walked in front of the projector. While this may well be true, Brownjohn would first have encountered these kinds of images as a student at the Chicago Institute under Moholy Nagy. In the article Sex and Typography, Brownjohn wrote, I remembered that, many years ago, Moholy Nagy had proposed projecting advertisements on to the clouds at night. As a student in Moholy Nagys light workshop in the 1940s, Brownjohn would have been encouraged to experiment by projecting light onto not only clouds but a variety of still and mobile forms. In Vision In Motion, Moholy Nagy had even used an image of a women with light projected onto her body, taken from a medical advertisement designed by Lester Beall, to illustrate his thoughts on experiments with light and photography (fig.35). Brownjohn constantly returned in his graphic work to the ideas that he would have come across during his education in Chicago. Katie Homans has suggested that, like Moholy Nagy, Brownjohn believed that art and life must be integrated. She argued, Brownjohn brought to his work and introduced to his contemporaries an approach to graphic design worthy of
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Moholy Nagys experiment in totality, but in the spirit of cynicism, instead of the optimism of his teacher. This theory is borne out by Brownjohns photographic article Street Level published in Typographica of 1961 (fig.36). As Moholy Nagy had suggested, Brownjohn chose to act as an integrator between design and life. But while Moholy Nagy believed that the integration of life and art implied a progressive attitude and a willingness keeping in step with the latest technology, Brownjohn accepted that poverty and shabbiness were part of modern life at Street Level in London. Brownjohn did not identify modernity with the improvement of the human condition. Using the sexually fetishised image of the belly dancer, an object of European fantasy since the nineteenth century whose potency had not diminished a century later, as a screen for a modern typography is similarly an exercise in integrating what cynics could have argued was the true stuff of modern life with the practise of modern design. By the mid 1960s pornography had entered the mainstream through magazines like Playboy, in this context the semi-clad female exposing herself to the voyeuristic male gaze as she dances her way through the From Russia With Love titles was truly an image of its age. He was the original pop artist for sure, claimed a friend of Brownjohns. Brownjohns apparently unjudgemental absorption of the images that were current in modern life is possibly more related to the approach of the pop artist than that of the European modernist. Nonetheless the simple, communicative designs he created using these images strongly reflect the ideas of those who taught him at the Art Institute in Chicago. Conforming to the ideals of the modernists, the partners of the design group BCG had shared a belief that if they couldnt describe an idea over the telephone, it wasnt simple, clear and direct enough. The concept behind the titles for From Russia With Love had the advantage of that kind of simplicity. To present the idea to Broccoli and Saltzman, Bj projected the titles onto a screen, took off his shirt and danced in the path of the projected type saying, Itll be just like this only well use a pretty girl. But, even though Broccoli and Saltzman were able to grasp the idea immediately, the titles themselves were very complex to produce. Trevor Bond, who assisted Brownjohn in animating the From Russia With Love titles, recalled the difficulty of keeping the type legible: The lighting cameraman tried to take a reading from the projected typography and noticed that the needle hardly moved on his Weston master. So the whole thing was shot with a wide open shutter! Its old hat now, but then it was a new frontier. The projector had a 3000 watt bulb and if the dancer moved just a little bit the wrong way the whole thing was out of focus. In Sex and Typography, Brownjohn told a similar story: A projector lens has no depth of focus, and another major problem was therefore to make the dancer control her movements in a plane at right angles to the projector without destroying the illusion of dancing. The final result achieved what I now call instant opticals - with everything done in the camera rather than the laboratory. Brownjohn was the first to exploit this technique commercially and he became celebrated for his ground-breaking work. Brownjohn was awarded the Design and Art Directors Club Gold Medal in 1965 for the titles from Goldfinger, the third Bond movie. While in the From Russia With Love titles he had projected still images onto an animated human screen, in the Goldfinger sequence he created instant opticals by projecting moving images onto a gold-painted passive female form. Broccoli and Saltzman enthusiastically enroled ground-breaking modern graphics into the Bond package, but there was no coherent modern ideology of any kind behind the films production. As the series progressed, the range of gadgetry employed by Bond to fight the enemy became increasingly elaborate and fantastical. But, while in some cases these devices were the related to important scientific breakthroughs, such as infra-red gun sights, often they were gimmicks that had more to do with Heath Robinson than the technological cutting edge. It is hard to imagine the British government spending money to develop the parachute sprouting car that appears in Live and Let Die in an earnest attempt to compete in the Cold War. To some extent the Bond films acted as a shop-window for the British manufacturing industry. Although Bonds cars, boats and planes routinely met their ends at high speed, before these vehicles were engulfed in belching clouds of black smoke audiences would have been made aware of their British origins. It is in their emphasis on these devices that the films depart most radically from the books. Major Boothroyd, a character equivalent to the Bond films Q, does exist in Flemings novels. But Boothroyd, primarily an expert in the technology of weaponry, would never have dreamt of replacing Bonds traditional, battleship grey, Aston Martin DB111, with the conspicuous silver DB5 (with oil slick squirter, wing-mounted machine guns, protruding wheel scythe and ejector seat) offered to Bond by Q in Goldfinger. Despite this comic book vision of modernity offered to audiences, the Bond films hung on to Ian Flemings unreconstructed British hero, who consistently raised his eyebrows in weary surprise at the gadgets offered to him by Q. Bond may have been hero of the modern age but he was not a modern character: he ordered thick cut Oxford marmalade for breakfast and recognised villains by their ignorance of what colour wine to drink with fish. Antimodern attitudes, that in school-boy tales are purported to have built the Empire, are partnered with the avid consumerism of the 1960s to form James Bonds unlikely on-screen personality.
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Pop modernity and traditionalism coexist as separate strands within the Bond series without any apparent contradiction. It is characteristic of the construction of the Bond package that the producers felt able to pick and choose the elements that make up the films without feeling any obligation to reconcile them into a coherent whole. The conception of the design of the titles for From Russia With Love was completely unrelated to that of the overall film. Sydney Cain, the films art director, has no memory of Robert Brownjohn and did not meet with him at any point during the films production. Brownjohn would have filmed the titles after the body of the movie had been shot. He came upon the idea of using the belly dancer after having seen some of the sequences from the film while it was being edited. The graphics used to advertise the film were also designed entirely independent of Brownjohns titles. The publicity of the film was farmed out to National Screen Service and one of their in-house designers put together the poster. The image on this poster of Bond, played in this case by Sean Connery, draped with women, became a template for subsequent Bond advertising. Therefore, while both the credits and the poster for the second Bond film were instrumental in creating a design format that was adhered to in the following Bond features, the elements that made up this format were arrived at through a series of separate design decisions. A popular music theme tune was an important ingredient of the Bond formula. The dancer appearing in the credits of From Russia With Love sways to a song written by Monty Norman and performed by Matt Monro, a reasonably well known crooner of the period. The synchronisation between the music and the visual is not close. The sounds and images might have been composed entirely independently of each other, Brownjohn timing his sequence to coordinate merely with the basic rhythm of Normans tune. The James Bond themes were intended to be, and invariably became, some of the best known popular music of their day. While traditional film music was composed to accompany already shot sequences of film, the Bond tunes could stand independent of the movies. Since the 1940s film music had been packaged to be sold to people who had already enjoyed the movie, but the Bond themes might have been the first pieces of music that were used to actively market the films. It is through some of the more memorable Bond songs, belted out by chanteuses such as Nancy Sinatra and Shirley Bassey, that many people best remember the series. After Brownjohns prize-winning titles for Goldfinger, Maurice Binder returned to the series to design the titles for Thunderball (1966), the fourth Bond movie, and remained to design every subsequent set. In a lecture at the National Film Theatre in 1991, Binder, who summed up the ingredients of his sequences as guns, girls, smoke and steam, claimed, They were really the fore-runners of todays pop videos: the song came first and wed illustrate it. As Binders attitude betrays, the Bond titles from Thunderball on, rather than being moving graphics, were elaborate filmic sequences. While Brownjohns use of elegant modern design to communicate the Bond theme is far from subtle, Binder delivered the sex and violence message through his videos with even less restraint. To open Thunderball Binder had women harpooned underwater, while in License To Kill, the most recent Bond film, he shot them from gun barrels. The elements that make the Bond films unpalatable in the early 1990s are most clearly defined through these sequences. Tom Shone, arguing that in the early 1990s its Time To Junk Bond, suggested the Bond formula, described by the New Statesman in the early 1960s as sex, snobbery and sadism, was nowhere more lovingly observed than in the films title sequences, shot by Maurice Binder: guns, girls and gadgets in slinky slo-mo silhouette. Asked why the Bond films were so successful, Terence Young replied, I'll just say they were well timed. What happened was that Ian Fleming turned up in a dead, grey period. London really is the saddest town in the world. The widespread popularity of James Bond in the 1960s has been the subject of a number of serious investigations which attempt to analyse the shared fantasies of those living through the Cold War in a time of rapid social change. But whatever it was that made Bond a phenomenon, the credits for From Russia With Love, described by one reviewer as disturbingly smart, clever, jazz and crazy, fuelled audience expectation, and the opening sequences became anticipated and popular features of the films.
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jake agnew, 19 January 2011, 7:48 PM
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"suggests that it was a city teaming with an immense number of creative bright people" Um. That should be 'teeming' I believe. Apart from some other typos, the other most shocking part is 'performed by Matt Monro, a reasonably well known crooner of the period' Name
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One of _the_ classic voices of the 20th C, described as a 'crooner'. ?! raja99, 19 January 2011, 9:00 PM
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"In the third image, a womans wide staring eyes appear through the double OO of Bonds OO7 identity. The projection of the coloured numbers is whisked down her body, rests for a few moments on her girating hips, and disappears." Um, are you sure those are "hips"? I'd say they're breasts; you can glimpse the occasional shoulder and arms to the sides before they vanish. Allan White, 19 January 2011, 11:03 PM
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Wonderful writing here. Consider putting some photos or video of the title sequence to give some context. I've been spoiled by the in-depth visual detail from Art of the Title (http://artofthetitle.com) - it's a formula that works. Thanks for writing! Peter Biak, 20 January 2011, 10:54 AM
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Thanks everyone for stopping by. This text has been dormant for a while, and now enjoys quite a few visitors. Would someone be interested in gathering illustrations for this piece? It will sure make it lot more interesting. We'll be happy to compensate for your efforts. If so, please get in touch -> peter-at-typotheque-com
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 8 Popcorn and Pop graphics, Whats New Pussycat?, 1965 by Emily King
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Essays, 2004
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by Emily King
Part eight of ten of Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
6: Popcorn and Pop graphics: Whats New Pussycat?, 1965 Richard Williams (b.1933), who animated the titles for Whats New Pussycat, called Charles K. Feldman (1905-68), the films producer one of the last great Hollywood Moguls. By the mid 1960s Feldman, working independently of the major studios, had produced a number of successful movies in Hollywood, including films as diverse as The Seven Year Itch and A Streetcar Named Desire. At this point, probably encouraged by Londons apparently flourishing film industry and swinging scene, he came to Britain in the search of the ingredients for his next box office hit. According to Clive Donner, the director of Pussycat, Feldman arrived in London in the summer of 1964 with four speculative film projects. On the strength of Donners previous movie, Nothing But The Best, Feldman called him up and offered him the chance to direct any one of these films: He told me what they were, and the fourth one was this comedy called Whats New Pussycat? That was the only one that interested me by title alone....... I took it home and the Casino Royale script, read them both overnight and said Ill do Pussycat.. Feldman had owned the script of Pussycat, which began as a play, for some time before he found Donner to direct the movie. He had hired Woody Allen, a young comedian best known for his set at New Yorks Blue Angel Club, to rewrite the original script. Allen had been working on the project for over a year before Donner became involved. Although Feldman had reservations about Allens script, by the time Donner agreed to direct the movie he had already partly cast the film: the idea at that time was that it would be Warren Beatty, Woody Allen and a lot of beautiful girls. Even after Donner came to the project Feldman remained in overall control. It was Feldman who decided that Peter OToole should play the protagonist after, for complicated reasons, Beatty dropped out and it was Feldman who decided that the beautiful girls surrounding OToole and Allen should be well known stars, rather than the unknowns he and Donner first had in mind. Donner made little claim to authorial input at the casting stage of the movie, other than the suggestion that he had been working on securing Peter Sellers as the third male lead. Pauline Kael writing on The making of The Group, a film produced by Feldman in tandem with Whats New Pussycat?, observed that the casting of Pussycat had got out of hand and concluded that movie finance and casting were often peculiarly linked processes. While The Group was cast as he had originally planned with unknowns and little knowns, in the case of Pussycat Feldman had capitulated to the demands of the investors by choosing well known stars for the major female roles. Feldmans projects were put together to attract investment from businessmen who were primarily interested in profits rather than cinema. His prospective films had to show box office promise and many believed that the only real guarantee of commercial success was a marquee name. Feldmans own preference for casting unknowns probably had more to do with keeping production costs as low as possible than with artistic integrity. While Feldman initiated or actively supported every element of the production of his films, he almost certainly exercised his authorial power in pursuit of profit for himself and his shareholders. Richard Williams suggests that makers of Whats New Pussycat? first got to know of his work through an article in the Observer Magazine. Clive Donner called him up a few days after the article was published in late February 1965. Donner and Feldman were likely to have been well aware of the contents of the Observer at that time because only a week after the article about Williams the same magazine ran a piece about the production of Pussycat. Ronald Bryden reported that the film, which was due for release in the summer, was already, before a foot of film has been edited, a guaranteed blockbuster,
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the big comedy picture of 1965. By the time Williams was brought in to design the titles for What's New Pussycat? in the spring of 1965, the film was in post-production. Williams writes This is normal - or was normal in those days of fancy title sequences. You usually got 6 to 8 weeks to do the job. While Williamss title designs were not part of the package originally conceived by Feldman, Richard Sylberts overall design had been an important part of the production from the outset. The copy in the Whats New Pussycat? press book emphasises Sylberts contribution. A piece headlined Pussycat gets designer of the Metropolitan Opera House sets, reminds audiences that Sylbert had designed other Feldman films including Walk On the Wild Side and concludes, The fact is Feldman wouldnt think of entrusting the chore to anyone else. Sylbert was given credit as the films Associate Producer, a title which adds apparent weight to his role in the production. Between them, Sylbert and Williams decided that the opening credits should, like the film, be in an Art-Nouveau-ish style. Using Aubrey Beardsley as a visual reference they presented their concept to Feldman, who, after having been convinced that it would be impossible to use Beardsley rather than Williams for the job, gave them the go-ahead only cautioning Williams, By the way kid, no purple. I hate purple. Richard Williams had been to art school in Canada, where he had lived before emigrating to England in the early 1960s. Although he left before graduation, his training left him with a firm sense of being a fine artist by temperament and a jobbing animator by profession. He has argued that his first animated film, The Little Island, was an extension of his early work as a painter. Having been a cartoon enthusiast from childhood, Williams believed that the ideas he wanted to explore when he made the film could only really be expressed through the cartoon medium. In the late 1950s, Williams insisted that the most important aspect of animating static images, for either art or profit, was to get the elements in it to move and live in their own way. Over his career Williams has animated a variety of illustrative styles, ranging from late nineteenth century engraved political cartoons for The Charge of the Light Brigade, to bug-eyed men for a Guinness advertisement. It is obvious from this work that allowing a drawing to move in its own way remained his primary concern. Although the animation in the Whats New Pussycat? sequence is very simple, the considered relationship between form and movement is apparent. Charles K Feldman, the first credit of the opening sequence (fig.37) as it appears in the movie, takes centre screen immediately after the identity of United Artists, who were distributing the film, has faded out. Written in the Art Nouveauish script devised by Williams, the name sits for a few seconds before decorative tendrils sprout from the type and meander across the frame. The next title, the word presents written in capitals which fill the frame, is brought on from the right hand side as if written on a card and passed in front of the camera, a device which refers to outmoded methods of movie titling. This card is taken off the screen from the left to reveal Peter Sellerss credit. The first joke of the film is made when Sellerss credit, which appears back to front, is removed and, after a loud crash, reappears the right way round. This extends the reference to old fashioned movie-making, the audience imagines a group of incompetent Laurel and Hardystyle technicians running around in front of the camera with titling boards. Each of the films major stars are given an individual credit illustrated by a drawing in stylised flowing lines of themselves in character. By filling the initials of the stars names with animated psychedelic patterns Williams puts his retro Art Nouveau script on the border between typography and illustration, allowing it to compete with the animated figures for the audiences attention. The opening minutes of the title sequence are accompanied by an instrumental of composer Burt Bacharachs Pussycat theme played in a fair-ground style. The films title, written in screen-filling, tendril sprouting capitals, appears on screen, after the names of the leading players, to coincide with a flourish in the score. The singer Tom Jones takes up the Pussycat theme and belts out Bacharachs song, Whats New Pussycat, throughout the rest of the sequence. As must have been foreseen, Tom Jones singing the Pussycat theme became a hit record, and while the version that is played alongside the credits was adapted to synchronize with the visual, the tune was composed to stand independently as a chart song. While the body of the acting credits are enlivened by animated putti in kitten masks, the technical credits are illustrated with a variety of decorative devices which symbolise the roles of those behind the production. Among others, the credit of the costumiers, Fonssagrives and Tiel, is illustrated by a peacock with a rainbow-striped tail, Burt Bacharach's composing credit is blown from trombone and Feldmans credit as producer is written on playing cards which are plucked from inside a top hat, possibly referring to the gamble taken in making the film. Clive Donner is given the last credit of the sequence. His name is written in type of the same size and in the same style as that of Feldmans opening credit. At the very end of the titles Donners credit turns on its side and a pair of white-gloved hands that have grown from the D and R of his name appear to pull apart the image, which splits along a line of scrolling curves to reveal the opening scene of the movie. Whats New Pussycat? was Williamss first film as title designer. It was scary, he recalled, new stuff and no time to do it. Williamss approach to animation was consciously experimental, but he has admitted that he often discovered his so-called
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innovations had all already been done in one form or another by pioneering animators of previous decades, such as those at Disneys studio in its Golden Age. In producing the Pussycat sequence, Williams and his colleagues were, as far as they knew, using revolutionary techniques. Williams explained, Charlie Jenkins, a very young guy who helped me, had thought of underlighting the scroll-like arabesques etc. - So we did it. That was the first time anyone had done underlighting scraped lines on black painted cel - third vaseline filters etc. Bernard Lodge, who has designed animated titles for television, particularly admires the sequence because Williams minimised the need for drawing board animation by creating the effect of movement using polarised film and rotating it under the camera. In spite of this labour-saving ingenuity, Williams ran over budget. Not revealing how much the titles cost to make in total, he admitted that Feldman gave him 1,000 extra when he ran out of money. While, as Williams says, even 1,000 was a lot of money those days, what it cost to make the titles, complete from first sketch to final edit, was probably not very significant as a proportion of the production costs of the film. Donner admitted that Whats New Pussycat? was not done cheaply and it is unlikely that the films budget was less than $2 million. But the expensive actors and extravagant sets, rather than Williamss title sequence, would have accounted for the weightiest slices of that budget. Feldman cannot have been that concerned when Williams spent too much on making the titles because he went on to employ him in other areas of post-production. Williams was asked to adapt his designs for the title sequence of Whats New Pussycat? to be used in the films promotional campaign. While Williams did the original drawings and lettering design, and developed the device of putting caricatures of the films stars into a canoe/cat motif (fig.38), it was Frank Frazetta who drew the finished art for the advertisements. In the process of transferring the designs from the animated opening sequence to static graphic material, Williams gave the elements he had used in the titles a more straightforward cartoon/comic book feel, moving even further from his original visual source, Art Nouveau. One would be hard put to recognise even a trace of Aubrey Beardsley in posters offered to American and British movie theatres in the films press book. The different visual styles used by Williams in the opening sequence and the promotional campaign relate to one another through mannerist exaggeration. But, while the animated titles draw on hip graphic styles that would have been recognised by the young and fashionable, the posters and advertisements, using the widely read visual language of the comic book caricature, were designed to have a broader appeal. In choosing Williams to create the films entire graphic package Feldmans aim was not visual coherence. He almost certainly hoped that audiences would recognise elements from the advertisement within the title sequence, but his primary concern, rather than remaining faithful to the films dominant design concept, was to attract the widest possible audience to the box office. Williams was probably hired as a relatively cheap (being young and virtually unknown) and reliably talented illustrator, rather than as the generator of a Bass-style overall graphic concept. While the style of Williamss title sequence, if not his advertisements, is very similar to that of fashionable static graphic work of the mid 1960s, Williams claims that he never was interested much in current graphic movements. The graphic language of the Whats New Pussycat? titles can be related to the self-conscious revival of illustration among designers practising in both Britain and America in the early 1960s. Although the work of illustrators like Ben Shahn and Saul Steinberg in America and Ronald Searle in Britain had remained consistently visible and popular in the late 1950s there had been a frequently remarked-upon trend towards the use of photography over that period. Possibly in reaction to this tendency, in the early 1960s some designers had returned to illustration and by 1965 hand drawing had become associated with Pop graphic styles. This revival did not significantly counteract the movement towards photography, which by the late 1960s was firmly established as the dominant means of illustration for advertising and packaging, but it did lead to some striking work which remains the most evocative of the period. In 1962 Print magazine put the question Where is graphics going?, to several well known designers. Milton Glaser (b.1929), an American designer whose illustration is some of the best known of the 1960s, (fig.39), argued The trend is eclectic - still and elaborated: span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The most striking aspect of the graphic arts today is the latitude of what is stylistically acceptable... In the last decade there has developed a wide awareness of the potential of many different stylistic idioms as source material for the graphic artist... graphic art today is a parody... but... the juxtaposition of certain stylistic elements is peculiarly contemporary... Surrealism, Dada, Assemblage, Nouveau Art, Victorianism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Romanticism all seem to be viable and in the air. Williamss graphic work was eclectic in the manner that Glaser described. He emphasises the research behind his designs and while he drew on a host of visual sources claims to have been most influenced by the great painters and Oriental art.
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Regarding himself as a fine artist, Williams was probably not self-conscious about making a break with the modernist hegemony over fashionable graphic styles. However the visual climate in which his psychedelic Art Nouveau graphics made was an important contribution to the chicest film ever made was created partly by designers who chose to look beyond formal modernism adopted by the previous generation. By the mid 1960s, modernist graphic design, having been adopted by both governments and multinational corporations, had become a style of the establishment. As such it was effectively deprived of much of its power to express the sentiments of a generation of young people who were highly aware of being part of a distinctive youth culture. Nigel Whitley has argued that the term Pop graphics, rather than referring to a single homogeneous style, is a label for design which adopted and adapted multifarious graphic styles at will. In rejecting the constraints of modernism, Pop designers created the visual language of the self-conscious younger generation. The Art Nouveau revival is understandable in the context of the magpie approach of Pop graphic designers. Spurred on by museum exhibitions of the work of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley, British designers took up the style to the extent that Queen magazine was describing an Art Nouveau fever in 1964. By packaging Whats New Pussycat? in unmistakably hip retro-Art Nouveau graphics, Feldman and Donner were targetting a young, fashion-conscious audience. In an interview given on the films release, Donner argued, Its a film about people who, wherever they are in Europe, have come under the cultural influence of the mid-1960s; they are mods to a lesser or greater degree. Part of mod culture is something that is intensely decorative, erotic, harkens back to the styles, shapes and designs and many techniques of [the Art Nouveau] era. I think that its tradition. Then it was a reaction against restriction - Isadora Duncan and all that - and Art Nouveau did that for another era. This is clearly why its happening today, as a reaction to what we had here in the fifties and forties. While Donner in the same interview insisted Gothic couldnt be fashionable today, implying that the style would not suit societys mood, Milton Glaser rejected the notion of a prevailing appropriate style on the grounds that there were multitudinous and contentious forces at play in present day society. As a Pop graphic designer, Glaser believed that Art Nouveau was simply one of a number of styles that had become part of the heterogeneous visual language of the late 1960s . In Notes on Camp, written in 1964, Susan Sontag argued that the popularity of the Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style was a triumph of style at the expense of content. She expanded: Art Nouveau is full of 'content', even of a political-moral sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts spurred on by a utopian vision of organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged unserious aesthetes vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau - and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is. Sontag hints that, rather than because of any mood bridging the 1960s and the turn of the century, the extravagant Art Nouveau style suited the decades Camp tendency to take style and leave meaning. Whether expunged of meaning, as Sontag insists, or not, as Glaser implies, a number of styles were revived during the 1960s. The Sunday colour supplements, first published in the early 1960s, were responsible for and responsive to design trends throughout the decade. Used as a body of evidence, these magazines strongly support the thesis that there was no single fashionable style. Decorative traditions were adopted at will by those with an up-to-date lifestyle. However, the magazines published around 1965 do very strongly reflect the craze for Art Nouveau design. An awareness of the style is apparent both in the design of the magazine and the design promoted by the magazine. Like the film Whats New Pussycat?, these magazines demonstrate the close relationship between prevailing styles in two-dimensional and threedimensional design in the period. The schemes used to decorate the sets from the film could have been taken from Shirley Conrans week by week Simple Girls Guide to interior decoration, which appeared in the Observer Magazine throughout 1965. Michael, the Peter OToole character, who divides his split level studio flat with an elegant Japanese blind and hangs the ubiquitous Toulouse Lautrec poster on his wall, even has dreams that take place in the kind of modish black and white interiors that were promoted by Conrans column. Pauline Kael remarked upon the trend for decorating film sets with furnishings audiences might want to have in their homes in her 1961 article Fantasies of the Art-House Audience. How can the picture be dismissed as trash, she asked, when it looks like your own expensive living room? Kael argued that the American art house audience will automatically believe a film is progressive and important if it is dressed up with intellectually fashionable decor. On the films release, Donner argued that Whats New Pussycat? dealt with important contemporary issues, suggesting that within it he had used the crutch of comedy to express something we feel very, very deeply. Possibly the films visual up-tominute-ness was intended to persuade audiences of its thematic relevance. But, whether the audiences were convinced or not, for all Whats New Pussycats? visual hipness, it is a film with a
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hackneyed plot which it treats in a completely conventional way. The protagonist, though he was eventually played by an Englishmen, is the standard post-Hemingway American in Paris and the man as victim of his sexual urges theme had been explored in numerous Hollywood comedies of the 1950s. Even Peter Sellarss psychiatrist could have been based on a similar character appearing in Billy Wilders The Seven Year Itch made a decade earlier. In general reviews of Pussycat were very cool: the films sumptuous design appears to have been unable to sell its flimsy derivative plot to the critics. The reviewer from Variety, having admitted the films art direction was outstanding and called the costumes eyefilling, dismissed the production as over-contrived. Feldman, who had previously used Saul Bass to design titles for his films, joked on hiring Williams, I have a tradition of my titles being better than the movie. Im counting on you to maintain that tradition. But when reviewers did suggest that the titles were one of the best things or even the best thing about the movie he might not have been amused. The director Tony Richardson, who asked Williams to animate the titles for The Charge of the Light Brigade three years later, suffered a similar fate. While the reviewer from Mc Calls remarked that Williamss animation was so brilliant it deserves to be seen for itself, Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker argued, Its too bad Richardson didnt lease the Charge itself to Williams and the critic from The Scotsman went as far as suggesting that the animation made Richardsons film seem worse than it was by comparison. By the time The Charge of the Light Brigade was made in 1968, animated graphic titles, from being a rarity in the mid 1950s, had become a standard feature of films with fashionable pretensions. It became the thing to do and kicked off sort of an industry, Bass said, remarking on the trend. But possibly the reaction to Richardsons movie in the late 1960s left film-makers wary of the device. By the early 1970s films were most often titled with low key typography superimposed over the introductory scene, a style which arguably remains the convention in the early 1990s. Adverse critical reaction might be at least partly responsible for this counter-trend. When asked Whose idea was it to have Dick Williams do the credits?, Donner crowed, without fear that the witty titles might put the rest of his film in the shade, Mine. I think theyre marvellous, so inventive. Donner, whose role as auteur of Whats New Pussycat? was tightly circumscribed by the dictatorial Feldman, was anxious to be known as responsible for the films opening sequence. Possibly in taking the credit for the credits, he was thinking of the well established auteurs, Hitchcock and Preminger, who had used control of graphic presentation as a sign of a more profound level of authorship. But in spite of Donner having had the original idea to use Williams to design the title sequence, it was Feldman whose decision in every case was final. By investing heavily in the design of the film, from the graphics to the costumes and sets, Feldman recognised that fashionable design had become an important selling point by the mid 1960s. Whats New Pussycat? was aimed at a young European and American audience who, through exposure to advertising, television and magazines, were believed to have become visual sophisticates.
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 9 Conclusion by Emily King
23/08/12 18:41
Essays, 2004
1984 words
4;ECHA #L?>CN &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZV^[Z ^ #IH=FOMCIH

by Emily King
The conclusion of Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
Conclusion: It is not by chance that the fashion for graphically adventurous title sequences coincided with the rise of independent film making. In purely practical terms, films made by independent production companies were likely to have lengthy credit sequences. The increasing clout of Hollywoods labour unions has been cited by some as largely responsible for the development of the title sequence in the late 1950s. Technicians, who would have remained anonymous if on the payroll of a studio, contractually demanded on-screen recognition. As well as getting longer, more attention was being paid to the text of credit sequences. Both title size and substance became the subjects of heated negotiation. In the 1950s and 60s new titles were constantly being invented to describe various roles within film-making: for example cameramen became directors of photography and set decorators became art directors, who then refashioned themselves as production designers. Even after the wording of a title had been painstakingly decided upon, lawyers were reputed to have come in later to take measurements. In the light of this heightened attention to the content of the credits, the concentration by some upon their form is not surprising. In the 1930s and 40s it had been the convention in many movie theatres to keep the curtains closed during the credits, parting them to reveal the films opening scene. By the 1950s this was unthinkable. A review in Daily Variety of The Seven Year Itch reported that Saul Basss main title for that film, a series of hinged and perambulatory patches on a multicolored field led one member of the audience to remark, Credits arranged this way are interesting - you dont have to read them. This was, joked Variety, the sort of crack which gives New Yorkers a bad name in Hollywood where screen credits come first before the wife and the trust fund. So, while it was attention to credit content that had led in some cases to the revolutionising of credit form, ironically this led to sequences which some might have believed did not take the issue of credit seriously enough. Also, through working within the tight budgets characteristic of most independent film-making, producer/directors were required to pay more attention to the two-dimensionality of film and so might have become more aware of the screen as a graphic image. Accurately costing a potential production demands careful storyboarding. While the technique was not new, it became commonplace as film-makers who were required to raise funds independently had to have a good idea of how much money they needed before they began touting for investment. Possibly the representation of screen activity on paper encouraged some film-makers to consider more seriously not only relationship of word and image on screen, but also the use of interesting camera angles to frame unusual shots. While the tension between the two-dimensional and threedimensional natures of film had concerned the avant garde since the early twentieth century, until the 1950s almost all mainstream American movie-makers had treated cinema as a quasi-theatrical medium. As well as being a result of the increased significance of the independent producer/director within the film industry, the graphically adventurous title sequence was used by those film-makers to signal their artistic autonomy. Preminger, almost certainly influenced by the craze among North American corporations for adopting modern graphic identities, was able to create a cohesive image for what was otherwise a disparate body of work through Basss designs. The appearance of eyecatching modern graphics at the start of Premingers films not only implied to audiences that they were viewing a sophisticated product, but also reminded them of the controlling presence behind what they saw on screen. Similarly, Hitchcocks aspirations are laid bare by the title sequences of his films. In trying to be important both within and beyond the mainstream, Hitchcock self-consciously introduced art into his films, a strategy for which he has been equally praised and criticised. By referring to the avant garde, Basss title sequences contributed to Hitchcocks campaign for cultural
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recognition. But eye-catching title sequences do not only reflect film-makers desire for recognition, they became part of their fight for survival. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, cinema rapidly lost ground to television in the battle to maintain its audience. Shaping a product that would be able to compete with the small screen became the film-makers primary task. Professional graphic designers had been working for television companies since the 1950s, designing opening sequences and advertisements. By projecting graphics onto the big screen film-makers hoped to out-do television at its own game. Not only did television familiarise audiences with screen graphics, but in tandem with the proliferation of printed media, particularly magazines, it led to a general heightening of visual sophistication among potential movie-goers. While, almost certainly due to the conservatism among those in charge of film distribution and advertising, the Hollywood poster format was only very occasionally, and extremely reluctantly, discarded in the 1950s and still remained dominant in the advertising campaigns for major releases throughout the next decade, there is some evidence that by the mid-60s attitudes towards film-promotion had begun to change. The modified bid to create a coherent visual scheme for Whats New Pussycat?, which began on the poster, ran through the credit sequence and on into the film, suggests a faith in up-to-date design within the film industry. In 1965 film packaging and promotion remained haphazard by todays standards, but the adoption of graphically interesting title sequences by movie moguls such as Charles Feldman is evidence of a new belief that graphic design would sell. This belief took hold to the extent that by the mid to late 1960s tricksy title sequences in a range of graphic styles had become ubiquitous in films with fashionable pretensions, for example Blow Up (1966) which opens with cut-out type through which audiences can glimpse cat-walk models, or Barbarella (1967) in which the titles flutter around the films undressing protagonist. These were probably the kinds of sequences that Saul Bass would have dismissed as pizazzy, but, as he did not deny, they were part of a trend that he had played an important role in establishing. And although Bass, like his fellow designers in the 1950s, sought to uphold the universal values of good modern design by transcending fads, even his title sequences were sometimes dismissed as accessories. As early as 1958 a reviewer of Bonjour Tristesse remarked that the film, with its Francoise Sagan label, Saul Bass credits and St Tropez sun-tan, is nothing if not fashionable. Just as the meaning of modern slipped subtly from implying progressive to meaning simply up-to-date, so the implications of a modern graphic title sequence changed. While in the mid 1950s, Preminger might have believed that he was establishing important film-making precedents, the Bond films aimed at being nothing more than of their time. In the 1960s modern graphic design of the Chicago school practised by Robert Brownjohn was just another one of a range of viable graphic modes. As such, it jostled for attention among a range of erstwhile counter-cultural graphic idioms which had been repackaged and sold to the mainstream. The newly wealthy, self-conscious youth, which made up a large part of any films potential audience in the 1960s, craved style but recognised its transience. Once fashionable, it was almost inevitable that eye-catching graphic title sequences of any kind should become dated, their demise being the inescapable outcome of their success. But film-audiences would not only have become bored with screen graphics in movie theatres. As commercial television stations thrived, small-screen graphics became increasingly commonplace. By the late 1960s the glamour of television had become tarnished and it had begun to be seen as a social evil. So while film-makers had adopted the techniques of television at the beginning of the decade, by the end they might have been keen to disassociate themselves from the medium. In the late 1960s debates about the nature of cinema began to have a noticeable impact on mainstream English language films. When in 1969 Bass remarked upon a great splurge of experimentation in film, he was almost certainly talking about the films that have since been grouped together under the title New American Cinema. The American-ness of these films was partly reconstructed from homages by the French New Wave to Hollywood films of previous decades. The American national identity as perceived on film through European eyes was reclaimed by American film-makers. In both Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) the conventional cinematic view of rural America is fully exploited, but consciousness of the use of cliche is heightened when, through unusual editing or the framing of bizarre shots, expectations based on cinematic norms are thwarted. These techniques are characteristically filmic and while Bonnie and Clyde does have a very elegant title sequence, in which old photos appear on screen to the sound of a clicking shutter, it would be fair to say that the relationship of word and image on screen was not of particular concern to those who made the film. However, attention to the two-dimensional nature of film, betrayed through the skilful composition of screen images, is apparent in this and many of the other movies gathered under the New American Film banner. Possibly the most important long-term impact of the relationship between graphic design and film has been the blurring of the border between the graphic and the filmic. The influence of what Bernard Lodge described as the graphic designers eye became strongly evident in the films of the late 1960s and remains so in those of the early 1990s. While title sequences which translated static graphic idioms onto the screen were commonplace in the 1960s, they never
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became the dominant mode of movie titling, nor were they ever completely displaced. From the late 1960s until now there has been huge variety in styles of movie titling, from Woody Allens theatre-style cards to the innovative computer animation in films such as Superman (1978). Rather than either reflecting a shift in the conventional relationship between Hollywood and modern design, or amounting to a new element in the vocabulary of the mainstream film-maker, the titles sequences addressed in this thesis were part of the widespread changes in film-making which were eventually to render any single Hollywood formula redundant. A sharp decline in the production of Westerns, possibly the most formulaic of all films, coincided with the fashion for animated graphic opening sequences. In 1950 34% of all films released in North America were Westerns, but by 1960 they accounted for only 18% of releases, which, because of declining film production, represents a fall in the number of 130 to merely 25. This is not surprising, fancy title sequences were part of a general search by film-makers for new modes which would be appropriate to the late twentieth century. Hollywood film-making in the studio era had been responsible for creating and perpetuating American mythology. In the 1960s political uncertainty deprived the American public of much of their faith in those myths. The title sequences discussed in this thesis, as well as being a reflection of the increasing autonomy of film-makers who were working in an ever more harsh commercial climate, might also be significant as responses to the ideological crises of the period. To take the title sequences addressed in this thesis out of their context within film, treating them purely as examples of moving graphics, would be to miss their point. Equally, to dismiss them as packaging, as film historians have tended to do, is to ignore both the importance of the opening sequence to the body of the film and its potential to throw analytical light on what it precedes. While design historians must recognise that proper analyses of the role of graphic design in film demands a catholic approach and an eclectic methodology, it should be recognised within film studies that movies are most characteristically wholes constructed of many diverse parts.
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Jan, 16 May 2007, 5:09 AM
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Well researched and informative information regarding the role of graphic designers in the film industry. A good read for someone wanting to start a career in this industry. Name douglas byers, 2 February 2009, 10:35 PM
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Email Vary informative, not much is known about the how's and why's of the graphic designer and the film industry. Despite the non-recognition of their contribution to the art of film, we have also saved some historical representations of their work at www.mgm-movie-titles-and-credits.com. We hope that our website will expand and add to the acknowlegment of the graphic designer in the making of film title design. Type letter here (anti-spam)
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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 10 Bibliography by Emily King
23/08/12 18:41
Essays, 2004
1309 words
4;ECHA #L?>CN &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZV^[Z VU "C<FCIAL;JBS

by Emily King
The bibliography for Emily Kings dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertation focuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.
Bibliography ALBRECHT, Donald, The I.S. Goes Hollywood, Skyline, February 1982, p.30 ALGREN, Nelson, The Man With The Golden Arm, Doubleday & Co Inc, New York, 1987 ANOBILE, Richard (ed.), Stagecoach, Avon Books, New York, 1975 ANOBILE, Richard (ed.), Casablanca, Darian House, New York, 1978 BAZELON, Irwin, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, 1975 BIGHAM, Julia, The Design and Art Directors Association in the 1960s: A Reflection of Changing Approaches in Graphic Design and Advertising, unpublished MA Thesis, RCA, London, 1989 BLUEM, William & SQUIRES, Jason (eds.), The Movie Business, Hastings House, New York, 1972 BROWNJOHN, Robert, Street Level, Typographica, May 1963, p.49 BROWNJOHN, Robert, Sex and Typography, Typographica, May 1963, p.57 BURGIN, Victor (ed.), Formations of Fantasy, Methuen, London, 1986 BUSCOMBE, Edward (ed.), The Western, Andre Deustch, Great Britain, 1988 CAMERON, Ian, & SHIVAS, Mark, Whats New Pussycat?, Movie, No. 14, Autumn 1965, p.12 CARRINGER, Robert L.,The Making of Citizen Kane, John Murray, Great Britain, 1985 CASPAR, Joseph Andrew, Stanley Donen, The Scarecrow Press Inc, London, 1983 CAUGHIE, John (ed.), Theories of Auteurship, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, 1981 CHIPP, Herschel B., Picassos Guernica, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989 CIMENT, Michael, Kubrick, Collins, Great Britain, 1983 CONTAINER CORPORATION OF AMERICA, Modern Art in Advertising, Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1946 COOK, Pam, The Cinema Book, British Film Institute, London, 1985 CRANE, Diana, The Transformation of the American Avant garde: the New York Art World 1940-1983, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987 CROOK, Geoffrey, The Changing Image: television graphics from caption card to computer, Robots Press, London, 1986 DAVIES, Philip & NEVE, Brian eds., Cinema, Politics and Society in America, Manchester University Press, Great Britain, 1981 DOBROW, Larry, When Advertising Tried Harder, The Friendly Press, New York, 1984 DOUGLAS, Kirk, The Rag Mans Son, Simon & Schuster, GB, 1988 ELLEY, David, The Epic Film, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc, London, 1984
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FAST, Howard, Spartacus, Bodley Head, London, 1952 FINLER, Joel, All Time Box Office Hits, Columbus Books, London, 1985 FINLER, Joel, The Hollywood Story, Octopus Books, London, 1988 FLEMING, Ian, From Russia With Love, Jonathan Cape, 1957 GILLETT, John, The State of the Studios, Sight and Sound, Spring 1954 GLASER, Milton, Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, Penguin, London, 1983 GREENBERG, Clement, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, New York 1961 GUILBAUT, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983 HALAS, John, Graphics in Motion, Novum Press, Munich, 1981 HEWISON, Robert, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960-75, Methuen, London 1986 HOMANS, Katie, Robert Brownjohn: Conceptual Design, unpublished M.A. Thesis, Yale University, New Haven, 1982 HOUSTON, Penelope, & GILLETT, John, Blockbusterisation, Sight and Sound, Spring 1963, p.68 KAEL, Pauline, I Lost At The Movies, Cape, London, 1966 KAEL, Pauline, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, Cape, London, 1970 KAPSIS, Robert E, Hitchcock, The Making of a Reputation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992 KEPES, Gyorgy, The Language of Vision, Paul Theobald & Co. Chicago, 1944 Key Profiles: Richard Williams, Key Press, London 1972 KUENZLI, Rudolf ed., Dada and Surrealist Film, Willis, Locker & Owens, New York, 1987 LE GRICE, Malcolm, Abstract Film and Beyond, Studio Vista, London, 1977 LIVINGSTON, Alan & Isabella, Graphic Design and Designers, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992 LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART, Art in Film, exhibition catalogue, Long Beach, 1957 MARCHAND, Roland, Advertising the American Dream, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986 MARQUIS, Alice Goldfarb, Alfred H Barr Jr, Missionary for the Modern, Contemporary Books, Chicago 1989 MEGGS, Philip B., The History of Graphic Design, Allen Lane, Great Britain, 1983 MERRITT, Douglas, Television Graphics, Trefoil Publications, London, 1987 NEALE, Stephen, Cinema and Technology, Macmillan, London, 1985 OPPLER, Ellen C (ed.), Picassos Guernica, Norton, New York, 1988 PALMER, Christopher, The Composer in Hollywood, Marion Boyars, New York, 1990 PEARLMAN, Chee, Roll Call, International Design, March/April 1990, p.38 PERKINS, Victor F, Film as Film, Pelican, London, 1972 PREMINGER, Otto, An Autobiography, Doubleday, New York, 1977 REBELLO, Stephen, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Dembner Books, New York, 1990 RHODE, Eric, The History of the Cinema: from its origins to 1970, Penguin Books, Great Britain, 1976 REMINGTON, Roger R. & HODIK, Barbara J., Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design, MIT, Cambridge, 1989 SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF ART, Art in Cinema, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco, 1947 SARRIS, Andrew (ed.), Hollywood Voices, Secker and Warburg, London, 1971 SCHATZ, Thomas, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film Making in the Studio Era, Pantheon, New York, 1988 SHONE, Tom, Its Time To Junk Bond, The Sunday Times, 27 October 1992, p.24 SLOAN ALLEN, James, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983 SONTAG Susan, Against Interpretation, Andre Deutsch, Great Britain, 1987
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STEPHENSON, Ralph & PHELPS, Guy, The Cinema as Art, Penguin Books, London 1989 TRUFFAUT, Francois, Hitchcock, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1984 TUDOR, Andrew, Theories of Film, Secker and Warburg, London 1974 ULRICH, Allen, The Art of Film Music, Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland 1976 WALKER, Alexander, Hollywood, England, Michael Joseph Ltd Great Britain, 1974 WALKER ART CENTER, Graphic Design in America, Harry N Abrams Inc, New York, 1989 WEAVER, Mike, The Concrete Art of Oskar Fischinger, Art and Artists, May 1969 WEES, William C., Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant Garde Film, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992 WHITLEY, Nigel, Pop Design: Modernism to Mod, The Design Council, Great Britain, 1987 WILLIAMS, Richard, Animation and The Little Island, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1958, p.309 WOOD, Robin, Hitchcocks Films Revisited, Faber & Faber, London, 1989 ZADOR, Leslie, Alex North, British Film Institute Pamphlet Films: Barbarella, Marianne Productions, France, 1967 Bass On Titles, Pyramid Films, U.S., 1982 Ben Hur, M.G.M., U.S., 1959 The Big Country, Worldwide Productions, U.S., 1958 The Blood of the Poet, Vicomte de Noailles, France, 1930 Blow Up, Bridge Films, G.B., 1966 Bonnie and Clyde, Tatira Productions, U.S., 1967 Carmen Jones, Carlyle Productions, U.S., 1954 Charade, Stanley Donen Productions, U.S., 1963 The Charge of the Light Brigade, Woodfall Films, G.B., 1968 Citizen Kane, Mercury Productions, U.S., 1941 Dr No, Eon Productions, G.B., 1962 Easy Rider, Pando Company, U.S., 1969 From Russia With Love, Eon Productions, G.B.,1963 Goldfinger, Eon Productions, G.B., 1965 Grand Prix, Joel Productions, U.S., 1966 License To Kill, Eon Productions, G.B., 1989 The Man With The Golden Arm, Carlyle Productions, U.S., 1955 Psycho, Shamley Productions, U.S., 1960 The Seven Year Itch, Twentieth Century Fox, U.S.,1955 Something Wild, Orion Pictures, U.S., 1986 A Star Is Born, Transcona Enterprises, U.S., 1954 Studies, Oskar Fischinger, Germany, 1922-32 Superman, Alexander Salkind, G.B., 1978 Thunderball, Eon Productions, G.B., 1966 2001: A Space Odyssey, M.G.M./Kubrick, G.B., 1968
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Vertigo, Paramount Pictures, 1958 Walk On The Wild Side, Famous Artists Productions, U.S., 1961 Whats New Pussycat?, Famous Artists Productions, U.S., 1965 Who Knows Saul Bass?, Karl Schmidt, Germany, 1992 Archival Sources: Anatomy of a Murder, press book, British Film Institute Bonjour Tristesse, press book, British Film Institute Exodus, press book, British Film Institute Goldfinger, press book, British Film Institute Museum of Modern Art, Film Library Report, 1956 Spartacus Archive, The State Historical Society of Wisconsin Spartacus, press book, British Film Institute Spartacus: The Portrait of the Production, United Artists, California, 1960 Vertigo, press book, British Film Institute Whats New Pussycat, press book, British Film Institute Journals: Graphis, Volume IX, 1953 Volume XXI, 1965 Print, Volume VIII, 1953 Volume XVII, 1963 Typographica, Number 1, 1960 Number 12, 1965 Letters and Interviews: Saul Bass, Bass/Yager Associates, Beverley Hills, 14 July 1992 Trevor Bond, by letter, 22 February 1993 Bob Brooks, BSCS, Paddington, 13 Janaury 1993 Sydney Cain, Pinewood, 14 November 1992 David Cammell, South Kensington, 16 December 1992 Alan Fletcher, Pentagram Offices, Notting Hill, 26 November 1992 Christopher Frayling, Design and the Dream Factory in Britain, R.C.A. lecture, 10 February 1993 Bernard Lodge, Surbiton, 25 November 1992 Richard Williams, by letter, 23 February 1993
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Typotheque Taking Credit Film Title Sequences, 1955-1965

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Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / Acknowledgements by Emily King

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