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23/08/12 18:35Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / Acknowledgements by Emily King

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Essays, 2004 57 words

4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è !=EHIQF?>A?G?HNMby Emily King

Emily King's acknowledgements for her dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. Thedissertation 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 RichardWilliams 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 Permalink

The relationship between graphic design and film is not as obvious asone might think. I like how she explores the ideas behind them, andeffortlessly gives us a greater understanding of the true relation.

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23/08/12 18:34Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 1 Contents by Emily King

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4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è V #IHN?HNMby Emily King

Emily King’s contents (part two of ten) for her dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. Thedissertation 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, What’s New Pussycat?, 1965

9 Conclusion

10 Bibliography

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3Jane, 21 January 2011, 6:51 PM Permalink

I'm glad you are writing about film title sequences. To me, they are animportant part of any film.

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23/08/12 18:36Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 2 Introduction by Emily King

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4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è W )HNLI>O=NCIHby Emily King

Emily King’s introduction to her dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses 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 totreat them purely as graphics which through cinema technology have taken on a temporal dimension. Film has been thesubject of widely respected academic study for more than thirty years. Over that period much has been written on thehistory of the cinema, but the most complex debates concerning the medium have taken place at a highly abstracted, andgenerally ahistorical, theoretical level. Most still address the auteur, a concept first developed in the late 1950s, either byrejecting the idea of authorship in favour of structuralist approaches, or by attempting to redefine the ‘auteur’ as aconstruct reconcilable with more recent theoretical stances.[2] Writers on set or costume design in film usually attempt nomore than chronological surveys. Few have taken a historically analytical approach to film design or tried to establish linksbetween issues raised by the study of design in film with the other debates active among film theoreticians and historiansor design historians. A vast amount of work could be done within this gap and by making a detailed study of film titlesequences in the decade between 1955 to 1965, rather than filling a single isolated academic hole, I hope to establish asensible 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 titlesequences that were related in style to fashionable static graphic design. The credit sequences that were part of this fashionwere quite distinct from traditional Hollywood movie titles. A vernacular graphic language had been developed in themajor 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 theirheyday the Hollywood studios would have had title-makers on the payroll. The first titlers hired by the film industry almostcertainly were trained sign-writers because from the start film credits were set out in templates derived from nineteenthcentury hand-lettered signs. These formats were so dominant that they were adhered to even in memos between membersof a movie’s 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’ postersfor hardened bandits in Hollywood’s version of the Wild West, the opening credits for romances were often written inletters that appear to be fashioned in pink ribbon and those for slapstick humour in ‘paint-stroke’ typefaces that suggesthastiness and incompetent workmanship (fig.2). But, while these Hollywood-vernacular typefaces were appropriate andcommunicative, no thought was given to the on-screen relationship of word and image. The two might well have beendesigned entirely independent of one another. The words of the credits generally appeared, drop-shadow, against abackground 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 thetitles of Sunset Boulevard (1950) which appear to be painted onto a road in the wake of a speeding car, but rather thanrelating 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 moderngraphic styles had always been used on film advertisements, until the 1950s American film posters nearly always took thesame format of the film’s 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 theindigenous Hollywood graphic language by claiming that ‘film publicity deliberately chooses a cheap graphic idiom in order




to attract the masses.’

Between them the major studios created the vernacular visual vocabulary for the Hollywood film in the first half of thetwentieth century and unlike parts of the French and German film industries they never whole-heartedly embracedinternational modernism.

Modern design played an integral part in the structure of a number of European films in the 1920s and 30s. In The Cabinetof Dr Caligari (1919), a German horror movie intended for a mainstream audience, modern design was an importantelement of the film’s innovative theme, and in L’Inhumaine (1924), a French film also intended to appeal to a wideaudience, experimental modern sets were intended to complement ground-breaking photographic techniques. Although bythe mid 1920s major Hollywood studios were hiring full time designers to create the ‘look’ of the modern, to American film-makers it was never more than a fashionable decorative style. As such it was heavily laden with narrative meaning, forexample the Hollywood-modern sets for What A Widow (1930) carried clear messages about the high class and progressivecharacter of Gloria Swanson’s lead character. Modern art and design continued to be used in this way by the Hollywoodstudios into the 1950s. While in High Society (1950) we are meant to assume that the Bing Crosby character is a modern-minded man because of a small Picasso on his wall, Hitchcock set most of his film North by Northwest (1955) instreamlined 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 isimportant to discover whether it is simply a new element that was absorbed into Hollywood’s visual language or if itreflected some fundamental change in the relationship between mainstream film and modern design. Although Hitchcockboth wrapped his films in modern graphic packages and set them in Hollywood-modern interiors, the relationship betweenthe two is not straightforward. While the sets conform to conventions of Californian film-making, the title sequences weresomething quite new.

By examining the visual and cultural context of title sequences which break from the Hollywood tradition in their use of up-to-date graphic styles I hope to clarify the shifting relationship between design and mainstream film in the period between1955 and 1965. I have approached this task through detailed case studies of five mainstream English language films ofdifferent 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 What’s New Pussycat? (1965). Each of these films, to a greater orlesser extent, attracted popular and critical attention at the time of their release and each has a title sequence which relatesclosely to static graphic styles of their period. While the first four speak the modern graphic language derived by Americandesigners from the early twentieth century European modernists, the last has a retro-Art Nouveau sequence. Thisinconsistency reflects shifting fashions in graphic styles over the decade. An independent graphic designer was responsiblefor the design of the title sequences of each of these five case study films. Rather than being on the payroll of the productioncompanies making the films, they were simply brought in on contract to design the opening sequence. In each of the casestudies the designer of the opening credits is acknowledged within his own sequence. Because Saul Bass remained the onlygraphic designer to be producing important work in mainstream film throughout the 1950s, the first three case studies ofthe thesis concentrate upon his work. The last two examine the work of other designers whose credit designs were part ofthe phase pioneered by Bass.

These last two case study films demonstrate increasingly close links between the mainstream British and North Americanfilm industries. The Bond film, although made in Britain and produced by a British company, was funded by Americandollars and represented largely American interests. What’s New Pussycat? was made by an American company, but filmedin Europe with an English director. The changing structure of the mainstream English language film industry in the early1960s 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 officetakings by mainstream American films reached an all time high in the years immediately after the war. But in 1948, thesame year that major studios were making record profits, they were involved in a legal battle, the outcome of which wouldsignificantly weaken the hold of ‘the big five’ on the international movie industry. At the close of the Paramount Case inMay 1948 the United States Department of Justice insisted on ‘the complete divorcement of the affiliated circuits fromtheir production and distribution branches’. Major studios were forced to let go of their theatre circuits in which their filmshad been automatically guaranteed exhibition. Cinemas began to rent from distributors on a movie by movie basis, judgingeach picture on its own merits. This led to a fall in the number of films produced by the Hollywood studios. But whilereleases in North America by the major studios fell from 234 in 1945 to 215 in 1955 and plummeted to 167 by 1966, releasesby independents increased, particularly by those companies importing films from abroad where they worked in cheaperstudios with relatively low-wage technicians. In 1945 143 films made by independents were shown in the United States, in1955 independents released 177 movies and in 1965 releases by independents outnumbered those by the major studios by



118. The stranglehold of the major studios over the mainstream English language film-industry had been almost completelybroken.

But despite increased opportunities for independents, overall the late 1950s and 1960s were years of crises for the NorthAmerican film industry. Movie audiences dwindled. In 1945 the film industry took 23.6% of the dollars spent in the UnitedStates 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 choosingto stay at home and watch television. Asked in 1959 what were the most encouraging and discouraging developments infilm of recent years, the director Elia Kazan answered ‘the triumph of television’ to both. ‘We have to be good or big tosurvive - 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 thatfilms were ‘good’, it was on ‘big’ that the ‘big five’ chose to concentrate. Writing on ‘Blockbustering’ in 1963, PenelopeHouston defined a blockbuster as ‘a film running not less than a hundred and fifty minutes, shot in colour, or in some bigscreen process, or both, shown initially on a "hard ticket" or "roadshow" basis.’ The term first came into currency in themid 1950s and by the early 1960s blockbusters were being produced systematically. Houston argued that the saturation ofthe market with high budget, intensively advertised movies was self-defeating. Because these films targetted those whowent to the cinema on a once-a-year basis it seemed unwise to release several each month. Cleopatra took $25 million inrentals 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 blockbusteringstudios 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 audiencesinto movie theatres. As well as blockbustering, increased attention to advertising and attempts to shape a product whichwas sufficiently differentiated from television to tempt people into theatres, but would still appeal to a primarily televisionwatching audience, were parts of the campaign to win back audiences. Through my case studies, I address the relationshipbetween changes in attitude towards design by some film-makers and the protean structures within which films were beingproduced in the period.

Trying to place film title sequences within a wide context, I have drawn on a variety of material for evidence. Films havebeen my most important primary resource, but I have also systematically looked at movie publicity material and graphicdesign journals. Existing texts on cinema have been useful in establishing the cultural status of mainstream film and I haveexplored notions of intended or unconscious cinematic meaning through literature on named directors or films. Todiscover how the title sequences of the case study films were read at the time of their release, I have looked atcontemporary 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 guess-work, though all speculation has been based on reliable sources. A detailed archive on the production of Spartacus made itclear how Bass’s sequence fitted in to the production of that film and interviews with designers have given me a fairlyaccurate 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 andhelped me root abstract ideas in practical thought. To bridge the histories of graphic design and film, I have been requiredto make unfamiliar connections between disparate sources of information. By bringing the subjects together, I hope tothrow light on both.

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dennis dorney, 17 August 2010, 9:09 PM Permalink

interesting article and subject matter. Do you know which font was usedfor the Main Titles in Truffaut's 1959 Les Quatre Cents Coups?

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23/08/12 18:39Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 3 Visions in Motion by Emily King

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4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è X 6CMCIHM CH -INCIHby Emily King

Part three of ten of Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century. here she lays down themodernist 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 theirrole 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 tothe 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 theprocess of progress was inherited by the American graphic designer from their adopted ancestors, the Europeanmodernists. The 30th anniversary issue of Print, published in 1969, chose to concentrate on the Great Graphic Designersof the Twentieth Century . Fifteen great graphic designers were discussed. Beginning with El Lissitsky, the magazine wentthrough, among others, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes and Paul Rand, until it ended up at Saul Bass and MiltonGlaser. Through this genealogy, the professionalised graphic designers who edited and subscribed to the magazine electedthemselves 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 whofollowed them. Moholy Nagy’s influential text on the Bauhaus preliminary course The New Vision was translated intoEnglish and published in America in 1932, spreading his ideas to the United States five years before he was appointed asDirector of the New Bauhaus in Chicago 1937. At the New Bauhaus, renamed the Institute of Design in 1944, he becamedirectly responsible for teaching many of the designers who were among the most influential practitioners of the 1950s and1960s. Gyorgy Kepes, a Hungarian-born graphic designer who had worked with Moholy Nagy in Berlin in the 1930s, playeda 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 EastCoast until his retirement in 1974. Kepes published a number of texts which brought the principles of the Bauhaus todesigners and design students schools throughout the United States.

Traditionally the American counterpart to theoretical European modernism has been seen as non-ideological. LorraineWilde in her essay ‘Europeans in America’ has suggested that ‘When Modernism was finally integrated into common designpractice in America, both its aesthetic and conceptual basis were significantly altered’ and that the process involved ‘thetransference of the visual aesthetic as opposed to the ideological framework’. She concludes that where the Europeandesign was ‘theoretical and functional’ its American counterpart was ‘pragmatic and visual’. While it is true that Americandesigners did not adopt the beliefs and aims of the European modernists wholesale, it is inaccurate to view the generationof practitioners working in the 1950s and 1960s as unideological. Many of the American graphic designers of this periodtook a consciously theoretical approach to their work and grasped opportunities to write about their ideas in magazines anddiscuss them at conferences. An editorial in Print magazine of 1960 believed it spoke for the American graphic designerwhen it crowed, ‘Articulate we have become, and the men and women who have raised their voices and given us theprivilege of their talents are among the most respected in the world of creative effort’. The editorial went on to list thesetalented and forthright individuals, placing the most theoretical of European modernists (Laszlo Moholy Nagy and HerbertBayer) alongside designers born and bred in the United States (Saul Bass) without comment. While not entailing anunquestioning espousal of the views of the European modernists, this juxtaposition implies a belief in a continuity betweenthe voices of the Europeans and their own.




The conclusion that American modernism was merely ‘pragmatic and visual’ rests on the assumption that the pursuit ofcommercial ends is necessarily a non-ideological goal. However many post war American graphic designers did not seecommerce in opposition to ideology but embraced it as part of their theoretical base. In general, the designers writing inPrint and speaking at the International Design Conference in Aspen believed that commerce was the route by which theirideals would be best achieved. There was shared a commitment to the notion that good design would flourish in the freemarket:

If the salesmen didn’t understand modern art, they did discover that it nonetheless markets the product. This meant theyhad to turn to the person who understood this art: the Designer, the artist. Thus what began as coterie acceptance becamemass acceptance.

The coterie referred to in this passage are likely to have been the securely professional readers of magazines like Fortune, ajournal for businessmen, and Scope, the periodical of the pharmaceutical company Upjohn. These magazines were amongthe first to employ art directors who were committed to the formal ideals of modernism (fig.3.). Wilde argued that bothperiodicals ‘assumed a fairly sophisticated degree of visual awareness on the part of the reader’. But while the art directorsworking on these magazines might have admitted that their work was reaching only an elite, they believed that modernistdesign would eventually play a beneficial role at every level of society. Will Burtin (1908-72), a designer who trained at theWerkschule in Cologne and emigrated to America in 1938, worked as art director on both Scope and Fortune magazines inthe 1950s. He argued,

To convey meaning, to facilitate understanding of reality and thereby help further progress, is a wonderful and challengingtask for design. The writer, scientist, painter, philosopher and the designer of visual communication, in commerce are allpartners in the task of inventing the dramatic and electrifying to a more comprehensive grasp of our time. The scope of thisprofessional 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 Europeanmodernists, 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 bookVision in Motion, published posthumously in Chicago in 1947, Moholy Nagy insisted that the artist ‘has to take sides andproclaim his stand’. He defined his ultimate aim: ‘To redirect the industrial world towards a balance between a biologicallysound human existence and the present industrial society, and to create a planned cooperative, economy’. Moholy Nagydenied that pure commerce would lead to the best possible outcome, arguing that, ‘The silly myth the genius has to suffer isthe sly excuse of a society which does not care for its productive members unless their work promises immediatetechnological or economic applications with calculable profit’. Obviously this stance is opposed to the free market ideologyof most American designers in the post-war period. But Moholy Nagy spun the ideological thread that bound the Americangraphic designer to the European modernist more strongly than any other when he went on in his text to commit himself tothe ideal of a modern universe in which technology would be fully employed in pursuit of appropriate ends.

It was Moholy Nagy’s desire to exploit the latest technology that brought him to film making in the 1920s. He suggestedthat "Painting, photography, film and television are parts of one single problem although their techniques may be entirelydifferent’, and engaged himself in exploring the ‘characteristic visual, perceptual elements’ that arose from the technicalpeculiarities of film. In Painting Photography Film, first published in German 1925, Moholy Nagy argued that ‘The camerahas offered us amazing possibilities, which we are only just beginning exploit’ and continued, ‘It seems to me indispensablethat we, the creators of our own time, should go to work with up-to-date means.’ Kepes shared this enthusiasm for workingin a contemporary fashion with modern media. In the Language Of Vision he suggested that ‘The invention of the motionpicture opened the way to a hitherto undreamed scope and flexibility of rhythmic organization’, but complained, ‘The newpossibilities of the synchronization of the temporal and spatial structure of the vision are, however, still barely touchedupon.’ Saul Bass (b.1920) had been taught by Kepes at Brooklyn College in the early 1940s and has suggested that TheLanguage of Vision had an important as a influence upon him. In the light of his design education, Bass’s extension of hisgraphic 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 the1950s and 1960s. He was particularly prominent as one of the most articulate designers of his generation, and frequentlywrote articles about his work in design journals, including Graphis and Print. At the ninth Aspen Conference held in 1959Saul Bass, who was acting as a moderator, was described in literature about the conference as a ‘native New Yorker butfirmly implanted on the West Coast... His schooling and preliminary work experience began in New York’. It is the mixtureof East Coast ideas brought to West Coast practice that is most characteristic of Bass’s work. While Bass retained many ofthe beliefs that he would have learnt from the modernists whose influence was pre-eminent in the design schools on theEast Coast and in Chicago, he unashamedly embraced elements of West Coast culture. Significantly he was enthusiastic



about the Hollywood film, having no reservations about its non-modern narrative structure, a form which both MoholyNagy and Kepes believed to be inappropriate to the medium. Bass might have been prepared for his work within film bywhat he had learnt from his modernist teachers, but he did not share their vision of its future. Bass formulated his owntheories regarding the validity of his work within film. He has repeatedly stressed in interviews that his titles were intendedto serve the movie. He believes that a picture’s content should be addressed in its opening sequence to establish emotionalor historical context and to create a rapport with its audience. Bass has dismissed graphically adventurous title sequencesthat do not deal with the substance of the film as ‘irrelevant tap dances’. Bass's conviction that his work within film mustproperly fulfil a function was derived from a European modernist's faith in simple, effective and appropriate forms ofcommunication 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 meaningwhen applied to Saul Bass and his work’, Bass remarked, ‘I seem to enjoy working on a variety of problems. But actuallyone creative problem helps me solve another. The underlying ideas and emotions of one problem can validly be related toanother’. Bass argues that his talents for working in both moving and static graphic media are not strictly related becausefilm-making requires a distinctive temporal awareness. But while he has suggested that it is purely coincidental that he isso able in both fields, he does not deny that the they are connected in some ways. Talking about his work in designingcorporate identities, Bass explained that, ‘The transition from the film metaphors to corporate identity was really quitelogical because to the extent that the symbol for the film was a metaphor for the film the trademark for a company is ametaphor for a company’. After Bass became well known for his work in cinema, design critics became keen to spot thefilmic elements throughout his work. A review of Henri's Walk to Paris, ‘a delightful new children's book written byLeonore Klein and designed by Saul Bass’, claimed that Bass ‘brought to it a certain cinematic flavor’ and expanded, ‘Frompage 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 toofar. An article in Print suggested that Bass took a ‘non-static approach’ to all areas of design. The implications of thisremark are borne out by Bass's ability to establish visual rhythms in a static trademark (fig.4.) and create a sense ofsuspense in a single shot (fig.5.). The same article went on to remark that Bass drew on ‘a compendium of visualexperiences’ to arrive at appropriate design solutions. Bass used certain elements from this compendium in both his staticand mobile designs and so created a recognisable visual vocabulary that runs through his work in all media (fig.6.). To drawvalid conclusions about the precise nature of the relationship between Bass's mobile and static graphic designs one mustlook in more detail at specific examples.

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23/08/12 18:39Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 4 Abstracting the Essence by Emily King

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4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è Y !<MNL;=NCHA NB? %MM?H=?by Emily King

Part four of ten of Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses 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 interviewshe has implied it was inevitable that, as West Coast graphic designer, he should become involved with the film industry asmovie-making was one of California's most economically important activities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Bassdesigned a number of film posters and advertisements. He was often employed to design a movie’s trade advertisementwhile 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 industry’s approach to marketing through design was not sophisticated. The graphic confusionof the studios’ own correspondence and publicity material suggests that despite the trend for coordinated corporateimagery which was sweeping America, the movie industry had not embraced the fashion of adopting a recognisablecohesive visual identity. The filmic identities of individual studios, which appear on the front of each movie, have remainedvirtually unchanged since the mid 1930s. In the early 1990s their archaic visual charm is an asset. That they have beenretained in their mid-twentieth century form implies a recognition that going to the cinema in the late twentieth century isa nostalgic act for a large part of the movie audience, who have chosen to leave their videos at home. But to have kept theseidentities in their pre-war form in the protean environment of post-war America, when the movie industry was making aserious bid for a substantial share of modern American life, suggests that those in the film business, unlike much of the restof 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’. Basswas Preminger’s son-in-law, which might go some way towards explaining how this encounter developed into a long termworking 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 ofhis 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 themexhibited....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 ofindependent movie making. Preminger went on,

I made an unprecedented contract with United Artists for The Moon Is Blue. I demanded and received complete autonomyand the right to the final cut of the film. Nobody could overrule my decisions. I had at last the freedom I had always wishedfor.

United Artists, while giving Preminger the freedom to produce the film as he wished, retained responsibility for itspublicity Preminger was outraged when he saw the advertising campaign for his film which he believed suggested that itwas pornographic. And at that point Preminger called in Saul Bass, ‘the best graphic designer I know’, to create anappropriately modest campaign.

After The Moon Is Blue, Saul Bass was asked by Preminger to design the publicity for Carmen Jones. Bass created the film’sgraphic 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 ofthe film. Bass insists that his revolutionary role in film-making sprang from an impulse that ‘was really as simple as that’.




On Preminger’s next film, The Man With The Golden Arm, Bass was employed to create both the film’s graphic identity,which Preminger intended to dominate its advertising campaign, and a self contained credit sequence using this graphicidentity 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 whichtheir films were marketed and distributed remained elusive for most of them. Preminger made films for a number ofdifferent studios in the 1950s and 60s under a variety of contractual conditions. In each case Preminger's bargaining powerwith the studio who were distributing the film is reflected in the advertising campaign.

Preminger hoped Bass’s complete graphic schemes for the marketing of his films would secure him an upper hand in thebattle for control over publicity. Bass's strong instantly recognisable designs also evinced Preminger's apparent controlover every facet of production and distribution. During the period of exhibition of The Man With The Golden Arm movietheatres asked for posters with an image of Frank Sinatra, but Preminger refused, allowing only Bass's image of thedisjointed arm to be used. In this case the film was being distributed by United Artists who allowed independent filmproducers a high degree of autonomy. Preminger, who had already been able to seize control of the publicity of The MoonIs 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 post-production 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 havecompletely lost the graphic symbol Bass had devised for the movie. On these posters the film's title, written in a typefaceclumsily derived from the one designed by Bass, appears above the standard film poster portrait montage of the picture'sbig stars, James Stewart and Lee Remick. Bass's overall graphic scheme for the marketing of the movie survives only on tie-in promotions, such as the cover of the record of the sound track by Duke Ellington and sheet music, which were almostcertainly simply the original American versions imported into Britain. Similarly, the British press book for BonjourTristesse, Columbia, 1957, (fig.8) suggests that Bass’s graphic symbol for the film, which was animated in the movie’sopening credit sequence, virtually disappeared in the British promotion. Again, the poster offered to British theatres usedan adaptation of Bass’s typeface, which was superimposed upon an image of two intertwined pairs of bare legs, one maleand one female, sticking out from under a parasol. These posters give the film a 'summer movie' image which is verydifferent from that suggested by Bass's original design (fig.9), which one graphic design critic believed referred to ‘threethousand year old Japanese writing’ and quoted from a source as aesthetically respectable as Sergei Eisenstein. Columbiastudios had no confidence that Bass's graphics would sell Otto Preminger's films to a mass international audience and hadthe 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 beeneffective in marketing himself as a man who ‘Shapes All Aspects of His Films’. Suggested press copy distributed byPreminger 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 withthe 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-esquereputation. Much that he did in turning out a motion picture, other independents would have delegated, but Mr Premingerkept a firm hold on subject selection, script writing, the selection of cameras and other equipment, and post-productionsupervision 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 modernaudience. This is analogous to the belief shared by many American industrialists in the 1950s that a modern a coherentgraphic 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 impliedchallenging and adult. He had already fought a battle with the film industry's self-censorship body, the Motion PictureAssociation of American, over The Moon Is Blue and quite knowingly rekindled the flames by producing The Man With TheGolden 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 claimedthat it had ‘no influence on the American movie-going public’. To release the film, United Artists were required to eitherleave the M.P.A.A. and so free themselves from their voluntary observance of the Code or to risk a $25,000 fine. Choosing



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 producedand directed films’, but nonetheless they credit him with ‘hastening revisions of the stiff morality rules of the ProductionCode Administration’. In Britain The Man With The Golden Arm became the first film that had been given an X certificateby the British Film Censor to be exhibited on the Odeon Circuit. John Davies, from the Rank Organisation who distributedthe film in Britain claimed that though ‘the 'X' certificate has been commonly associated in the public mind either withhorror or pictures depicting sex’ it was ‘intended to cover all types of film entertainment considered suitable for adultaudiences’.

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. Thatwhich is produced, comes about sporadically, and does not grow out of a consistent attitude or policy of any businessorganization. There are many reasons for this, but they all focalize in the lack of confidence of the advertiser in maturityand taste of the audience. This attitude can be traced back to the film itself. Certainly the men who make films forinsensitive audiences (as many film makers see it), would hardly be expected to abandon the cliche in the material that isdevised to bring the audience to the film. Where a more creative approach to the advertising is undertaken, it is usually as aresult 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 film’s graphic identity (fig.10), devised to attract the mature audience that Bass and Preminger believed themselves tobe among the first to acknowledge, was intended to act as symbolic of its substance. In Bass On Titles, a short film made byBass's own production company Pyramid Films in 1982 Bass explained the symbol: ‘The film is about drug addiction, thesymbol, that is the arm, in its jagged form, expressed the jarring disjointed existence of the drug addict’. It is likely thatboth Saul Bass and Otto Preminger saw Picasso's Guernica when it toured the United States in 1939. Bass would have stillbeen at art school in Brooklyn when the painting was on show in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Preminger, alongwith a large part of Hollywood's film-making community, may well have attended a preview of the painting in Hollywoodon 10 August 1939, sponsored by The Motion Picture Artists’ Committee for Spanish Orphans. The painting receivedwidespread media coverage and became the centre of numerous debates conducted both between artists and art critics andamong a wider public. In the late 1930s graphic designers and film makers would have been aware of the imagery used inGuernica and the discussions surrounding the work. Fifteen years later the arm symbol Bass derived for the film The ManWith The Golden Arm is strongly reminiscent of the outstretched arms and twisted hands of the character at the far right ofPicasso'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 ofsymbols, and so we behold him prodigal, on the present occasion, with a group of revolutionary forms ...... all of themcompelling 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'suse of Picasso's symbolic language reflects the belief, held by many American graphic designers of the period, that designand fine art shared a purpose and so could have a common language. This position was inherited from the Europeanmodernists. In 1960 the editor of Print asserted that ‘Today, mindful of the indivisible unity of all the arts, PRINTrecognizes 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 ofintellect, snobbery, and use are being eliminated.’

Many of the debates surrounding Guernica concentrated on the issue of abstraction. Social realism, seen as the favouriteart form of the European dictators, was in disrepute among American avant garde artists. Abstraction had been establishedas the only appropriate form of modern artistic expression. Some felt that Picasso's work in not being abstract enoughbecame merely propaganda. While Clement Greenberg insisted that ‘Guernica aims at the epic and falls into thedeclamatory’, Ad Reinhart argued that ‘It is a painting of pain and suffering. It symbolizes human destruction, cruelty andwaste, not in a local spot but all over our one world’. The consensus of opinion lay with the latter view. John Bergerexpressed what had become the accepted reading when he wrote in 1965, ‘Guernica is not a painting about modern war inany 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 wasfirst published in 1949. At the beginning of the film Frank Sinatra’s character, the drug addict Frankie Machine, has just



emerged from a sanitarium, temporarily clean, and is determined to give up his old life of heroin and gambling. The pre-sanitarium Machine had earned his name and his living through his skill in dealing for the local crap games. The post-sanitarium Frankie hope to turn his ‘golden arm’ to drumming and so make an honest crust. The film that followsconcentrates on Frankie Machine's personal struggle between good and evil. Machine's dilemma is abstracted from theChicago slums, where Algren's book was so firmly set. A reviewer writing about the film in Time admitted that ‘DirectorOtto Preminger has dulled the sociological backdrop that Nelson Algren daubed so brilliantly’ but went on to claim that thisabstraction ‘has edged his major characters more starkly against the mass. As a result, the picture is no intellectualslumming 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 asintellectually a cut above a study of the social problems festering in urban America. Representing an abstract view ofhuman cruelty and suffering was assessed as a more worthwhile project than protesting against real hardships. It isappropriate that Bass chose a symbol that represented universalised human suffering to symbolise the substance of a filmthat abstracted the pain of drug addicts in the slums of Chicago and presented it to the movie-going audience as an allegoryof 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 ElmerBernstein’s jazz score a white bar appears from the centre top of the screen and cuts through the plain black background tothe 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 arespelt 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 eachother at diagonals jut down to the middle of the screen. The names of the film’s 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 sequenceappear on the screen in time to the beats of the title music. The length of time a particular image sits upon the screen isprescribed and contained by the score. The images and the music work symbiotically, one emphasising the other soeffectively that they appear inseparable.

The film’s title appears after the names of its major stars. Written in capitals slightly larger than the type of the rest of thesequence it appears to be held in place at the centre of the screen by four white bars which jut out from the middle of eachof the edges of the frame. The more important credits appear either in pairs or singly, framed by abstract compositions ofwhite elongated rectangular forms. The major body of the credits appear in text blocks which either descend from the topor emerge from the bottom of the frame at either side of the screen as white bars slash across its centre in time to theincreasingly 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 tothe middle of the frame. This bar then transforms itself into the geometrically stylised arm motif. The fingers of the handcurl tensely and the image is frozen at the moment that Preminger’s director’s credit appears across the centre of thescreen.

The style of the sequence is very similar to that of pioneering animation produced by Oskar Fischinger (1900-67) inGermany in the early 1920s. Between 1921 and 1925 Fischinger produced a series of films which he called ‘Studies’. In theseshort films he animated white forms against a black background in time to pieces of well known classical music. In StudyNo 8 blocks and crescents dance upon the screen to Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and in another Study, whichwas subtitled a modern artist's impression of The Glory Of Music and repackaged to appear as a short film in Britishmovie-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 regardingthe correlation between the visual shape of an object and its auditory shape or sound. He reckoned that there was ‘nothingof an absolute artistic creative sense in realism in motion’ and his films were made in pursuit of ‘absolute cinema’. Musicwas central to Fischinger's notion of absolute film, he explained that, ‘The flood of feeling created through the musicintensified the feeling and effectiveness of this graphic cinematic expression and helped to make understandable theabsolute film’.

In the late 1930s, Fischinger had come to Hollywood. Fellow emigres helped him find a job at the Disney studio working asequence of Fantasia, but his relationship with Walt Disney was not successful and at their parting Disney is reputed tohave told Fischinger, ‘You want to make art, I’m looking for entertainment.’ After this experience Fischinger was voluble inhis criticism of commercial film, appearing to have forgotten that he had pursued and achieved a degree of popular successin Berlin just before he fled Germany. In the catalogue of the exhibition Art in Cinema held at the San Francisco Museumof Art in 1947 Fischinger took the opportunity to attack the Hollywood system:



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 inthe final creation. The creative artist of the highest level should always work at his best alone, moving ahead of his time. Heshould not care if he is misunderstood by the masses...... Consequently, there is only one way for the creative artist: Toproduce 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 makingaltogether. In his last years in Hollywood Fischinger concentrated on painting, a medium where he could maintaincomplete creative control.

Bass’s sequence for The Man With The Golden Arm is like a Fischinger Study, both in the style of animation and also in theclose sychronization between visual and auditory rhythm. Mike Weaver, writing about Fischinger’s work just after his deathin 1969, claimed that he turned the screen into a ‘graphic score’ the visual rhythm being subordinate to auditory. This isalso 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.

Fischinger’s work was shown occasionally at art museums on the West Coast and Bass and Preminger might well havebecome aware of it through these exhibitions. Fischinger did attract a small following, which Malcolm Le Grice consideredsubstantial enough to label ‘the West Coast abstract school’ but as Le Grice went on to acknowledge the ‘formal aspects ofabstraction made only small impact’. Bass’s 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 school’s impact on mainstreamfilm. Despite Bass’s use of the formal aspects of abstract film in these early title sequences, he had no sympathy with theproject of the absolute film. Fairly early on in his career, he turned towards live action rather than animation because hefelt 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 overallproduction costs of the film. It was animated under a rostrum camera, using no innovative techniques. Bass would havebeen assisted in the animation by specialists from one of the Hollywood post production facilities, which were justbeginning to emerge in the wake of the collapse of the studios. But in spite of being technically unadventurous, thesequence was a radical departure from the conventional Hollywood film title which took the form of typographysuperimposed 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 fora modern audience. The film’s jazz score reinforced that impression, jazz being the favourite musical style of the up-to-dateurban American in the 1950s. Preminger’s believed his films to be at the vanguard of modern film making, and so he choseto promote them using modern graphic styles.

23/08/12 18:39Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 5 Spiralling Aspirations: Vertigo, 1958 by Emily King

Página 1 de 5http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_5_spiralling_aspirations_vertigo_1958


4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è Z 3JCL;FFCHA !MJCL;NCIHMÄ6?LNCAI} V^Z]by Emily King

Part five of ten of Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses 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 NorthBy Northwest. A year after the release of Vertigo, Bass went on to design the credits and work on sequences for the filmPsycho. It seems likely that Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was responsible for employing Bass. Years later in an interviewwith Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock admitted, ‘the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on thescreen’. Bass after his early work for Preminger had made a name for himself as a creator of a certain kind of ‘over-all visualimpact’. Like Preminger, Hitchcock used Bass’s input both to maintain control over post-production of his films and topromote the idea of his own complete creative vision. It seems ironic that employing another individual to design asequence within a movie should be used as a device to signal sole authorship. By designing distinctive sequences Bass gaveHitchcock 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 theshaping of a recognisable and marketable artistic identity for himself. Kapsis has argued ‘From the beginning of hisdirectorial career in England in the mid 1920s Hitchcock used publicity to promote himself, his films, and idea ofdirectorial 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 author’s novel isthe offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artisticthey 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. Thistheory, which came to dominate serious film criticism, was derived from a bunch of loosely connected opinions expressedin articles written by French critics/directors including Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema, amagazine launched in 1951. Andrew Sarris, the American film critic who was the first to formally express the theory in theearly 1960s, argued that the value of a film lay in the qualities that could be attributed to its auteur, who he assumed to beits director. He identified these as the common features within a single auteur’s body of work, such as a distinctive cameraangle or sequence of images. Kapsis’s thesis is important because he implies that a director might be commercially, as wellas 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 theproduction process. In 1939 he signed a contract with the American production company, Selznick International.Hitchcock’s long term contract with Selznick’s studio granted them his non-exclusive services on two pictures in the firstyear. Though Selznick retained the right to prepare the final cut of the films and was in charge of post-production of allfilms made by his studio, in interviews Hitchcock claimed that Rebecca, the first film he directed for Selznick, would reflectsolely his personality. This view was reinforced rather than contradicted by the material released by Selznick’s ownpublicity machine. Hitchcock was not only promoting the idea of himself as the sole author of his films he was alsosuccessfully 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 usedadvance notices, press releases, staged interviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, reportedly authored by




himself, to instruct audiences what to expect of a typical Hitchcock feature film. Reviews of Vertigo suggest that he hadsuccessfully instilled in his audiences the feeling that they should be spotting his authorial input. After spending more thana column summarising the film’s plot, a piece in Film In Review concluded,

Vertigo’s credits have the best titles Saul Bass has done to date. To them and the really beautiful photography, and creativephotographic effects I add for praise the Hitchcock directorial "touches". It is really those, I suppose, that enable Vertigo’s126 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 samesentence as the Bass title sequence, which was something he would have recognised as a common feature of Hitchcock’sfilms. The reviewer in the Motion Picture Herald claimed that the film was ‘Fortified with ... the identity of Hitchcock’sdirection’, but again the only cinematic devices he chose to mention are ‘the clever main titles designed by Saul Bass, andJohn P Fulton’s special photographic effects’ which brought ‘The mood of the somewhat lengthy screenplay... intoimmediate focus.’

Jack Moffitt, who reviewed the film in The Hollywood Reporter, recognised the problem raised by identifying one man’swork 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 andHitchcock exhibits absolute genius in doing this in Vertigo. The animated spirals of Saul Bass’s title designs create an effectof dizziness and audience participation at the very start.

Other reviewers failed to recognise Bass’s 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 Novak’s beauty, even to theextent of using her large eyes as part of the main title backgrounds’.

This is not to claim that Hitchcock’s 'directorial touches' were in any way fictitious, but just to suggest that it is easier for anaudience to recognise a screen-filling graphic device than a subtle camera shot. Stanley Donen made a series of suspensemysteries in the mid 1960s in a consciously Hitchcockian manner. To enable his audience to recognise his homage, heborrowed Hitchcock’s 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 forthe film adapted from his title sequence (fig.13). Kapsis argues that the idea for this advertisement was Hitchcock’s andParamount reluctantly went along with it. The studio blamed these ads for the film’s failure to attract large audience in itsfirst few days, Kapsis suggests that the Bass design implied Vertigo was ‘a more poetic and less mainstream film’. WithinVertigo’s first weeks of exhibition Paramount’s East Coast marketing office had put together a new design, which put moreemphasis on the film’s stars. Kapsis argues the impact of the new campaign was negligible, Vertigo’s box office takingscontinued 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 anadaptation of the Bass spiral, none keep to the original Bass design created for the press ad which borders on the abstract, astylised figure of a man falling into the eye of a geometrical figure. The posters that are illustrated with the spiral wereintended to emphasise the ‘Hitchcock Sell’. The face of the ‘master of suspense’ looms out from the top left of the designand the text reads ‘Alfred Hitchcock engulfs you in a whirlpool of terror and tension’ (fig.14). Other posters completelyabandon the spiral motif to concentrate on the films stars or its major dramatic scenes. One design shows Kim Novak inbed, James Stewart’s 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 thecampaigns to promote his films, he had no dominant idea about the visual approach to this promotion. Despite havingcommissioned Bass to create the press advertisement for Vertigo, Hitchcock, unlike Preminger, cannot be seen as achampion of modern graphics. Hitchcock chose to promote Psycho with a poster of Janet Leigh in only her underwear.Though the film’s title was written on this poster in a slashed typeface derived from a Bass design, its style was one thatmost movie-goers of the early 1960s would have associated with pornographic films. This poster, along with other effectivemarketing ploys, such as instructing audiences that if they arrived late they would not be allowed into the theatre, wereresponsible for the film’s immediate success. Hitchcock’s strategy for managing publicity was derived from his instincts asa 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, mighthave held widely varied expectations. Within the movie theatre, an instant impression would have been created by the firstsuggestively mysterious notes of Bernard Hermann’s score, which begins as the Universal pictures logo fades from screen.



Immediately after this opening, the first image of the title sequence (fig.16) fades onto the screen. In the opening seconds ofthe sequence the camera moves to the left, drawing our eyes with it, until it rests on a black and white close-up of the faceof the film’s star, Kim Novak, already in character as Madelaine/Judy. The camera then closes in on her mouth. Our gaze isconcentrated upon this single feature which is blown up to fill the screen. The mouth twitches slightly as if its owner werenervous under our concentrated examination. The opening words of the title ‘ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS’ expandonto the screen until they fill the woman’s upper lip. The credits are all written in serif capitals. The larger titles in the firstpart of the sequence are in outline type through which the image beneath can be seen. The main body of the titles are insolid black capitals of the same typeface. The camera then moves our gaze upwards to the woman’s eyes. Again as if inresponse to our gaze, she moves her glance from side to side in swift panicky movements. The names of the film’s big stars,Kim Novak and James Stewart, expand onto the screen in the same manner as the first credit to fill the forehead of thewoman. The camera then concentrates our gaze upon the right eye of the woman. At the slightly spooky sound of a bell inBermann’s score the screen is suddenly stained red. The film’s title expands from the woman’s pupil to fill the centre of thescreen. The changing colour of the screen signals that the images are no longer examining the external signs of identity butdealing with the inner being. The camera draws us into the psychological depths of the woman through her pupil. As thecamera dives into the depths of the woman’s 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 bythe next, which in its turn appears from the cinematic distance and expands to fill the screen. The body of the text in thesequence appears in blocks to the lower left and lower right of the screen as the camera travels through the geometricalfigures. The sequence ends as a rotating circular form fades into an image of the woman’s eye and Hitchcock’s director’scredit 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 WestCoast experimental film maker, John Whitney. The Whitney brothers, John and James, were part of the small resurgenceof interest in the experimental film on the West Coast immediately after the war. They were included in the 1947 SanFrancisco Museum of Art exhibition Art in Cinema. In their catalogue entry for that exhibition they commited themselvesto 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 onemost 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’ andwent 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 inthe United States. He described:

abstract art forms, traced by intricate electrical waves on the screen of a cathode-ray oscilloscope. They are originated andfashioned by the electronic circuits and displayed by the glowing beam of the electronic picture tube; they are recorded bymeans 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 non-representational 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 theseelectronic abstractions offered an exciting new possibilities. In 1957 an article in Print (fig.18) reported on MortonGoldsholl’s work with electronic abstractions, suggesting it was ‘directly connected to the graphic designers concern withlight, as it accurately reflects the growing use, first in avant-garde circles and then in the commercial work’. The use of lightpioneered by the Whitney brothers was possibly the first mobile graphic device which was subsequently adapted to staticuse, reversing the conventional route of graphics into film.

By employing Whitney’s technology in the opening sequence of a narrative feature film, Bass again showed an interest inthe 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 showprospective customers the kinds of graphics they could produce for use within commercial film or television. The mostfamous use of Whitney’s technology in mainstream film is within the Stargate sequence in Kubrick’s 2001.



Bass’s sequence at the beginning of Vertigo is symbolic of the film’s substance. Robin Wood in his book Hitchcock’s Films,the first analysis of Hitchcock’s complete oeuvre written in 1965, suggests the film’s theme was ‘unstable identity’ andargues, ‘Hitchcock is concerned with impulses that lie deeper than individual psychology that are inherent in the humancondition’. This concern with human psychology was widespread in the mid-twentieth century, when ‘the unconscious wason everybody’s mind’. The association of intricate geometrical figures with complex psychology states was made by theWhitney 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 openingsequence of Vertigo, to some extent he adopted their ideology. By the early 1960s the association of the geometrical formwith the mental state had become a graphic convention (fig.19), and these figures appeared as cover illustrations onvirtually 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 tothe images. It is likely that Hermann would have composed the music to counts of the title sequence and a outline of thestoryboard. Bass has said that, with the exception of The Man With The Golden Arm, ‘In every case, I did the visualmaterial first and the composer wrote an original piece of music to accompany it’. Probably both music and the titlesequence 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 unrevisedby independent producer/directors.

Bass made the credit sequence for Vertigo with the help of Harold Adler, a movie advertising artist and title design lettererwho worked for National Screen Service. Adler later went on to cooperate with Bass on the titles for Psycho. Discussing thatcollaboration Adler observed,

I don’t think [Saul Bass] was too technically involved or oriented at that time. One of the reasons he came to us at NationalScreen was that we tried to contribute to that concept and not let him make any mistakes.

He went on to recall that Bass’s storyboards were ‘complete and precise’ but that he needed help to ‘interpret them’ intofilm. 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 theprocess 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 waspaid $3,000 to design the opening sequence, which cost $21,000 in total to produce. Hitchcock employed the crew fromhis television series to make the film, bringing in only the editor George Tomasini and Bass. In this case the opening fewseconds of the film accounted for a relatively large proportion of the production costs because, at only $800,000, Psychowas a very low budget film. By 1960 the small budget B movie had its day and the average cost of a feature film produced bythe major studios was $2 million. Psycho was produced on such a low budget only because Hitchcock had not been able toattract financial support from the major studios for the project. Therefore, while Bass might well have been paid a similaramount for his work on Vertigo two years earlier, against that movie’s overall production costs the title sequence must havebeen fairly inexpensive. Vertigo was a major release by a large studio and would have been produced on a budgetcommensurate with that status.

Despite being of little financial significance, the opening sequence of Vertigo might have been intended to play animportant role in the film’s bid for cultural gravity. Kapsis suggests cynically, ‘Throughout the 1940s Hitchcock continuedhis practice of including unusual shots or sequences in his films for their calculated effect on the more serious critics.’ Themost famous of these is the dream sequence within Spellbound, which was designed by Dali and is little more than atransfer of his paintings onto the screen. The emphasis in this sequence appears to be to create easily recognisable Daliimages on screen rather than an effective filmic sequences. After arriving in the United States in the early 1940s, Dali hadquickly achieved notoriety and by the time he collaborated with Hitchcock he was already a familiar name beyond artcircles. He had designed window displays for Barney’s, 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 hisaudience would have been able to respond. But, while Hitchcock arguably always played to a crowd, it is unlikely that hewas unaware of the effects his films were having on serious critics. Spellbound, among other films by Hitchcock, wasacquired by the Museum of Modern Art when Selznick donated his collection to the Film Library in the early 1950s. By thelate 1950s Hitchcock, canonised by MOMA and firmly established as the icon of the ‘Cahiers Club’, the emergent band ofserious film critics, was highly aware of the relationship of his films to art. By using a style characteristic of theexperimental art film in the opening sequence of Vertigo, Hitchcock possibly hoped to reinforce the status his oeuvre in thecultural hierarchy. Richard Griffith, curator of MOMA’s film library in the 1950s, actively encouraged the collection of



American avant garde film of the period. Hitchcock must have been aware that the films of John and James Whitney lay inthe 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 forcultural 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 Hitchcockin the United States are undeniably Hollywood products, and as such would have attracted the scorn of Greenberg. Thoughit might have been more productive for Hitchcock to reject completely the terms of this debate, in the post war period ithad become the dominant framework in which to discuss cultural issues. Champions of all sorts of popular culture began toargue that their particular cause, fashion, music design etc, was art. The design of the opening sequence of Vertigo was oneof Hitchcock’s attempts to ally himself with the avant garde rather than the Kitsch.

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Stan Wood, 25 January 2009, 7:21 AM Permalink

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 Permalink

how much did it cost to produce Vertigo?

Michele Johnson, 18 September 2009, 2:23 PM Permalink

I have read somewhere that the face of the woman in the title sequencebelongs to Joanne Genthon who plays Carlotta in the dream sequence.This adds another layer to the matter of female identity.

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http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_5_spiralling_aspirations_vertigo_1958#comment1105



23/08/12 18:40Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 6: Musical Statues: Spartacus, 1960 by Emily King

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4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è [Ä -OMC=;F 3N;NO?MÄ3J;LN;=OM} V^[Uby Emily King

Part six of ten of Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses 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 putsSpartacus, which was released in 1960, at the cusp of the genre’s decline.

Kirk Douglas (b.1916), star and executive producer of the film, was the controlling presence on the production, to the extentthat Stanley Kubrick (b.1928), the director, claimed that he was nothing more than a ‘hired hand’ on the set. Douglassacked the film’s original director, Anthony Mann, and most of the production crew after the first few days' filming. SaulBass was one of the few members of the original production team to survive the change-over. He had been hired in theearliest stages of the production to design the opening credits and to create the film’s 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 wasn’t 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... that’s Saul Bass, sothey called me in and I was working on a symbolic battle. Then things started getting a little out of hand, budget rising - itwas now about 4 or 5 million - so they said, let’s have a little more... let’s do an impressionistic battle. So I redid the wholething. Well, they were enlarging the picture, putting more and more things in, and finally they said - Well gee, we can’t godown the line and then have somebody look through the window and say "That’s 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 that’s how I wound up doing what for me isthis 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 spendingmoney 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 togreat effect. Along with the ‘symbolic’ battle, Bass’s opening title sequence was part of a package of relatively low budgetfeatures intended to distinguish the film. The opening credits of Ben Hurappear in a ‘classical’ typeface over a static imageof a detail of Michelangelo’s Creation of Man. Similarly, the titles of other major epics are in the traditional Hollywoodmould of typography over appropriate static image. Bass’s modern graphics would have set Spartacus apart from the restin its first few minutes.

The opening sequence of the film lasts 5 minutes 17 seconds and credits 57 separate individuals and companies. Basshimself 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.... Sincetrade requirements demand these extensive credits, it seems that this usually neutral interlude should be converted into apositive introduction to the film.’ After the studio system broke down the entire production team of a movie would be hiredon contract. Whenever possible the contractee would include a clause demanding a screen credit. Visibility on screen hadbecome 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




audiences. In A Star Is Born (1954) the James Mason character is told that his career is finished in the time it takes for thecredits on the film he is watching to roll. Significantly, this climactic scene is played against the background of a baseballgame on television, making the connection between lengthy credits and the decline of the movie industry. It was theshifting power structures in Hollywood, which many believed would hasten the collapse of the film industry, that wereresponsible 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 ofthe production team (fig.20). The complete list of credits was revised several times before the final version was reached inmid August 1960, after shooting of the titles had already begun. Saul Bass’s own credit appears to have been the source ofdebate. A memo dated July 14, 1960 announced, ‘The Saul Bass title has been resolved. He will be the first name on card 17and the credit will read as follows: Main titles and design consultant ... Saul Bass.’ The memo concludes wearily, ‘We allhope 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 Bass’s sequence on 10 June 1960 (fig.21). On19 July he was sent the revised counts (fig.22) and nine days later a schedule was drawn up which projected that his scorewould be completed by 12 August. Despite the repeated delays in the production of Spartacus, to the extent that by early1960 the film was nearly a year behind its original schedule, the post-production work on the film was completed toextremely tight deadlines.

In the sequence as it appears on the film (fig.23) Alex North’s score opens with a harsh trumpet fanfare just before the firstimage appears on the screen. Described in the counts sent to North as ‘Hand Entering Field at Right’, a sculptural handpoints authoritatively from right to left and the first credit, for Bryna Production Company, fades in over it. Seconds later amanacled hand tightly clenched in a rebellious fist breaks through from the left of the screen and Kirk Douglas’s creditappears in elegant serif capitals [‘Slaves Hand - Static’]. Next, Laurence Olivier’s credit is superimposed onto an image ofthe head of an imperial sceptre [‘Eagle’]. Jean Simmons, the only female lead, is given a credit against the background of animage of a hand holding a water jug [‘Hand With Pitcher’]. The images and text of this part of the sequence fade in and outwithin regular time intervals. The doom-laden drum beats of the Spartacus theme keep time, but the auditory and visualrhythms are not synchronised in any detail.

Each of the film’s principal characters is given this style of solitary credit. The photographed fragments of apparentlyclassical statutory juxtaposed against their names are intended to symbolise their role in the production. After sixindividual credits, which take up the first 74 seconds of the sequence, the film’s title appears in the centre of the screen inthe same typeface as the major credits, but in slightly larger script. It is superimposed onto an image of two sword bladeswhich appear to challenge each other. This symbol is accompanied by some dramatic trumpet flourishes in the scoreemphasising it as a key point in the sequence.

After the film’s title, other acting credits and minor technical credits appear in text blocks of smaller type superimposedonto either fragments of classical statues or blocks of Roman script. The respective authors of the screenplay and originalbook, Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast, are credited in the same frame, their names superimposed onto a screen filled withRoman script, which must refer to the process of authorship. The men who had an overview of the film’s production, KirkDouglas and Edward Lewis, the executive producer and the producer, are given their credits at the end of the sequence overthe profiles of classical busts. Stanley Kubrick, the film’s director, is given the last credit, superimposed over the centre of afull face view of the sculpted head of a young Roman man. After Kubrick’s name disappears from the screen the statueappears to age. Cracks appear in the marble [‘Head Starts Cracking at 293’] and eventually the statue crumbles [‘CracksOccur 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 ofthe 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 theAnthropological Museum at Berkeley. If he could not find the right statue to symbolise a certain role he would commissionit from Sylvestri, a craftsman who specialised in 'classical' statuary. Almost certainly the manacled fist of the slave, thesymbol of defiance in captivity, was made for the sequence rather than found in a museum. The nobility and strength of theslave was not a theme explored in the statuary of ancient Rome. This emphasis on research in tandem with a cavalierapproach 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 inancient Rome, were motivated by the desire to draw parallels between the politics of the Spartacus fable and those of themid-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



Spartacus as an opportunity to make a large-scale Zionist statement’. Douglas described the theme of the film as ‘theindividual, fighting against society’ and went on to remark, ‘its always obsessed me ... it doesn't matter if you're a nice guyor 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 film’s mostblatant political message. Romans, upholders of a decaying political order, speak with English accents. Slaves, who seek tooverthrow Roman authority and establish a just society, have American voices. Jean Simmons, the only exception to thisrule, was cast as a slave ‘from Britannia’. Hers is the only English accent that the audience is not intended to associate witha rotting society. This ‘scheme’ was common among Hollywood epics and the message, that modern American society waschallenging the degenerate European establishment in the new world order, was reinforced again and again through thesemovies.

Manipulation disguised as attention to detail was not motivated solely by politics. The battle scene was advertised in thepublicity around the film as ‘the first time audiences may view the unique formation which military experts call history’smost 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 machine-like, 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 createa graphic impression on the screen of mechanistic efficiency, the publicity was selling his design as an accuraterepresentation of Roman military efficiency.

Publicity released with the movie boasted, ‘All the research was not aimed solely at visual effects. Alex North, for one, wasconcerned about authenticity for the ear.’ In an interview North claimed, ‘What I tried to do in the picture was to capturethe 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 today’s world, I tried to combine research and period authenticity withcontemporary composition’. 'Authenticity' is not a straightforward concept in regard to the music of an extinct culture andcan often be identified in the score of Spartacus by jarring brass fanfares. Among other 'contemporary music andtechniques', North used elements of jazz music. The surprising juxtaposition of jazz and togas must have been intended towake 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 makersadopting historically questionable devices to draw arguably spurious contemporary parallels and that its messageamounted to nothing more than vague ideas about freedom from old world orders. However, the most pertinent politicalmessage of the film lay not in its substance, but in the credits appearing in the opening sequence. On 1 August 1960 it wasfinally agreed that Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast would be openly acknowledged for their roles in writing the film. Bothwere writers who had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era. For Trumbo, who had been working in Hollywood underpseudonyms for many years, it was the first time his role in the production of a film had been acknowledged since thehearings of the Un-American Activities Committee. The Hollywood Reporter, while suggesting that the employment ofblacklisted writers might prevent the film being accepted, admitted that ‘there is nothing more subversive in Spartacusthan 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). Hereturned to Guernica as a source for this symbol. The figure of the gladiator, head thrust back, arms upstretched and swordin hand, is a more defiant version of the unarmed figure at the far left of Picasso’s canvas. In drawing on the visuallanguage that had been derived from the painting, Bass was communicating a metapolitical message about liberty thatwould have been widely understood. By 1960 Guernica had come to epitomise the appropriate way to visually express theabstract rhetoric which dominated the political language of United States. North Americans were not only exposed to 'mistymeditations on freedom' through their films, they were also hearing them from their President. John F Kennedy delivered aspeech concluding, ‘My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do forthe freedom of man’, at his inaugural address only three months after the release of Spartacus. With minimal changes,Kennedy’s speech could have been slotted quite comfortably into the script of the film.

Bass’s symbol for Spartacus, though expressive both of America’s political conscience and of the film’s message, did notappear in any form in the credits. The visual language employed by Bass in the sequence suggests a completely differentsource. The surrealists had been engaged in exploring the psychological and subconscious impact of classical imagerythrough their paintings and films since the 1920s. The images of fragments of sculpture appearing in the Spartacus titlesare 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 likelythat Bass was directly informed by the medium of film. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), in The Blood Of The Poet, 1930, had let



the camera linger on brightly lit statuary and subsequently the imagery had made its way into mainstream film. In CitizenKane, 1940, German Expressionism met Surrealism in the halls of the mythical mansion, Xanadu. Kane’s bizarre collectionof antiques included classical, medieval and Renaissance statues which stood out against the eerie shadows of the GreatHall.

Bass’s use of classical motifs in the Spartacus sequence obviously makes sense in terms of the film’s subject. But, while theuse of classical sculpture in the opening sequence of a film about the Roman Empire could be seen as prosaic, the style ofthe sequence implies more than a straightforward visual representation of the film’s historical context. Tantalisinglyincomplete images are left on screen for merely a few seconds. It is impossible to view this collection of fleeting imagessimply as a gallery of remnants of a bygone age. Bass described the image used to symbolise Tony Curtis’s role in the film as‘Friendly Hands’. This suggests that the sequence was intended to convey emotional as well as symbolic messages. Thestatues are not the inert artefacts of an ancient culture but collectively become the communicators of complex meanings.

No element of Bass’s title sequence for Spartacus was used in the advertising campaign for the film. Bass’s graphic symbolappeared as only a small trademark on the American posters and not at all on those offered to British theatres. The filmwas the object of a coordinated world-wide promotion, but Bass was not responsible for any part of its design. The posterformat which was adhered to consistently in both America and Europe was a series of mix and match portrait medallions ofthe film’s major stars against a plain background (fig.26), a style which followed the conventional graphic formula of mostblockbuster advertising. At this point Bass was no longer confined in his film-work to post-production packaging andpublicity, 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 muchthe film did eventually cost to make. Over the years it had taken to produce Spartacus the budget had grown toconventionally epic proportions. A promotional book titled The Portrait of a Production claimed that Spartacus was ‘themost expensive motion picture ever made in Hollywood’. The press excitedly repeated the rumour that the film’s budgetwas $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 Bass’s other credits of the sameperiod, the Spartacus sequence received no attention from contemporary reviewers, who instead concentrated on the film’s‘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 thecosts of actually shooting the credits under Bass’s supervision at National Screen Service. The responsibility for the openingtitles of Spartacus as they appear on screen lies with a team. As well as the technicians from National Screen Service, someof the credit for the sequence must go to Bass’s colleagues from Saul Bass and Associates, chiefly Art Goodman whodesigned the typography and Elaine Mack who appears to have been responsible for a substantial amount of the researchbehind the sequence.

By 1960 the work of Saul Bass and his team had become well known and popular. They had designed opening sequences for9% of the films which grossed over $5 million at the box office in the period between 1951 and 1960, as well as those for anumber of films which were successful on a smaller scale. From the late 1950s, Bass increasingly used live action withinthese sequences and became more involved in working on scenes within films. In a filmed interview made by his ownproduction company in the early 1970s, Bass explained that although he had begun his work on titles by animating graphicsymbols, ‘somewhere down the line’ he ‘felt the need to come to grips with the realistic or live action image’. SometimesBass used these live action sequences symbolically: the titles for Walk On the Wild Side (1962) posit a fight between a blackand a white cat as a metaphor for the gang wars on the streets of Chicago (fig.27), and the closing sequence of West SideStory (1961), which wanders round an urban landscape finding credits in the graffiti, symbolises a tale which was supposedto have been plucked from the city’s 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 thestory 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 BernardLodge, who has designed graphics for television since 1962, suggests that the sequences are evidently the work of a graphicdesigner, arguing that what characterises a graphic designer’s eye for film is ‘looking for shapes and patterns’. Lodge,explained that having seen Saul Bass’s work in the early 1960s he ‘realised that there was a graphic designers way ofshooting live action’ which has become a ‘common language’. Discussing Bass’s use of a telephoto lens to shoot the openingsequence of Grand Prix he observed that ‘you get instant super-graphic images using one of those things...... You get aninstant composition ...its very much a graphic designers look’. Lodge went on to complain that this style of film making hasbecome cliched suggesting that, ‘One almost wants a stringent ungraphic thing now.’



Throughout the sixties, graphic designers became increasingly involved in the production of films. The positive reception ofSaul Bass’s work in the late 1950s must have encouraged film-makers to employ graphic designers to work on the openingcredits and other sequences within their movies. Making a feature of the titles and creating sequences within films withthat distinctive 2D graphic look became common elements of mainstream movies in the mid to late 1960s.

23/08/12 18:40Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 7: Sex and Typography: From Russia With Love, 1963 by Emily King

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Part seven of ten of Emily King's dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century. Bond titling sequencesand 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. Americanswho were already established in both fields migrated there and simultaneously took advantage of and added to theflourishing 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. Fletchersuggests, ‘A lot of the designers came to England because it was like virgin territory. It was beginning here, there was aromance.’ Charles Rosner reported in Graphis of November 1960 that, ‘The reputation of British design as a whole wasconsiderably enhanced in the summer of 1960 when the British Exhibition was held New York’, and went on to cite soaringadvertising 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 hadincreased 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 plasticcultural climate. Robert Hewison has argued that anxiety and excitement prompted by the breakdown of long-standingsocial and political structures led to a shared sense that society was at a turning point. The feeling of being on the edge of anuclear precipice and on the brink of major social upheaval, in tandem with the facilitation of mass communicationthrough television, was reponsible for what was effectively a transformation of the most visible aspects of British cultureand 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 theNew York design group, BCG. He left the United States because of the breakdown of his working relationship with IvanChermayeff and Thomas Geismar (C&G) which was a result of his addiction to heroin, a drug he first took as a student. Likemost of the American designers who came over he had no problem finding well paid work, and within a few weeks ofarriving in London he was employed as an art director at J. Walter Thompson’s. Katie Homans has suggested that thoughfamily connections and a thriving advertising industry made London an obvious choice for Bj, he was motivated mosturgently by the fact that ‘heroin and other hard drugs were available by prescription through clinic in England at this time.’

While Britain’s advertising industry was employing some of America’s brightest designers, its film industry was attractingsignificant dollar investments. Small British studios had been making movies from the earliest days of commercial filmproduction. Having switched largely to turning out propaganda during the second world war, these studios returned toproducing entertainment films in the late 1940s and 1950s. American talent or investment played an important role in alarge part of post-war British film production. Alexander Walker has argued that in the mid 1950s, because of fallingdomestic audiences, British film-makers were forced to concentrate on foreign markets and had become ‘more akin toexporters than producers’. In 1954 the film critic John Gillett, reporting on the ‘State of the Studios’, had noticed that ‘thereare only four feature films on the floor in British Studios, and three of them are being made by American directors’. WhileGillett went on to speculate that ‘a different name on the credits is no assurance of a different line of approach’, with thebenefit of hindsight, Walker has suggested that the specifically British character of the films produced under these




condition was ‘nebulous’ and that they ‘were sometimes indistinguishable in look and tone from the product turned out bythe home studios in California’.

British studios were able to attract American film makers by offering film lots and skilled labour at prices which greatlyundercut their Hollywood equivalents. Sydney Cain, who worked in the 1950s as a draughtsman at Warwick films, animportant London based company, recalled that he ‘has almost invariably worked for American directors’. Cain observedthat 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 andhis 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. Thesefilms, as well as earning money for companies representing British interests, also appeared to encapsulate a characteristicBritishness. Ranging from the relentlessly gritty Room At The Top to the costume comedy Tom Jones, these film do notreflect a homogeneous style but their relationship to contemporary British theatre or their ironic humour clearlyannounced 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 Osborne’s Look Back In Anger among other projects. Broccoli had also had several years experiencein the British film industry pre-Bond, having co-founded Warwick films he successfully produced a number of movies withthe 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 financiallysuccessful movies produced by the British film industry in the 1960s. But while they were made by a nominally Britishcompany all the interests represented were American. Walker has argued that the Bond films’ self-parodying humourrelates them to British films like Tom Jones. It is probably because Bond’s irony differentiates the series from themisplaced, low-budget Hollywood productions of the 1950s that the films have been seen as the commercial heart of thebrief 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 tofilm its sequel, From Russia With Love. Alan Fletcher suggests that Brownjohn was commissioned to design the titles forthe second Bond movie ‘because he was part of the scene of the moment’. Saltzman and Brownjohn met at a Chelsea dinnerparty at a period when designers and film-makers in London ‘all knew each other, and used to meet in the samerestaurants’. A friend of Bj’s remembers him as a charismatic ‘youthful crew-cut slim American character who woresneakers and was quite different to anyone else I'd ever met’. Though he had never worked with film, being a charmingmercurial figure at the heart of the closely knit Anglo-American London scene qualified Brownjohn to be offered what, afterthe 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 Binder’s work beartraces of the influence of the modern European graphic aesthetic (fig.29). But, possibly because he was trained primarily asa film-maker, Binder appears to have felt free to animate abstract elements, employed in a strictly formal manner byEuropean-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 Binder’s dancing dots, whichwere made by animating price tags, mock the seriousness of these designers. From the outset, Broccoli and Saltzmanappear to have conceived eye-catching, suggestively modern graphics as part of the Bond package. Probably this wasbecause by the time the Bond series was being planned film-makers were competing primarily against television for theiraudience. From the earliest days of television, channels had used screen graphics to introduce and punctuate programs andanimated two dimensional designs were becoming increasingly common in television advertisements. Even though Basshad been creating movie title sequences since the mid 1950s, by the early 1960s most people would have become familiarwith animated graphics in their living rooms rather than at the movie theatres. However the quality of televisiontransmission was still very poor and screens were usually small, so the exciting Bond lead-ins gave audiences somethingtelevision offered but could not deliver.

Binder, in cooperation with Brownjohn, topped and tailed the titles for From Russia With Love . Binder’s famous gunbarrel sequence opens the film by putting the audience inside the shaft of a gun as the weapon scans the screen. The figureof 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



subsequently used to open every James Bond film. It was remade several times to accommodate a range of James Bondswearing a variety of trouser widths. While the title sequences were part of the Bond brand image, it was this sequence thatbecame the trademark.

After the roving gun barrel device, the film is introduced with a short ‘hook’ sequence. This structure was borrowed fromtelevision. Program-makers hoped that a short dramatic burst of action, usually ending in a car crash or a murder, wouldstop people switching channels during the credits. Within a film, whose audience has already paid its money, this kind oflead-in is a stylistic, rather than a directly commercial ploy. The action-packed introduction sequences to From RussiaWith Love and all the following Bond films are further evidence that films were competing against television for theiraudience. Film-makers were learning that in order to survive they had to adjust to meet the expectations of apredominantly television watching audience, rather than merely compete with what the small screen had to offer.

Brownjohn’s 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 openswith a belly dancer moving against a black background with a series of coloured lights playing across her body (fig.33). Thelights are a projection of the words ‘Ian Fleming’s 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 flatbackground 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, awoman’s wide staring eyes appear through the double OO of Bond’s OO7 identity. The projection of the coloured numbersis 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 dancer’s rippling belly and closed thighs, the creditsof their co-stars appear upon the her inner thighs and so on so until each part of the dancer’s body has been appropriatedby text. The main bulk of the technical credits are either projected onto the undulating back of the dancer or onto hershimmying front. In every case, credits distorted to the point of illegibility by womanly curves are reprojected against a flatbackground. At the end of the sequence, the names of Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, the film’s producers, get a primesite within the dancer’s 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 hedescribed the ideas and processes behind this sequence (fig.34). Beginning by outlining other ways in which he hademployed the female body in his work, Brownjohn suggested, ‘I think I must have become rather obsessed with thatparticular solution because when, a few months later, I was asked to design the titles for the James Bond film From Russiawith Love I extended that idea’. He goes on to rationalise his obsession by explaining, ‘On this type of the film the onlythemes to work with are, it seems to me, sex or violence. I chose sex’. In fact, rather than focussing in immediately on eithersex or violence as the theme of the titles, Bj had originally thought of using the symbol of a chess game within the openingsequence as a metaphor for the film’s storyline. Likening the film’s plot machinations to a complex strategic game wouldhave produced a cool metaphorical solution, similar to those arrived at by Bass during his first phase of title making. Byeventually deciding to concentrate on the passive female form Brownjohn established the model that was conformed to inevery subsequent set of Bond titles. Brownjohn had correctly identified the semi-clad female as the most importantingredient of the Bond films. From the very beginning, when Venus-like Ursula Andress strode out of the waves wearingonly a bikini in Dr No, audiences expected Bond films to be littered with naked female flesh. The 1960s are often lookedback on as years of a sexual revolution during which women were liberated by sophisticated methods of birth control andrelaxing moral codes. The impression created by the Bond series suggests that rather than freeing women, the sexualrevolution merely made them appear the increasingly available object of mens’ fantasies.

The source of Brownjohn’s inspiration for the form of these sexually charged titles has become the subject of myth. JohnBrimacombe, Brownjohn’s assistant at the time, remembered that Bj had become fascinated with images of still type onmoving bodies when people arriving late for one of his lectures had walked in front of the projector. While this may well betrue, Brownjohn would first have encountered these kinds of images as a student at the Chicago Institute under MoholyNagy. In the article ‘Sex and Typography’, Brownjohn wrote, ‘I remembered that, many years ago, Moholy Nagy hadproposed projecting advertisements on to the clouds at night’. As a student in Moholy Nagy’s light workshop in the 1940s,Brownjohn would have been encouraged to experiment by projecting light onto not only clouds but a variety of still andmobile 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 andphotography (fig.35).

Brownjohn constantly returned in his graphic work to the ideas that he would have come across during his education inChicago. Katie Homans has suggested that, like Moholy Nagy, Brownjohn believed that art and life must be integrated. Sheargued, ‘Brownjohn brought to his work and introduced to his contemporaries an approach to graphic design worthy of



Moholy Nagy’s experiment in totality, but in the spirit of cynicism, instead of the optimism of his teacher.’ This theory isborne out by Brownjohn’s photographic article ‘Street Level’ published in Typographica of 1961 (fig.36). As Moholy Nagyhad suggested, Brownjohn chose to act as an integrator between design and life. But while Moholy Nagy believed that theintegration 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 notidentify 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 screenfor a modern typography is similarly an exercise in integrating what cynics could have argued was the true stuff of modernlife with the practise of modern design. By the mid 1960s pornography had entered the mainstream through magazines likePlayboy, in this context the semi-clad female exposing herself to the voyeuristic male gaze as she dances her way throughthe From Russia With Love titles was truly an image of its age.

‘He was the original pop artist for sure’, claimed a friend of Brownjohn’s. Brownjohn’s apparently unjudgementalabsorption of the images that were current in modern life is possibly more related to the approach of the pop artist thanthat of the European modernist. Nonetheless the simple, communicative designs he created using these images stronglyreflect the ideas of those who taught him at the Art Institute in Chicago. Conforming to the ideals of the modernists, thepartners of the design group BCG had shared a belief that ‘if they couldn’t describe an idea over the telephone, it wasn’tsimple, clear and direct enough’. The concept behind the titles for From Russia With Love had the advantage of that kind ofsimplicity. To present the idea to Broccoli and Saltzman, Bj projected the titles onto a screen, took off his shirt and dancedin the path of the projected type saying, ‘It’ll be just like this only we’ll use a pretty girl’. But, even though Broccoli andSaltzman 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 thetype legible:

The lighting cameraman tried to take a reading from the projected typography and noticed that the needle hardly moved onhis 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 hermovements in a plane at right angles to the projector without destroying the illusion of dancing. The final result achievedwhat 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 thirdBond movie. While in the From Russia With Love titles he had projected still images onto an animated human ‘screen’, inthe 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 nocoherent modern ideology of any kind behind the films’ production. As the series progressed, the range of gadgetryemployed by Bond to fight the enemy became increasingly elaborate and fantastical. But, while in some cases these deviceswere the related to important scientific breakthroughs, such as infra-red gun sights, often they were gimmicks that hadmore to do with Heath Robinson than the technological cutting edge. It is hard to imagine the British government spendingmoney to develop the parachute sprouting car that appears in Live and Let Die in an earnest attempt to compete in theCold War. To some extent the Bond films acted as a shop-window for the British manufacturing industry. Although Bond’scars, boats and planes routinely met their ends at high speed, before these vehicles were engulfed in belching clouds ofblack 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 characterequivalent to the Bond films’ ‘Q’, does exist in Fleming’s novels. But Boothroyd, primarily an expert in the technology ofweaponry, would never have dreamt of replacing Bond’s traditional, battleship grey, Aston Martin DB111, with theconspicuous 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 hungon to Ian Fleming’s unreconstructed British hero, who consistently raised his eyebrows in weary surprise at the gadgetsoffered to him by ‘Q’. Bond may have been hero of the modern age but he was not a modern character: he ordered thick cutOxford marmalade for breakfast and recognised villains by their ignorance of what colour wine to drink with fish. Anti-modern attitudes, that in school-boy tales are purported to have built the Empire, are partnered with the avid consumerismof the 1960s to form James Bond’s unlikely on-screen personality.



Pop modernity and traditionalism coexist as separate strands within the Bond series without any apparent contradiction. Itis characteristic of the construction of the Bond package that the producers felt able to pick and choose the elements thatmake up the films without feeling any obligation to reconcile them into a coherent whole. The conception of the design ofthe titles for From Russia With Love was completely unrelated to that of the overall film. Sydney Cain, the film’s artdirector, has no memory of Robert Brownjohn and did not meet with him at any point during the film’s production.Brownjohn would have filmed the titles after the body of the movie had been shot. He came upon the idea of using the bellydancer after having seen some of the sequences from the film while it was being edited. The graphics used to advertise thefilm were also designed entirely independent of Brownjohn’s titles. The publicity of the film was farmed out to NationalScreen Service and one of their in-house designers put together the poster. The image on this poster of Bond, played in thiscase by Sean Connery, draped with women, became a template for subsequent Bond advertising. Therefore, while both thecredits and the poster for the second Bond film were instrumental in creating a design format that was adhered to in thefollowing Bond features, the elements that made up this format were arrived at through a series of separate designdecisions.

A popular music theme tune was an important ingredient of the Bond formula. The dancer appearing in the credits of FromRussia With Love sways to a song written by Monty Norman and performed by Matt Monro, a reasonably well knowncrooner of the period. The synchronisation between the music and the visual is not close. The sounds and images mighthave been composed entirely independently of each other, Brownjohn timing his sequence to coordinate merely with thebasic rhythm of Norman’s tune. The James Bond themes were intended to be, and invariably became, some of the bestknown popular music of their day. While traditional film music was composed to accompany already shot sequences offilm, the Bond tunes could stand independent of the movies. Since the 1940s film music had been packaged to be sold topeople who had already enjoyed the movie, but the Bond themes might have been the first pieces of music that were used toactively market the films. It is through some of the more memorable Bond songs, belted out by chanteuses such as NancySinatra and Shirley Bassey, that many people best remember the series.

After Brownjohn’s prize-winning titles for Goldfinger, Maurice Binder returned to the series to design the titles forThunderball (1966), the fourth Bond movie, and remained to design every subsequent set. In a lecture at the National FilmTheatre in 1991, Binder, who summed up the ingredients of his sequences as ‘guns, girls, smoke and steam’, claimed, ‘Theywere really the fore-runners of today’s pop videos: the song came first and we’d illustrate it.’ As Binder’s attitude betrays,the Bond titles from Thunderball on, rather than being moving graphics, were elaborate filmic sequences. WhileBrownjohn’s use of elegant modern design to communicate the Bond theme is far from subtle, Binder delivered the sex andviolence message through his ‘videos’ with even less restraint. To open Thunderball Binder had women harpoonedunderwater, while in License To Kill, the most recent Bond film, he shot them from gun barrels. The elements that makethe Bond films unpalatable in the early 1990s are most clearly defined through these sequences. Tom Shone, arguing thatin the early 1990s it’s ‘Time To Junk Bond’, suggested the Bond formula, described by the New Statesman in the early1960s as ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’, ‘was nowhere more lovingly observed than in the films’ title sequences, shot byMaurice 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 happenedwas that Ian Fleming turned up in a dead, grey period. London really is the saddest town in the world.’ The widespreadpopularity of James Bond in the 1960s has been the subject of a number of serious investigations which attempt to analysethe shared fantasies of those living through the Cold War in a time of rapid social change. But whatever it was that madeBond a phenomenon, the credits for From Russia With Love, described by one reviewer as ‘disturbingly smart, clever, jazzand 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 Permalink

"suggests that it was a city teaming with an ‘immense number ofcreative 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 theperiod'

Comments (4)



http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_7_sex_and_typography_from_russia_with_love_1963#comment2138





One of _the_ classic voices of the 20th C, described as a 'crooner'. ?!

raja99, 19 January 2011, 9:00 PM Permalink

"In the third image, a woman’s wide staring eyes appear through thedouble OO of Bond’s OO7 identity. The projection of the colourednumbers is whisked down her body, rests for a few moments on hergirating hips, and disappears."

Um, are you sure those are "hips"? I'd say they're breasts; you canglimpse the occasional shoulder and arms to the sides before theyvanish.

Allan White, 19 January 2011, 11:03 PM Permalink

Wonderful writing here. Consider putting some photos or video of thetitle sequence to give some context. I've been spoiled by the in-depthvisual detail from Art of the Title (http://artofthetitle.com) - it's aformula that works.

Thanks for writing!

Peter Biľak, 20 January 2011, 10:54 AM Permalink

Thanks everyone for stopping by. This text has been dormant for awhile, and now enjoys quite a few visitors.

Would someone be interested in gathering illustrations for this piece? Itwill sure make it lot more interesting. We'll be happy to compensate foryour efforts. If so, please get in touch -> peter-at-typotheque-com




23/08/12 18:41Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 8 Popcorn and Pop graphics, What’s New Pussycat?, 1965 by Emily King

Página 1 de 6http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_8_popcorn_and_pop_graphics_whats_new_pussycat_1965#


4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è ] 0IJ=ILH ;H> 0IJ AL;JBC=M}7B;NàM .?Q 0OMMS=;NÖ} V^[Zby Emily King

Part eight of ten of Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses on the relationship between graphic design and film in the middle of the past century.

6: Popcorn and Pop graphics: What’s New Pussycat?, 1965

Richard Williams (b.1933), who animated the titles for What’s New Pussycat, called Charles K. Feldman (1905-68), thefilm’s producer ‘one of the last great Hollywood Moguls’. By the mid 1960s Feldman, working independently of the majorstudios, had produced a number of successful movies in Hollywood, including films as diverse as The Seven Year Itch andA Streetcar Named Desire. At this point, probably encouraged by London’s apparently flourishing film industry andswinging 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 thestrength of Donner’s previous movie, Nothing But The Best, Feldman called him up and offered him the chance to directany one of these films:

He told me what they were, and the fourth one was this comedy called What’s New Pussycat? That was the only one thatinterested me by title alone....... I took it home and the Casino Royale script, read them both overnight and said I’ll doPussycat..

Feldman had owned the script of Pussycat, which began as a play, for some time before he found Donner to direct themovie. He had hired Woody Allen, a young comedian best known for his set at New York’s Blue Angel Club, to rewrite theoriginal script. Allen had been working on the project for over a year before Donner became involved. Although Feldmanhad reservations about Allen’s script, by the time Donner agreed to direct the movie he had already partly cast the film: ‘theidea at that time was that it would be Warren Beatty, Woody Allen and a lot of beautiful girls’. Even after Donner came tothe project Feldman remained in overall control. It was Feldman who decided that Peter O’Toole should play theprotagonist after, ‘for complicated reasons’, Beatty dropped out and it was Feldman who decided that the beautiful girlssurrounding O’Toole 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 beenworking 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 What’s 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’, inthe case of Pussycat Feldman had capitulated to the demands of the investors by choosing well known stars for the majorfemale roles. Feldman’s projects were put together to attract investment from businessmen who were primarily interestedin profits rather than cinema. His prospective films had to show box office promise and many believed that the only realguarantee of commercial success was a ‘marquee name’. Feldman’s own preference for casting unknowns probably hadmore to do with keeping production costs as low as possible than with artistic integrity. While Feldman initiated or activelysupported every element of the production of his films, he almost certainly exercised his authorial power in pursuit of profitfor himself and his shareholders.

Richard Williams suggests that makers of What’s New Pussycat? first got to know of his work through an article in theObserver Magazine. Clive Donner called him up a few days after the article was published in late February 1965. Donnerand Feldman were likely to have been well aware of the contents of the Observer at that time because only a week after thearticle about Williams the same magazine ran a piece about the production of Pussycat. Ronald Bryden reported that thefilm, which was due for release in the summer, was ‘already, before a foot of film has been edited, a guaranteed blockbuster,




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 inpost-production. Williams writes ‘This is normal - or was normal in those days of fancy title sequences. You usually got 6 to8 weeks to do the job.’ While Williams’s title designs were not part of the package originally conceived by Feldman, RichardSylbert’s overall design had been an important part of the production from the outset. The copy in the What’s NewPussycat? press book emphasises Sylbert’s contribution. A piece headlined ‘Pussycat gets designer of the MetropolitanOpera House sets’, reminds audiences that Sylbert had designed other Feldman films including Walk On the Wild Side andconcludes, ‘The fact is Feldman wouldn’t think of entrusting the chore to anyone else’. Sylbert was given credit as the film’s‘Associate Producer’, a title which adds apparent weight to his role in the production. Between them, Sylbert and Williamsdecided that the opening credits should, like the film, be in an ‘Art-Nouveau-ish’ style. Using Aubrey Beardsley as a visualreference they presented their concept to Feldman, who, after having been convinced that it would be impossible to useBeardsley rather than Williams for the job, gave them the go-ahead only cautioning Williams, ‘By the way kid, no purple. Ihate 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 ajobbing animator by profession. He has argued that his first animated film, The Little Island, was an extension of his earlywork as a painter. Having been a cartoon enthusiast from childhood, Williams believed that the ideas he wanted to explorewhen he made the film ‘could only really be expressed through the cartoon medium.’ In the late 1950s, Williams insistedthat the most important aspect of animating static images, for either art or profit, was ‘to get the elements in it to move andlive in their own way’. Over his career Williams has animated a variety of illustrative styles, ranging from late nineteenthcentury 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 theanimation in the What’s New Pussycat? sequence is very simple, the considered relationship between form and movementis apparent.

‘Charles K Feldman’, the first credit of the opening sequence (fig.37) as it appears in the movie, takes centre screenimmediately after the identity of United Artists, who were distributing the film, has faded out. Written in the ‘Art Nouveau-ish’ script devised by Williams, the name sits for a few seconds before decorative tendrils sprout from the type and meanderacross the frame. The next title, the word presents written in capitals which fill the frame, is brought on from the right handside 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 Sellers’s credit. The first joke of the film is made whenSellers’s credit, which appears back to front, is removed and, after a loud crash, reappears the right way round. Thisextends the reference to old fashioned movie-making, the audience imagines a group of incompetent Laurel and Hardy-style technicians running around in front of the camera with titling boards.

Each of the film’s major stars are given an individual credit illustrated by a drawing in stylised flowing lines of themselvesin character. By filling the initials of the stars’ names with animated psychedelic patterns Williams puts his retro ArtNouveau script on the border between typography and illustration, allowing it to compete with the animated figures for theaudience’s attention. The opening minutes of the title sequence are accompanied by an instrumental of composer BurtBacharach’s Pussycat theme played in a fair-ground style. The film’s title, written in screen-filling, tendril sproutingcapitals, appears on screen, after the names of the leading players, to coincide with a flourish in the score. The singer TomJones takes up the Pussycat theme and belts out Bacharach’s song, ‘What’s New Pussycat’, throughout the rest of thesequence. As must have been foreseen, Tom Jones singing the Pussycat theme became a hit record, and while the versionthat is played alongside the credits was adapted to synchronize with the visual, the tune was composed to standindependently as a chart song.

While the body of the acting credits are enlivened by animated putti in kitten masks, the technical credits are illustratedwith a variety of decorative devices which symbolise the roles of those behind the production. Among others, the credit ofthe costumiers, Fonssagrives and Tiel, is illustrated by a peacock with a rainbow-striped tail, Burt Bacharach's composingcredit is blown from trombone and Feldman’s credit as producer is written on playing cards which are plucked from insidea 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 Feldman’s opening credit. At the very end of thetitles Donner’s credit turns on its side and a pair of white-gloved hands that have grown from the D and R of his nameappear to pull apart the image, which splits along a line of scrolling curves to reveal the opening scene of the movie.

What’s New Pussycat? was Williams’s first film as title designer. ‘It was scary,’ he recalled, ‘new stuff and no time to do it.’Williams’s approach to animation was consciously experimental, but he has admitted that he often discovered his so-called



‘innovations’ had all already been done in one form or another by pioneering animators of previous decades, such as thoseat Disney’s studio in its ‘Golden Age’. In producing the Pussycat sequence, Williams and his colleagues were, as far as theyknew, 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 didit. 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 Williamsminimised the need for drawing board animation by creating the effect of movement using polarised film and rotating itunder 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 alot of money those days, what it cost to make the titles, complete from first sketch to final edit, was probably not verysignificant as a proportion of the production costs of the film. Donner admitted that What’s New Pussycat? was not ‘donecheaply’ and it is unlikely that the film’s budget was less than $2 million. But the expensive actors and extravagant sets,rather than Williams’s 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 toemploy him in other areas of post-production. Williams was asked to adapt his designs for the title sequence of What’s NewPussycat? to be used in the film’s promotional campaign. While Williams did the original drawings and lettering design,and developed the device of putting caricatures of the film’s stars into a canoe/cat motif (fig.38), it was Frank Frazetta whodrew the finished art for the advertisements. In the process of transferring the designs from the animated openingsequence to static graphic material, Williams gave the elements he had used in the titles a more straightforwardcartoon/comic book feel, moving even further from his original visual source, Art Nouveau. One would be hard put torecognise even a trace of Aubrey Beardsley in posters offered to American and British movie theatres in the film’s pressbook. The different visual styles used by Williams in the opening sequence and the promotional campaign relate to oneanother through mannerist exaggeration. But, while the animated titles draw on hip graphic styles that would have beenrecognised by the young and fashionable, the posters and advertisements, using the widely read visual language of thecomic book caricature, were designed to have a broader appeal. In choosing Williams to create the film’s entire graphicpackage Feldman’s aim was not visual coherence. He almost certainly hoped that audiences would recognise elements fromthe advertisement within the title sequence, but his primary concern, rather than remaining faithful to the film’s dominantdesign concept, was to attract the widest possible audience to the box office. Williams was probably hired as a relativelycheap (being young and virtually unknown) and reliably talented illustrator, rather than as the generator of a Bass-styleoverall graphic concept.

While the style of Williams’s title sequence, if not his advertisements, is very similar to that of fashionable static graphicwork of the mid 1960s, Williams claims that he ‘never was interested much in current graphic movements’. The graphiclanguage of the What’s New Pussycat? titles can be related to the self-conscious revival of illustration among designerspractising in both Britain and America in the early 1960s. Although the work of illustrators like Ben Shahn and SaulSteinberg in America and Ronald Searle in Britain had remained consistently visible and popular in the late 1950s therehad been a frequently remarked-upon trend towards the use of photography over that period. Possibly in reaction to thistendency, in the early 1960s some designers had returned to illustration and by 1965 hand drawing had become associatedwith Pop graphic styles. This revival did not significantly counteract the movement towards photography, which by the late1960s was firmly established as the dominant means of illustration for advertising and packaging, but it did lead to somestriking 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 iseclectic - 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 therehas 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 theair.

Williams’s graphic work was eclectic in the manner that Glaser described. He emphasises the research behind his designsand while he drew on a host of visual sources claims to have been most influenced by the ‘great painters and Oriental art.’



Regarding himself as a fine artist, Williams was probably not self-conscious about making a break with the modernisthegemony over fashionable graphic styles. However the visual climate in which his psychedelic Art Nouveau graphics madewas an important contribution to the ‘chicest film ever made’ was created partly by designers who chose to look beyondformal modernism adopted by the previous generation. By the mid 1960s, modernist graphic design, having been adoptedby both governments and multinational corporations, had become a style of the establishment. As such it was effectivelydeprived of much of its power to express the sentiments of a generation of young people who were highly aware of beingpart of a distinctive youth culture. Nigel Whitley has argued that the term ‘Pop graphics’, rather than referring to a singlehomogeneous style, is a label for design which adopted and adapted multifarious graphic styles at will. In rejecting theconstraints of modernism, Pop designers created the visual language of the self-conscious younger generation. The ArtNouveau revival is understandable in the context of the magpie approach of Pop graphic designers. Spurred on by museumexhibitions of the work of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley, British designers took up the style to the extent thatQueen magazine was describing an ‘Art Nouveau fever’ in 1964.

By packaging What’s New Pussycat? in unmistakably hip retro-Art Nouveau graphics, Feldman and Donner weretargetting a young, fashion-conscious audience. In an interview given on the film’s release, Donner argued,

Its a film about people who, wherever they are in Europe, have come under the cultural influence of the mid-1960s; theyare mods to a lesser or greater degree. Part of mod culture is something that is intensely decorative, erotic, harkens back tothe styles, shapes and designs and many techniques of [the Art Nouveau] era. I think that it’s tradition. Then it was areaction against restriction - Isadora Duncan and all that - and Art Nouveau did that for another era. This is clearly why it’shappening today, as a reaction to what we had here in the fifties and forties.

While Donner in the same interview insisted ‘Gothic couldn’t be fashionable today’, implying that the style would not suitsociety’s 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 ArtNouveau 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 andfully 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 autopian vision of organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengagedunserious aesthete’s vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau - and about what the lens of Camp, whichblocks out content, is.

Sontag hints that, rather than because of any mood bridging the 1960s and the turn of the century, the extravagant ArtNouveau style suited the decade’s ‘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 the1960s. The Sunday colour supplements, first published in the early 1960s, were responsible for and responsive to designtrends throughout the decade. Used as a body of evidence, these magazines strongly support the thesis that there was nosingle fashionable style. Decorative traditions were adopted at will by those with an up-to-date ‘lifestyle’. However, themagazines published around 1965 do very strongly reflect the craze for Art Nouveau design. An awareness of the style isapparent both in the design of the magazine and the design promoted by the magazine. Like the film What’s NewPussycat?, these magazines demonstrate the close relationship between prevailing styles in two-dimensional and three-dimensional design in the period.

The schemes used to decorate the sets from the film could have been taken from Shirley Conran’s week by week ‘SimpleGirl’s Guide’ to interior decoration, which appeared in the Observer Magazine throughout 1965. Michael, the Peter O’Toolecharacter, who divides his split level studio flat with an elegant Japanese blind and hangs the ubiquitous Toulouse Lautrecposter on his wall, even has dreams that take place in the kind of modish black and white interiors that were promoted byConran’s column. Pauline Kael remarked upon the trend for decorating film sets with furnishings audiences might want tohave 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 willautomatically believe a film is ‘progressive and important’ if it is dressed up with ‘intellectually fashionable decor’. On thefilm’s release, Donner argued that What’s New Pussycat? dealt with important contemporary issues, suggesting that withinit he had used ‘the crutch of comedy to express something we feel very, very deeply.’ Possibly the film’s visual up-to-minute-ness was intended to persuade audiences of its thematic relevance.

But, whether the audiences were convinced or not, for all What’s New Pussycat’s? visual hipness, it is a film with a



hackneyed plot which it treats in a completely conventional way. The protagonist, though he was eventually played by anEnglishmen, is the standard post-Hemingway American in Paris and the ‘man as victim of his sexual urges’ theme had beenexplored in numerous Hollywood comedies of the 1950s. Even Peter Sellars’s psychiatrist could have been based on asimilar character appearing in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch made a decade earlier. In general reviews of Pussycatwere very cool: the film’s sumptuous design appears to have been unable to sell its flimsy derivative plot to the critics. Thereviewer from Variety, having admitted the film’s 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 mytitles being better than the movie. I’m counting on you to maintain that tradition’. But when reviewers did suggest that thetitles were ‘one of the best things’ or even ‘the best thing’ about the movie he might not have been amused. The directorTony Richardson, who asked Williams to animate the titles for The Charge of the Light Brigade three years later, suffered asimilar fate. While the reviewer from Mc Calls remarked that Williams’s animation ‘was so brilliant it deserves to be seenfor itself’, Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker argued, ‘Its too bad Richardson didn’t lease the Charge itself to Williams’and the critic from The Scotsman went as far as suggesting that the animation made ‘Richardson’s film seem worse than itwas by comparison’. By the time The Charge of the Light Brigade was made in 1968, animated graphic titles, from being ararity in the mid 1950s, had become a standard feature of films with fashionable pretensions. ‘It became the thing to do andkicked off sort of an industry’, Bass said, remarking on the trend. But possibly the reaction to Richardson’s movie in the late1960s left film-makers wary of the device. By the early 1970s films were most often titled with low key typographysuperimposed over the introductory scene, a style which arguably remains the convention in the early 1990s. Adversecritical 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 titlesmight put the rest of his film in the shade, ‘Mine. I think they’re marvellous, so inventive.’ Donner, whose role as auteur ofWhat’s New Pussycat? was tightly circumscribed by the dictatorial Feldman, was anxious to be known as responsible forthe film’s 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 whosedecision 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. What’s NewPussycat? was aimed at a young European and American audience who, through exposure to advertising, television andmagazines, were believed to have become visual sophisticates.

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23/08/12 18:41Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 9 Conclusion by Emily King

Página 1 de 3http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_9_conclusion#


4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è ^ #IH=FOMCIHby Emily King

The conclusion of Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses 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 filmmaking. In purely practical terms, films made by independent production companies were likely to have lengthy creditsequences. The ‘increasing clout of Hollywood’s labour unions’ has been cited by some as largely responsible for thedevelopment of the title sequence in the late 1950s. Technicians, who would have remained anonymous if on the payroll ofa studio, contractually demanded on-screen recognition. As well as getting longer, more attention was being paid to the textof credit sequences. Both title size and substance became the subjects of heated negotiation. In the 1950s and 60s new titleswere constantly being invented to describe various roles within film-making: for example cameramen became directors ofphotography and set decorators became art directors, who then refashioned themselves as production designers. Even afterthe wording of a title had been painstakingly decided upon, lawyers were reputed to have ‘come in later to takemeasurements’. In the light of this heightened attention to the content of the credits, the concentration by some upon theirform 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 film’s opening scene. By the 1950s this was unthinkable. A review in Daily Variety of The SevenYear Itch reported that Saul Bass’s main title for that film, ‘a series of hinged and perambulatory patches on a multi-colored field’ led one member of the audience to remark, ‘Credits arranged this way are interesting - you don’t have to readthem.’ This was, joked Variety, ‘the sort of crack which gives New Yorkers a bad name in Hollywood where screen creditscome first before the wife and the trust fund.’ So, while it was attention to credit content that had led in some cases to therevolutionising of credit form, ironically this led to sequences which some might have believed did not take the issue ofcredit seriously enough.

Also, through working within the tight budgets characteristic of most independent film-making, producer/directors wererequired to pay more attention to the two-dimensionality of film and so might have become more aware of the screen as agraphic 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 howmuch money they needed before they began touting for investment. Possibly the representation of screen activity on paperencouraged some film-makers to consider more seriously not only relationship of word and image on screen, but also theuse of interesting camera angles to frame unusual shots. While the tension between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional natures of film had concerned the avant garde since the early twentieth century, until the 1950s almost allmainstream 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, thegraphically adventurous title sequence was used by those film-makers to signal their artistic autonomy. Preminger, almostcertainly influenced by the craze among North American corporations for adopting modern graphic identities, was able tocreate a cohesive image for what was otherwise a disparate body of work through Bass’s designs. The appearance of eye-catching modern graphics at the start of Preminger’s films not only implied to audiences that they were viewing asophisticated product, but also reminded them of the controlling presence behind what they saw on screen. Similarly,Hitchcock’s aspirations are laid bare by the title sequences of his films. In trying to be important both within and beyondthe mainstream, Hitchcock self-consciously introduced ‘art’ into his films, a strategy for which he has been equally praisedand criticised. By referring to the avant garde, Bass’s title sequences contributed to Hitchcock’s campaign for cultural




recognition.

But eye-catching title sequences do not only reflect film-makers’ desire for recognition, they became part of their fight forsurvival. 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-maker’s primary task. Professionalgraphic designers had been working for television companies since the 1950s, designing opening sequences andadvertisements. 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, almostcertainly due to the conservatism among those in charge of film distribution and advertising, the Hollywood poster formatwas only very occasionally, and extremely reluctantly, discarded in the 1950s and still remained dominant in theadvertising campaigns for major releases throughout the next decade, there is some evidence that by the mid-60s attitudestowards film-promotion had begun to change. The modified bid to create a coherent visual scheme for What’s NewPussycat?, which began on the poster, ran through the credit sequence and on into the film, suggests a faith in up-to-datedesign within the film industry. In 1965 film packaging and promotion remained haphazard by today’s standards, but theadoption of graphically interesting title sequences by ‘movie moguls’ such as Charles Feldman is evidence of a new beliefthat 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 hadbecome ubiquitous in films with fashionable pretensions, for example Blow Up (1966) which opens with cut-out typethrough which audiences can glimpse cat-walk models, or Barbarella (1967) in which the titles flutter around the film’sundressing 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, likehis fellow designers in the 1950s, sought to uphold the universal values of good modern design by transcending fads, evenhis title sequences were sometimes dismissed as accessories. As early as 1958 a reviewer of Bonjour Tristesse remarkedthat the film, ‘with its Francoise Sagan label, Saul Bass credits and St Tropez sun-tan, is nothing if not fashionable.’ Just asthe meaning of ‘modern’ slipped subtly from implying progressive to meaning simply up-to-date, so the implications of amodern graphic title sequence changed. While in the mid 1950s, Preminger might have believed that he was establishingimportant film-making precedents, the Bond films aimed at being nothing more than of their time. In the 1960s moderngraphic design of the Chicago school practised by Robert Brownjohn was just another one of a range of viable graphicmodes. As such, it jostled for attention among a range of erstwhile counter-cultural graphic idioms which had beenrepackaged and sold to the mainstream. The newly wealthy, self-conscious youth, which made up a large part of any filmspotential 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, theirdemise being the inescapable outcome of their success. But film-audiences would not only have become bored with screengraphics in movie theatres. As commercial television stations thrived, small-screen graphics became increasinglycommonplace. By the late 1960s the glamour of television had become tarnished and it had begun to be seen as a socialevil. So while film-makers had adopted the techniques of television at the beginning of the decade, by the end they mighthave 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 languagefilms. When in 1969 Bass remarked upon ‘a great splurge of experimentation in film’, he was almost certainly talking aboutthe films that have since been grouped together under the title ‘New American Cinema’. The American-ness of these filmswas partly reconstructed from homages by the French New Wave to Hollywood films of previous decades. The Americannational identity as perceived on film through European eyes was reclaimed by American film-makers. In both Bonnie andClyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) the conventional cinematic view of rural America is fully exploited, but consciousnessof the use of cliche is heightened when, through unusual editing or the framing of bizarre shots, expectations based oncinematic norms are thwarted. These techniques are characteristically filmic and while Bonnie and Clyde does have a veryelegant title sequence, in which old photos appear on screen to the sound of a clicking shutter, it would be fair to say thatthe relationship of word and image on screen was not of particular concern to those who made the film. However, attentionto the two-dimensional nature of film, betrayed through the skilful composition of screen images, is apparent in this andmany of the other movies gathered under the ‘New American Film’ banner. Possibly the most important long-term impactof 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 thelate 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



became the dominant mode of movie titling, nor were they ever completely displaced. From the late 1960s until now therehas been huge variety in styles of movie titling, from Woody Allen’s theatre-style ‘cards’ to the innovative computeranimation in films such as Superman (1978). Rather than either reflecting a shift in the conventional relationship betweenHollywood and modern design, or amounting to a new element in the vocabulary of the mainstream film-maker, the titlessequences addressed in this thesis were part of the widespread changes in film-making which were eventually to render anysingle Hollywood formula redundant.

A sharp decline in the production of Westerns, possibly the most formulaic of all films, coincided with the fashion foranimated graphic opening sequences. In 1950 34% of all films released in North America were Westerns, but by 1960 theyaccounted for only 18% of releases, which, because of declining film production, represents a fall in the number of 130 tomerely 25. This is not surprising, ‘fancy’ title sequences were part of a general search by film-makers for new modes whichwould be appropriate to the late twentieth century. Hollywood film-making in the studio era had been responsible forcreating and perpetuating American mythology. In the 1960s political uncertainty deprived the American public of much oftheir faith in those myths. The title sequences discussed in this thesis, as well as being a reflection of the increasingautonomy of film-makers who were working in an ever more harsh commercial climate, might also be significant asresponses 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 ofmoving 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 lighton what it precedes. While design historians must recognise that proper analyses of the role of graphic design in filmdemands a catholic approach and an eclectic methodology, it should be recognised within film studies that movies are mostcharacteristically wholes constructed of many diverse parts.

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Jan, 16 May 2007, 5:09 AM Permalink

Well researched and informative information regarding the role ofgraphic designers in the film industry. A good read for someone wantingto start a career in this industry.

douglas byers, 2 February 2009, 10:35 PM Permalink

Vary informative, not much is known about the how's and why's of thegraphic designer and the film industry.

Despite the non-recognition of their contribution to the art of film, wehave also saved some historical representations of their work atwww.mgm-movie-titles-and-credits.com.

We hope that our website will expand and add to the acknowlegment ofthe graphic designer in the making of film title design.

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23/08/12 18:41Typotheque: Taking Credit: Film title sequences, 1955-1965 / 10 Bibliography by Emily King

Página 1 de 4http://www.typotheque.com/articles/taking_credit_film_title_sequences_1955-1965_10_bibliography


4;ECHA #L?>CNÄ &CFG NCNF? M?KO?H=?M} V^ZZÇV^[Z è VU "C<FCIAL;JBSby Emily King

The bibliography for Emily King’s dissertation for the V&A/RCA M.A. Course in the History of Design. The dissertationfocuses 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 GraphicDesign 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, ‘What’s 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., Picasso’s 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 ofChicago 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 Man’s Son, Simon & Schuster, GB, 1988

ELLEY, David, The Epic Film, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc, London, 1984




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.), Picasso’s 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



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 CaliforniaPress, 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, Hitchcock’s 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



Vertigo, Paramount Pictures, 1958

Walk On The Wild Side, Famous Artists Productions, U.S., 1961

What’s 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

What’s 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

typotheque taking credit film title sequences, 1955-1965

Documents