![]() Note: This poster was ultimately rejected. “Such Good Friends” (1971) īass maintains a deisgn credit on the poster for this Joe Camp film, though the piece is technically credited to “Saul Bass / Herb Yaeger & Associates.”.The image pictured here is a mock-up that features the illustration Bass drew for the poster. Note: The actual poster that Bass designed for “Very Happy Alexander” seems to have disappeared without a trace. Image Credit: Advise & Consent poster Saul Bass Note: This poster was rejected after Coca-Cola threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Note: The spinning figures on the red “Vertigo” poster were actually drawn by Art Goodman, not Saul Bass. Please enjoy this gallery of every movie poster that Saul Bass ever designed, presented in chronological order. “West Side Story” and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World”). His style was so striking and influential that it was widely copied in his own time, and many of the posters that are still attributed to Bass were actually created by imitators (e.g. He didn’t work in the movies very often, but many of the posters and title sequences he created have grown to be as famous as the films for which he created them.ĭirectors were floored by Bass’ ability to distill a story down to its bare essence - how his thick black lines and bold swatches of color seduced and focused a viewer’s attention where other posters would simply try to overwhelm it - and legendary auteurs like Otto Preminger would fight the studios to protect Bass’ creative freedom. Preview of “Why Man Creates” (a short film by Bass).The man who launched a million “minimalist movie posters” (try not to hold that against him), graphic designer Saul Bass may have spent most of his career advertising other people’s work, but in doing so he quietly became one of the most iconic pop artists of the 20th century. When his work comes on the screen, the movie itself truly begins. His titles are not simply imaginative identification tags. His design tactic in this context, although characteristic, possesses subtly and variety. Often sequences begin with a solid, empty frame of color (as with Exodus’ blue or North by Northwest’s green). ![]() Secondly, Bass exhibits an exemplary use of color and movement. His various techniques are discussed in the site’s introduction.īass’ techniques are various and decidedly inconsistent: cutout animation, montage, live action, and type design to name only his more prominent exercises. has an interactive image gallery of titles designed by Bass. More of Bass’ title sequences after the jump.īass’ “Around the World in 80 Days” title sequence. Writer Ken Coupland feels that in this respect, Bass is something of a magician: “I believe that a great title sequence almost literally hypnotizes you, especially the work of Saul Bass where there’s a very strong repetitive swirling motion and abstract things that happen that’s putting you into a dream-like state.” I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it”Īs Bass went forward, he proceeded in perfecting these thoughts, creating mini-narratives which would help bring the viewer into the film. Saul Bass: “My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. Saul Bass: A Film Title Pioneer offers Bass’ thought process behind his titles: By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. 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. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra – to overcome his heroin addiction. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film. Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans – “Projectionists – pull curtain before titles”. Here’s his opening title sequence for “The Man With The Golden Arm.” Saul Bass is the master of film title design.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |