The film titles of Saul Bass
by Sonya Greenwood
Saul Bass was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century, but also the undisputed master of film title design. With a career spanning over fifty years – which included collaborations with Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese (among others) – the work he produced was consistently innovative. While always of the moment, Saul Bass’ work is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago as it continues to appeal to the audience’s emotions and intellect.
His graphic compositions and movements of his title sequences act as prologues, setting the tone and mood for the forthcoming movie. These were not simple identification tags – they are integral part of the film. When his title sequence begins, the movie itself has begun. In fact, when Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden
Arm arrived at US cinemas in 1955, it came with a note attached on the cans: “Projectionists – pull curtain before titles”. Before this, it was not uncommon for projectionists to only pull back the curtains to reveal the screen after the monotonous list of cast and crew had finished scrolling across it. But Preminger understood that the titles of his new controversial drugs movie were a key device to setting up the film, and he wanted his audience to see them.
The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra – to overcome his heroin addiction. Saul Bass’ titles featured an animated black paper-cutout of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face – as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster. That cut-out arm caused a sensation… and Saul Bass had reinvented the movie title as an art form.
In 1958, Saul Bass created his first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock – it was for the film Vertigo. Bass shot an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and then her eye before spinning it into a (now iconic) sinister spiral as a bloody red soaks the 
screen. He used the motif of the revolving Spirograph to evoke the dizzying sensations of the film. For his next Hitchcock commission, 1959’s North by Northwest, the credits swoop up and down a grid of vertical and diagonal lines like passengers stepping off lifts. The lines then disappear to reveal the face of a skyscraper. The whole sequence reflects the busy, non-stop feel of a major city, and when the animation fades away that’s exactly what we get.
In the same year, Bass produced the title sequence for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (it was when I first saw this title sequence that I began to get excited about his work). In the sequence, he uses a simple and limited animation playing over a jazz soundtrack that draws the audience into the film’s world of murder and betrayal.
The entire sequence is based on a paper-cutout silhouette of a corpse broken into pieces. It opens with the silhouette appearing as a whole, then you are presented with the separate pieces of the body that slide on and off the screen in an edgy and fast-paced manner while the jazz music walks you through the whole sequence. The limited style of animation and the ‘jumpiness’ of the medium helps keep the viewer fixated on the screen. You are not allowed to
enter into this movie in a casual, relaxed way – instead, you enter as a participant. I love how simple and yet effective this animation is – the silhouette is so easily recognised as the murder victim!
Equally haunting are the opening credits of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Along with the dramatic music of the maddening violins that represent Norman Bates’ fractured psyche, vertical bars sweeping across the screen in a manic, mirrored helter-skelter motif. The perfect setup for a terrifying horror film – one of my favourites of all time!
By the end of his life in 1996, Saul Bass he had created over fifty title sequences – and I believe we’re all better off for it! You can click here to take a look at just some of his career highlights. I’m sure you’ll be just as impressed and inspired by his incredible work as I am…. I know the creators of the title sequence below were:
Tags: Advertising Agency, Alfred Hitchcock, Anatomy of a Murder, Creative Marketing Agency, Creative Thought, Design Agency Manchester, Digital Video, film, Film Score, Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Psycho, Saul Bass, The Man with the Golden Arm, Title Sequence
