Saul Bass (1920-1996) was an outstanding graphic designer, title designer, filmmaker, photographer, and illustrator. His expertise masterfully ranged among static two-dimensional posters (Carmen Jones, Vertigo, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games), corporate identities (Continental Airlines, Minolta, United Airlines, AT&T, Girl Scouts of the USA), packaging (Quaker, Wesson, Alcoa), sophisticated animated title sequences (The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and Casino, just to mention a few), and directing short and feature films (The Searching Eye, Why Man Creates), which respectively earned him a Lion of San Marco from the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar.
His title sequences expand from the function of crediting the cast and crew. They complement the movie by piquing the audience’s interest while entertaining them with visually stunning motion graphics. In his title sequences, utilizing a variety of techniques such as paper cut-outs, live action, animation, type design, and montages, he exquisitely demonstrates a strong sense of typography, design, rhythm, pace, composition, and color theory.
It’s not a surprise that his graphic design education was imparted by the Hungarian-born designer, painter, and educator György Kepes, who worked with Lazló Moholy-Nagy in Berlin in the 1930s and was deeply influenced by the Berlin-based Gestalt psychologists, the Bauhaus design theory, and Russian Constructivism typography.
Saul Bass created title sequences over more than 40 years for directors such as Otto Preminger (whose film Carmen Jones is the first film in which the designer Saul Bass earns an on-screen credit), Alfred Hitchcock, and Martin Scorsese. Here’s how Martin Scorsese describes his work: “Bass was instrumental in redefining the visual language of title sequences. His graphic compositions in movement, coupled with the musical score, function as a prologue to the movie; setting the tone, establishing the mood, and foreshadowing the action. His titles are not simply identification tags but pieces that are integral to the work as a whole. When his work comes up on the screen, the movie truly begins"
San Francisco, California:
North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1959, follows advertising executive Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) in a series of intricate adventures during which he is mistaken for a government agent who is supposedly trying to smuggle microfilm containing government information.
The film opens with Bernard Herrmann’s score, the fandango. As the music builds, diagonal and vertical gray lines enter parallel to each other in the screen at an irregular rate. While intersecting, they form a grid over a pale green solid background color. Then type comes onto the screen from the top and bottom frame edges and its baseline comes to rest on one of the diagonal lines. After this first title card, a few more appear (three single title cards for the main talent, then the director’s title card), and finally the type comes onto the screen from the top and bottom frame edges to create the main title card: North by Northwest. This sequence is a fantastic example of how a main title, if designed by a skilled hand, can become and be used as a logo.
Shortly after the main title card exits the screen and a multiple title card enters frame, the pale green background dissolves to reveal the glass façade of a New York office building. Both the diagonal and vertical lines introduced in the first title cards (and now dissolved into the building shot) exactly match the structural lines of the building that is framed at a slight angle. Its windows reflect the busy streetscape, and the shots that follow portray some of the details of these streets (people exiting buildings, entering the subway, crossing the streets, and one person missing the bus—Hitchcock’s cameo!). If you look closely, even at the secondary title cards, you can notice the details of the hands of a skilled designer, such as one title card elegantly and subtly exiting the screen on the right while the camera pans left, giving the impression of the titles being embedded in the scene. Even Alfred Hitchcock’s title card exits screen right when he enters screen left, as though his entrance pushes away his own title while he tries to catch the bus.
Psycho (1960) opens with a full string orchestra playing music composed yet again by Bernard Herrmann, the New York-born composer who overall in his career collaborated with Hitchcock on nine films. “I felt that I was able to complement the black-and-white photography of the film with a black-and-white sound.
On a solid gray background, horizontal black lines alternate their entrance in the frame from the right, creating a regular ruled pattern and bringing with them a couple of horizontal sections of a dissected type. With a surprising and subtle play on foreground/background visual illusion, the gray horizontal lines exit screen left, creating a black background and leaving the full stage of the first title card: “Alfred Hitchcock." Another set of gray lines enter screen right, then exit again to the right, bringing with them and leaving on-screen the dissected pieces of the main title card: Psycho. After a couple of perfectly synced movements of the main title that emphasize their cuts, the type leaves the screen and other lines are introduced, this time vertical. The title sequence further develops with alternating horizontal and vertical lines, first inviting the type on-screen and then pushing it away to clear the way for the next title card. The result is an increasingly elaborate articulation of these seemingly innocent, but at the same time very jittery and nervous, lines dominating the screen.
While the lines evoke prison bars, cityscapes, order, and structure, their onscreen behavior and movement suggest jitteriness, nervousness, and irregularity. The dissected type in three horizontal rows evokes how something considered one unique, solid, and immovable entity can indeed be split, shattered, and dissected. It seems to allude to the fact that appearances can be misleading; after taking a first look at the movie and going back to watch the title sequence once again, we see that the type is a magnificent symbolic interpretation of the psychological state of the main character, Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins): split, shattered, schizophrenic, and incoherent.
“In those days," Bass said about his work, “I liked strong, clear, structural forms against which to do things. I liked giving more zip to Psycho because it was not only the name of the picture but a word that means something. I was trying to make it more frenetic, and I liked the idea of images suggesting clues coming together" (Rebello, Stephen, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho; New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1998).
For this title sequence, Bass worked with Harold Adler, a hand-lettering artist who worked for the National Screen Service and who also worked on the title sequences of Vertigo and North by Northwest; animation director William Hurtz; and cameraman/production man Paul Stoleroff. The lines we see in this title sequence were actually six-foot-long aluminum bars that were sprayed black and animated on a table at different speeds and positions. The camera was rigged on top of the table, looking down.
Adler described the process: “We worked on a large white painted plywood board with push-pins to guide the bars. The bars had to follow a straight line and couldn’t wiggle. Paul [Stoleroff] and I manually pushed in each bar at predetermined distances and speeds. Each bar was precisely timed by numbers of frames per second, called ‘counts.’ Each bar had to be pushed in and shot separately. Once a bar had gone across the screen, it was tied down. There were lots of retakes because they’d come in crooked …"
Bass utilized two sets of sans-serif fonts in this title sequence, Venus Bold Extended and News Gothic Bold, all in capital. Each title card was recreated on reverse (white type on black) photostats (early projector photocopier machines that photographed documents and reproduced them onto sensitized photographic paper), which were cut into three horizontal parts. To add motion, Adler said, “I moved the top section [of the title letters] in one direction and shot it at a certain speed, moved the bottom in another direction at another speed, and the middle part at another speed. So you were really getting three images, each one a third of the height of the lettering, coming in at different speeds. For the last frame, we popped on the word Psycho, which was the intact photostat by itself. For the other big titles, like ‘Directed by Alfred Hitchcock,’ I used News Gothic Bold typeface and we did the same three-cut technique as for the title of the movie."
