Saul and Elaine Bass

 

Research into Saul and Elaine Bass

Saul and Elaine Bass

Born in New York in 1920, Saul Bass was an iconic American graphic designer, and filmmaker who primarily designed opening title sequences and film posters over an impressive 40 years, working alongside him throughout this long career (and of course often overlooked) was his wife Elaine Bass, a title designer and filmmaker born in New York in 1927 whom he married in 1961.

Their iconic style

Originally, opening titles to films were widely dismissed as wholly unimportant and were often projected onto the closed curtains of a theatre, only opening for the first real scene of the film. 

However, Saul and Elaine Bass soon introduced a new and distinctive style to designing opening titles, completely revolutionising this unique art form for the rest of cinema. They introduced their signature "kinetic type" made up of bold block fonts moving across the screen in visually engaging patterns, usually accompanied by images or animations, resulting in a quirky minimalist style that was aesthetically intriguing and effectively set the respective tone for the rest of the film.

Most distinctive work

The project that launched Saul into widely regarded success in the industry was his work on Otto Preminger's 1955 'The Man with the Golden Arm', a film centered around the then controversial and taboo topic of drug addiction, which Saul was challenged to create a symbol for that artistically captured its intensity that he greatly succeeded at, making a respected name for himself.

For this project, he designed a single image of a jagged and distorted silhouette of an arm to represent the theme of the film, it simultaneously implied a theme of addiction as it alluded to the harsh realities of intravenous drug use, but also strayed away from being too explicit and sensationalist for shock value. He kept this theme for the opening titles as their minimalist yet meaningful sentiment hinted at the film's topic, but also left plenty of space for questioning and curiosity.

The pair then went on to work with Otto Preminger again on Anatomy of a Murder (1959), as well as an extensive list of talented and important names in film history, notably including;

• Alfred Hitchcock, designing the poster and opening sequence to Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960)

• In the same year, working for Stanley Kubrick on the titles to Spartacus (1960), and later creating the iconic poster for The Shining (1980)

• Robert Wise and Jerome Robins on the uncharacteristic end credits to West Side Story (1961)

• Martin Scorcese on multiple occasions, such as Goodfellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991), with mainly Elaine designing the unique and romantic titles to The Age of Innocence (1993), and finally Casino (1995) as Saul's final project before his death in the following year at the age of 75.

Opening Sequence - Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Notably the Bass' second project working with Otto Preminger, Anatomy of a Murder is a 1959 courtroom drama/crime film produced and directed by Preminger based off of the novel of the same name by John D. Voelker, starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and Eve Arden among others. 

The plot follows a lawyer defending a soldier on trial for the murder of an inkeeper, whom the soldier claimed he killed in a fit of insanity after he allegedly assaulted his wife.

 

Title Credits to Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

This title sequence is amongst my favourites of the Bass' works due to its sheer simplicity and clever efficiency, proving to offer a smooth introduction that easily sums up the film's themes with a very minimal concept.

This sequence opens on the director's title, crediting Preminger in block white capitals against a uniform grey background, this is then covered step by step with the illustration of a deceased victim in a crime scene, coloured in solid black. The victim's body parts all drawn separately to one another and appearing in parts, with the film's contrastingly bright white title promptly displayed across the body in a rough and uneven font - the image of the whole body along with the title and director's name essentially representing the film as a whole;

The rest of the opening is made up of jarring cuts between zoomed in sections of the dismembered body next to other credits - such as a single leg with Lee Remick's name followed by the other leg with Ben Gazarra's, then sliding off the screen to cut to another body part with another name.

This could reflect how, similarly to a whole body being made up of separate body parts, a whole film is made up of several credits all offering their individual contributions. So if the entire body represents the finished film credited to Preminger, the broken down limbs would be the rest of the cast and crew's specific efforts that came together to result in the final product.

That simple idea clearly presents the plot's themes of murder and mystery with the single image of a dead body, yet the very vague and simple style of the image hints that the focus isn't on the horror of the murder itself, but rather on its study as the zooms on its limbs mirrors how a detective would inspect the body and attempt to (literally) piece together the real story behind it.

Saul and Elaine Bass' minimalist take on this opening is overall very impressively visually engaging as it is made of just three distinct elements; the flat grey background, the jagged and fully black illustration of the dead body, and the white block capitals of the credits. These three incredibly basic colours are somehow surprisingly effective as they clearly contrast against each other and allow for no distractions to shine the focus on the titles, whose simple font works smoothly with this style and remains very prominent against the darker shades behind it, as well as leaving the spotlight on the more uneven and quirkier font of the film's name.

The iconic simplicity of this sequence went on to inspire many other films' openings, such as Catch me if you can (2002) or even Monsters, Inc. (2001).