Saul Bass

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Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 - April 25, 1996) was a graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences, which is thought of as the best such work ever seen.

During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, and the text racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the United Nations building in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

Saul Bass designed the 6th AT&T Bell System logo, that at one point achieved a 93 percent recognition rate in the United States. He also designed the AT&T "globe" logo for AT&T after the break up of the Bell System.

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[edit] Early career

Saul Bass was born in May 8, 1920, in New York City. He studied at the Art Student's League in Manhattan until attending classes with Gyorgy Kepes at Brooklyn College. He began his time in Hollywood doing print work for film ads, until he collaborated with filmmaker Otto Preminger to design the movie poster for his 1954 film Carmen Jones. Preminger was so impressed with Bass’s work that he asked him to produce the title sequence as well. This was when Bass first saw the opportunity to create something more than a title sequence, but to create something which would ultimately enhance the experience of the audience and contribute to the mood and the theme of the movie within the opening moments. Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a film.

[edit] Movie title sequences

Bass became notorious in the industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The subject of the film was a jazz musician's struggle to overcome his heroin addiction, a taboo subject in the mid-'50s. Bass decided to create a controversial title sequence to match the film's controversial subject. He chose the arm as the central image, as the arm is a strong image relating to drug addiction. The titles featured an animated, black paper cut-out arm of a heroin addict. As he expected, it caused quite a sensation.

For Alfred Hitchcock, Bass provided effective, memorable title sequences for North by Northwest, Vertigo, working with John Whitney, and Psycho. It was this kind of innovative, revolutionary work that made Bass a revered graphic designer. His later work with Martin Scorsese saw him move away from the optical techniques that he had pioneered and move into computerised titles, from which he produced the title sequence for Casino.

He designed title sequences for 40 years, for films as diverse as Spartacus (1960), The Victors (1963), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and Casino (1995). He also designed title sequences for films such as Goodfellas (1990), Doc Hollywood (1991), Cape Fear (1991) and The Age of Innocence (1993), all of which feature new and innovative methods of production and startling graphic design.

[edit] Logos and other designs

1971 logo for Quaker Oats
1971 logo for Quaker Oats

Bass was responsible for some of the best-remembered, most iconic logos in North America, including both the Bell Telephone logo (1969) and successor AT&T globe (1983). Other well-known designs were *Continental Airlines (1968), Dixie (1969) and *United Way (1972). Later, he would produce logos for a number of Japanese companies as well. He also designed the Student Academy Award for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.[1]

Selected logos by Saul Bass and respective dates (note that links shown point to articles on the entities themselves, and not necessarily to the logos):

[edit] Movie posters

All of Bass's posters had a distinctive style. After his first film project Carmen Jones, he frequently collaborated with Otto Preminger as well as with Alfred Hitchcock and others. His work spanned five decades and inspired numerous other designers.

[edit] 1950s

[edit] 1960s

[edit] 1970s

  • Such Good Friends (1971)
  • Rosebud (1975)
  • Bass on Titles (1977)
  • Brothers (1977)
  • Notes on the Popular Arts (1977)
  • The Human Factor (1979)

[edit] 1980s

  • The Shining (1980)
  • Very Happy Alexander (1980)
  • The Solar Film (1981)

[edit] Unused poster designs

He received an unintentionally backhanded tribute in 1995, when Spike Lee's film Clockers was promoted by a poster that was strikingly similar to Bass's 1959 work for Preminger's film Anatomy of a Murder. Sims claimed that it was made as an homage, but Bass regarded it as theft.[2] The cover art for the White Stripes' single The Hardest Button to Button is clearly inspired by the Bass poster for Man With the Golden Arm.

[edit] Filmmaker

Bass famously claimed[citation needed] that he directed the highlight of Psycho, the tightly edited shower-murder sequence, though many on set at the time (including star Janet Leigh) dispute this contention. Bill Krohn's recent work of scholarship on Hitchcock's production of Psycho(Hitchcock At Work, Phaidon Press), however, notes that Bass in his capacity as a graphic artist did have a significant influence on the visual design of that famous scene. Hitchcock had asked Bass to produce storyboards for this scene and a later murder scene(which was truncated). For this, Bass received a credit as 'Pictorial Consultant as well as Title Designer.

Krohn noted that Bass's 48 drawings introduced key aspects of the final scene, namely the fact that the attacker would be seen as a silhouette, the shower curtain torn down, an high angle shot of the murder scene with the curtain rod used as a barrier and also the famous shot of the transition from the drainage hole of the bathtub to Marion Crane's dead eye which as Krohn notes is reminscent of the iris titles of Vertigo. However Krohn also refutes Bass' claims that he directed the scene proving Hitchcock's presence on the set throughout the shooting of that scene conclusively. The shower scene was shot with two cameras at least part of the time and Hitchcock working from the paradigms set up by the storyboards would trim the shot footage into a proper montage that he believed would produce the right emotions on the audience. Hitchcock showed a rough cut of the scene during production to his editor George Tomasini and even brought a Movieola on the set to gauge the exact sequence of scenes which ultimately was shaped according to his decision and approval.

In 1964, he directed a short film titled The Searching Eye and shown during the 1964 New York World's Fair, coproduced with Sy Wexler. He later made a short documentary film called Why Man Creates, which won an Academy Award in 1968.

In 1974, he made his only feature length film as a director, the visually splendid though little-known[3] science fiction film Phase IV.

[edit] Quotes

"My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it."[4]
"Design is thinking made visual."

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.oscars.org/aboutacademyawards/awards/saa.html Student Academy Award
  2. ^ Entertainment Weekly 1995
  3. ^ http://www.notcoming.com/reviews.php?id=457 Folm review for Phase IV. Accessed February 27, 2007
  4. ^ Haskins, Pamela. "Saul, Can You Make Me a Title?": Interview with Saul Bass. Film Quarterly, Autumn 1996:12-13

[edit] External links