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Casino, Spartacus, Psychosis … Saul Bass, the Man Who Revolutionized Film Credits – Cinema News

Posted on the 08 May 2020 by Thiruvenkatam Chinnagounder @tipsclear

Just 100 years ago, the immense American designer Saul Bass was born, a genius and precursor who revolutionized the creation of film credits, to the point of raising him to the rank of art. And whose influence is still felt today.

Casino, Spartacus, Psychosis … Saul Bass, the man who revolutionized film credits – Cinema News

"Saul Bass. Before I even met him, before we worked together, he was already a legend in my eyes. His design work, for film credits, creation of company logos, and advertising posters, defined his era. In their essences, his creations infused and distilled the poetry and modernity of the industrial world. His works gave crystallized images, as expressions of what we were and where we were going, towards this future who was waiting for us. His creations were images we could dream of. And that is always the case ... " This is how Martin Scorsese, filmmaker par excellence, expressed himself in a reference work released in 2011, Saul Bass: A Life In Film & Design. An event book, since it was the first book ever devoted to this graphic designer of genius and inventor of modern credits, still too little known to the general public, disappeared in 1996 at the age of 75. An artist whose creativity and work are still felt today.

Born in New York in the Bronx in 1920 in a modest household, Saul Bass showed drawing skills very early. At 15, he already took painting lessons at Art Students League; a prestigious institution which was born in 1875. Then he continued his studies at Brooklyn College from 1938. It was during this time that, under the influence of his professor György Kepes, he passionately discovered the Bauhaus movement, born in 1919, which influences Design and architecture - and will lay the foundations of modern architecture -. As well as the Russian constructivism movement; an artistic current born at the beginning of the XXth century, which concentrates on the rigorous geometrical composition, associating simple geometrical forms, of type circles or triangles, to create skeletal structures in three dimensions. Two artistic movements which will greatly influence Saul Bass thereafter.

After a few internships in various Manhattan design studios, he began his career as a freelance advertising graphic designer, then moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and founded his own studio, Saul Bass & Associates, in 1950. It was there that he began to put his talent to the service of Hollywood, creating advertising campaigns for films by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and productions by Howard Hughes. In 1956, he made a decisive encounter for his personal as well as artistic life: he hired Elaine Makatura as assistant, whom he ended up marrying in 1961. The two worked tirelessly until the end.

Generics, a means of conditioning the public

The artistic turning point - and the notoriety that goes with it - comes shortly after his meeting with the filmmaker Otto Preminger. The latter entrusted him with the creation of the poster for his film Carmen Jones. It is a first revolution: the artist uses a graphic symbol, in this case a rose wrapped in a flame, where the posters of the time were still content to take pictures of the film. Then Preminger asked him to take care of the creation of the poster as well as the production of the credits of his other upcoming film, The Man with the Golden Arm, in 1955. The evocative force of the visual designed by Saul Bass (a stylized arm representing the talents of musician and poker player of the main character played by Frank Sinatra), as well as his addiction to heroin) is such that at the time of the premiere of the film in New York, only the logo is displayed, the title is superfluous.

Rest of the credits. Before Saul Bass, the credits of films were only obligatory prologues, shelling like rosaries the lists of names of artistic talents who collaborated on the work. A legal obligation; Nothing more, nothing less. It is only gradually that certain directors will entrust the task of creating credits to artistic directors. When Otto Preminger entrusts this to Saul Bass, the credits pass from the status of legal obligation to one of the first fields of experimentation with the moving image, or Motion Design.

Below, the opening credits of the film "The Man with the Golden Arm", and his famous jazzy music by Elmer Bernstein ...

He also had a very clear vision of his work: "For the average audience, the credits tell them that there are only three minutes left to eat popcorn. I take this" dead "period and try to do more than just get rid of the names that moviegoers don't like. I aim to set the audience up for what is going to happen; I make them impatient. My first thoughts on what a title can do was set the mood and the underlying core of the film's story, d "express this story metaphorically. I saw the sequence of the credits as a means of conditioning the audience, so that when the film really started, the viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it" he said.

Bass has a very refined approach to graphic design, with a modern and nervous style. In his creations, the lines are broken or straight, in recurring ways. Applied to film credits, his sense of composition and typography, his preference for suggestion, and his attraction for geometric abstraction, work wonders. In Autopsy of a murder, in 1959, Saul Bass takes the title of the film in the most literal sense of the term, presenting each member of the team next to a part of a disassembled body, and does not reveal the whole body only when the name of the director appears; in this case Otto Preminger. A fruitful collaboration, moreover: they will make ten films together.

His work obviously caught the eye of Alfred Hitchcock, who entrusted him with the creation of the credits for some of his most famous works. The extraordinary opening credits of Cold Sweats, to start with. Creation offering a perfect combination between the shots on the beautiful eyes of Kim Novak, the no less hypnothic musical theme of Bernard Herrmann, and all the work on typography and animations done by Saul Bass. Little icing on the cake of anecdotes, the famous hypnothic spirals visible in the sequence are the work of artist John Whitney Senior. Musician, experimental filmmaker, he was also a pioneer of computer art. This credits will haunt the cinephilic memory of the young Martin Scorsese for a long time, to the point that he will entrust to him, after having produced that of Les Affranchis in 1990, the credits of his remake of Nerves à vif, whose homage is obvious (until 'to music, originally due to Bernard Herrmann, but adapted and re-orchestrated by his disciple Elmer Bernstein).

On Psychosis, beyond its credits, Saul Bass will also take part in the conception of certain sequences, like that of the legendary scene of the murder of the shower, of which he entirely drew the storyboard. The same year, he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, signing the credits for his Spartacus peplum, as well as storyboarding of combat scenes. A year later, he worked on another film that entered the pantheon of the 7th Art: West Side Story. From now on, a film poster, a trailer or an opening credits signed by the master Saul Bass is to ensure a business card for posterity.

Phase IV, a first ... And last film

In parallel, as early as 1964, he produced short films, one of which, Why Man Creates, who mixes animation, photographs and vignettes offering a historical perspective of creativity through the ages, even won the Oscar for Best Short in 1969. The only one of his career. In 1974, long before Bernard Werber and his obsession with ants, Saul Bass directed a first and last feature film: Phase IV. An astonishing work to discover (which also comes out in a splendid ultra collector's edition Blu ray 4k at Carlotta), in the vein of the Andromeda Mystery, at the crossroads of SF, a zest of horror and Thriller. The story of a death struggle between Man and ants, written by Mayo Simon and Michael Murphy, foreshadowing the wave of disaster films of the second half of the 70s. The title of the film is explained by its narrative structure , divided into four parts. Little irony, Saul Bass was not invited to make the poster for his own film; the producers having preferred to him a poster designer exploiting the motif of "disaster film with monsters" unrelated to the overall tone of the work: a tense hand, surrounded by a frightening horde of insects sowing chaos and pierced in his palm by an ant.

Bitter failure at the Box Office, the film was quickly buried by Paramount, producer of the film, in addition to making cuts (certain scenes present in the BA are not in the film for example) and in particular the mythical end initially planned by Saul Bass; a four-minute surreal and psychedelic montage, eyeing the side of 2001: the space odyssey. An original ending long considered lost, before being found and shown in June 2012. In France, the film was not even released until ten years later; that is to say the then confidential distribution of the work. Following the failure of his film, Saul Bass intensified his production in graphic design throughout the 1980s.

Below, the trailer for "Phase IV" ...

An end of career in apotheosis

It is ultimately Martin Scorsese who released the artist from his semi-retirement at the start of the 1990s. Its credits are not simple, unimaginative labels - as is the case in many films - they are much more, they are an integral part of the film as such. When his work appears on the screen, the film itself really begins. I speak in the present, because his work and that of his wife Elaine speak to each of us, no matter our age, no matter our date of birth " explained the filmmaker in the book Saul Bass: A Life In Film & Design. And to remember his first collaboration with the master. "The first time I worked with him was for The freedmen . I had an idea for the credits, but I couldn't put the words on it. Someone suggested that I call Saul Bass, and I thought, "Dare we?" After all, he had worked on Vertigo, Psychosis, Autopsy of a murder, Washington storm, Spartacus, The unknown from Las Vegas ... Films that defined me as spectators, as a filmmaker. When we were young and we went to the movies, his work excited us terribly: like the music of Bernard Herrmann, it added a special dimension to the film. He instantly made the films... different, apart. Saul, to put it simply, was a great film director. He watched the work, and he immediately understood the rhythm, the structure, the mood ... He penetrated the heart of the film, and found his secret. "

After signing the generics of Raw nerves and that, splendid, of the Time of innocence, Saul Bass will bow out with a generic in the form of apotheosis: that of Casino. On the musical theme of The Passion of Saint Matthew by Jean-Sébastien Bach, Saul Bass and his wife Elaine have created an elegant, brilliant and baroque graphic composition. A sequence that Saul Bass described as follows: "Think of Dante's Hell and the painter Jérôme Bosch, backed by the Passion according to Saint Matthew by Jean-Sébastien Bach, and you will have an idea of ​​what we are trying to achieve". The Designer and his wife wanted to visually represent the rise and fall of the soul and body of Ace Rothstein, while Las Vegas acts as a purgatory. Between its ascent and its fall, the purifying flames give way to the neon lights of Las Vegas, "the city that cleanses us from all our sins".

"In this credits, Elaine and Saul found the perfect metaphor for the whole film, as a whole: Las Vegas of the 70s, and the descent into hell of the Mafia" will say, moved, Nicholas Pileggi, scriptwriter of the film. An ultimate and moving master's business card for posterity. "There is nothing glamorous about what I do. I am a hard worker. Maybe I am luckier than most, in that I get the great satisfaction of doing useful work that I sometimes find , and others like me too, succeeded. " Let him be reassured. His legacy is not about to die. So long the artist ...


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