Saul Bass

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 designs. When film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US cinematic screens in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain before titles". Until Saul Bass, 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. The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero, a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra, to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it, rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face, as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster. That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. If it was not for Saul Bass I highly doubt that many of the film titles you see today would have been so cleverly put together if it was not for his great past work.

From looking at the work which Saul Bass came up with its given my group and I the inspiration to really go in depth with our design of the title opening and names. It has proven to me also that film making has a lot of processes to go through and does not only come down to the filing but initial preperation and excessive amounts of meaning.