Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (Screen Classics)
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 0813147182
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Iconic graphic designer and Academy Award–winning filmmaker Saul Bass (1920–1996) defined an innovative era in cinema. His title sequences for films such as Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) introduced the idea that opening credits could tell a story, setting the mood for the movie to follow. Bass's stylistic influence can be seen in popular Hollywood franchises from the Pink Panther to James Bond, as well as in more contemporary works such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) and television's Mad Men.
The first book to examine the life and work of this fascinating figure, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design explores the designer's revolutionary career and his lasting impact on the entertainment and advertising industries. Jan-Christopher Horak traces Bass from his humble beginnings as a self-taught artist to his professional peak, when auteur directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, and Martin Scorsese sought him as a collaborator. He also discusses how Bass incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modern art in his work, presenting them in a new way that made them easily recognizable to the public.
This long-overdue book sheds light on the creative process of the undisputed master of film title design―a man whose multidimensional talents and unique ability to blend high art and commercial imperatives profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, designers, and advertisers.
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Bass called it, they were always consciously developed and executed. Saul Bass’s designs have been held in high esteem for decades by his peers, as well as by specialists in other fields, yet the time is ripe for a critical reevaluation of all of Bass’s work. Certainly, his designs were valued in the commercial marketplace, where he commanded fees that might have priced him out of the Hollywood market, at least until he made a comeback in the late 1980s. Now, more than fifteen years after the
promotion to partner. The same sense of aesthetic minimalism that had influenced Bass’s posters and graphic designs now came into play in the design of corporate logos for United Airlines, AT&T, United Way, Alcoa, Dixie Paper, Rockwell International, Quaker Oats, Lawry’s Seasoning, the Girl Scouts, the YWCA, and Warner Communications. Many of these logos are still instantly recognizable by most ordinary Americans. Bass earned large sums for these corporate logos and for the corporate identity
became Hollywood’s most prominent designer precisely because he jealously guarded his brand—a brand so tied up with his own personality that Bass/Yager & Associates was not sustainable after the designer’s demise. Creating Saul Bass In interviews, Saul Bass liked to say, “I always knew I was going to be Saul Bass, commercial artist.”13 But what did that mean, and how did it work? In an article on creativity, Bass related a funny anecdote about his Jewish mother, who asked him what he did for a
a cross with Preminger’s credit as producer and director, which appears on the horizontal axis. The drawing, unlike the previous abstract shapes, was accomplished with no more than a few bold strokes of oil paint or chalk, recalling Picasso in its utter simplicity, with echoes of so-called primitive art as filtered through the early-twentieth-century French modernists. The same image is repeated over the end credit, this time with the tear in purple-red. Bass’s Bonjour Tristesse poster of the
titles, which, ironically, were built not around the theme of fire but of water—specifically, footage of the surf.87 Bass and Preminger may have been thinking about illegal immigrants to Palestine landing on the beach, which is in fact the way the film begins. Bass’s Exodus logo plays off his Spartacus logo, designed only months earlier for that film’s September 1960 release. The Spartacus logo, which was used only sparingly on posters and other publicity, features the silhouette of a Roman
