Author Topic: Saul Bass: The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star  (Read 3202 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Saul Bass: The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star
« on: November 07, 2011, 12:21:24 pm »


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/arts/design/saul-bass-made-the-title-sequence-into-a-film-star.html?pagewanted=all



Design
The Man Who Made the Title Sequence
Into a Film Star

 
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Published: November 6, 2011



Saul Bass at work in his editing studio; he made the opening title sequences for many movies,
including "Vertigo."




Saul Bass designed one version of  the corporate logo of United Airlines.


LONDON — While he was browsing in the bargain bin of a book store on Third Avenue in Manhattan, the young graphic designer Saul Bass was struck by the spiraling images in a book about the 19th-century French mathematician Jules-Antoine Lissajous. He bought the book and experimented with ways of replicating those spirals. “I made a batch. Sat on them for years,” Bass recalled. “And then Hitchcock asked me to work on ‘Vertigo.’ Click!”

Alfred Hitchcock had commissioned him to design the title sequences for his 1958 psychological thriller “Vertigo.” Bass chose the spiraling forms in the Lissajous book as his main motifs, knowing that they would reflect the frenzied tension of the plot. Beginning with an extreme close-up of a woman’s face as the screen is soaked in a bloody shade of red, his opening titles ended with a dizzying spiral fading into an eye.

It is very rare for a designer to be as revered in his field as Bass is in film graphics. The titles he devised for directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger, Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder and Hitchcock transformed what were once cursory lists of the cast and crew into thrilling complements to the movies. “The great thing in working with Saul,” said the composer Elmer Bernstein, “is that your music never got a better break.”

So accomplished were Bass’s titles that when a colleague suggested to Mr. Scorsese that they should commission him to work on the film “Goodfellas,” he replied: “Do we dare?” Luckily they did. But Bass’s dazzling work in film has obscured his other achievements as one of the most prolific graphic designers of the late 20th century. The first major book on his work, “Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design,” by his daughter Jennifer Bass and the design historian Pat Kirkham, redresses the balance by analyzing an eclectic career that also included the design of corporate identities, gas stations, record and book covers, children’s toys and a postage stamp.

Witty, gregarious and intellectually inquisitive, Bass executed each project in a seemingly simple, yet expressive style that reflected his fascination with constructivism, modernism and surrealism. In the book, Mr. Scorsese describes his designs as having “found and distilled the poetry of the modern, industrialized world.”

Born in the East Bronx in 1920 to Russian immigrant parents, Bass worked in commercial art studios after leaving school and became what he called “a subway scholar” by reading voraciously on his hourlong commute. One of his favorite books was Gyorgy Kepes’s “Language of Vision,” and when he discovered that the author taught at Brooklyn College, Bass enrolled for evening classes. Kepes was an unusually inspiring teacher whose pioneering theories of the construction and impact of visual imagery had an enduring influence on Bass’s work.

By the late 1940s, Bass was working in Los Angeles, mostly on promotional campaigns for movies, and in 1952 he opened his own design studio there. His film assignments became progressively more ambitious until, in 1955, he devised a spectacular animated title sequence for Otto Preminger’s drama “The Man with the Golden Arm.” The titles of the era were so dull that projectionists often screened them on closed curtains, which were only drawn when the action began. Preminger attached a note to the film cans insisting that the projectors could not start until after the curtains were opened.

Working closely with Elaine Makatura, who joined his studio in 1954 and became his second wife, Bass designed title sequences for several dozen movies by the late 1960s. His repertory ranged from the terrifying staccato bars hurtling across the screen in the opening titles of “Psycho” and the fraught preparations for a rally in “Grand Prix,” to the majestic spectacle of decaying Roman statues for “Spartacus” and a comical animated pastiche of the whole of “Around the World in 80 Days.”

To celebrate his engagement to Makatura, Bass even allowed himself a joke. The closing credits for “West Side Story” are “written” as graffiti on the New York streets, including the initials SB and EM inside a heart.

“They made the picture instantly special,” wrote Mr. Scorsese of Bass’s titles. “And they didn’t stand apart from the movie, they drew you into it instantly. Because putting it quite simply, Saul Bass was a great filmmaker. He would look at the film in question, and understand the rhythm, the structure, the mood — he would penetrate the heart of the movie and find its secret.”

By the early 1960s, the Basses wanted to make films of their own. They directed a series of shorts, one of which won an Academy Award, and a feature in 1974, “Phase IV.” They also developed other aspects of the studio’s work, including some 80 corporate identity projects for AT&T Inc., Bell, Exxon, Minolta, Quaker Oats and United Airlines among others. Having abandoned film titles in the 1970s, they were persuaded to return in the late 1980s, and created stunning sequences for several of Mr. Scorsese’s movies: “Cape Fear,” “The Age of Innocence” and “Casino” as well as“Goodfellas.”

Drawing on Jennifer Bass’s memories of her father and Ms. Kirkham’s observations from working with him, the book paints an engaging picture of Bass as a vigorous, highly disciplined man with a gift for friendship and sense of fun. He once insisted on conducting a business meeting from his hospital bed with clients and colleagues clad in surgical gowns and masks. A month before his death in 1996, he defied doctors’ orders by giving a lecture at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Bass spent so long talking to the students’ afterward that the janitors chucked them out.

Throughout his long career, Bass insisted that his objective was always the same: “To achieve a simplicity, which also has a certain ambiguity and a certain metaphysical implication that makes that simplicity vital. If it’s simple simple, it’s boring. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think and rethink.”
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Saul Bass: The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star
« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2011, 12:31:54 pm »



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tek8QmKRODw[/youtube]



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« Last Edit: November 07, 2011, 11:45:29 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Saul Bass: The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star
« Reply #2 on: November 07, 2011, 12:40:41 pm »



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8pQJOeTkFs[/youtube]



« Last Edit: November 07, 2011, 11:46:14 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Saul Bass: The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star
« Reply #3 on: November 07, 2011, 12:47:10 pm »


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1A7bJD3atk&feature=related[/youtube]
&feature=related


« Last Edit: November 07, 2011, 11:46:57 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"