Portrait of Saul Bass by Harry Verstappen.
Posts for Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Making dismembered body parts cool since 1959. The opening titles to Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, by Saul Bass.
If any one person can be credited with having introduced the idea of “high concept”—the single striking image or pithy phrase that immediately sums up a creative work—to the movie industry, it would have to be Saul Bass.
From Philip Kemp’s short biography of Saul Bass.
North By Northwest (1959)
- Roger Thornhill: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
- Eve Kendall: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
- Roger Thornhill: She might find the idea objectionable.
- Eve Kendall: Then again, she might not.
Design is thinking made visual.
SAUL BASS (1920-1996) was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.
When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans — “Projectionists: pull curtain before titles”.
Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film. Read more.
A genius mashup of Saul Bass and Star Wars, created for a school project by Brian Hilmers. The Remastered Deluxe Edition video response adds a little George Lucas “magic”.
An interactive image gallery presenting title credits for each of Saul Bass’s film projects, from Carmen Jones (1954) to Casino (1995), with a brief overview of each project.
2,723 Plays
An excerpt from Archie Boston’s documentary on Saul Bass, in which the designer talks about collaborating with his wife Elaine and about getting paid to play with toys.
Vertigo is a free Tumblr theme by Matthew Buchanan, inspired by the design work of the late Saul Bass and released 24 June 2008 under Creative Commons.
To install the theme on your Tumblr site, copy the contents of vertigo-theme-1-2.txt into the Custom HTML field of the Customize area on your Tumblr Dashboard. (If this doesn’t make sense, Richard Dunlop-Walters has a tutorial that explains the process visually.)
The theme includes a single custom colour named “Accent”, which allows you to change all the orange elements to a different shade (look in Customize under “Colors” once the theme is installed). Bright colours work best with the dark background.
