Saul Bass/Essay

Motion Graphics
Santana Singleton
10/11/07
Saul Bass Essay
Saul Bass was a freelance graphic designer and an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. Bass did it all: films, packaging, products, architecture, corporate identification, and graphics. He suppressed the idea of titling movies with sequences that were highly symbolic and evocative. His work has been fused into our lives. His designs are everywhere from our telephones, films, to our airlines. Saul Bass was able to speak to people in a language that familiar, but new.
Bass was born in New York’s Bronx district in 1920. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes. Kepes introduced Bass to the Bauhaus style and Russian Constructivism. After training under Manhattan design firms, Bass moved to Los Angeles in 1946 to branch his career. It was in Los Angeles where he was invited to design the poster and title sequence of Otto Preminger’s “Carmen Jones.” Bass went on to make movie titles an integral part of the film. He was collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Martin Scorsese.
He created over fifty title sequences in his lifetime. His first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock was an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and eyes before spinning in at a spiral into a bloody screen. In “North by Northwest”, he swooped the credits up and down vertical and diagonal lines, imitating passengers stepping off elevators that resembles the façade of a skyscraper. In 1968 he directed a series of shorts for “Why Man Crates” and branched off to direct a feature with 1974’s Phase IV. Phase IV failed and Bass returned to his commercial graphic designs.
Bass is best known for his design for “The Man with the Golden Arm.” The movie’s theme was about a jazz musician, played by Frank Sinatra, overcoming a heroin addiction. Saul Bass used a symbol of a black paper-cut-out, heroin addict’s arm to establish a powerful image title. I am able to see a jitter being duplicated in a still image, a jitter that is identified to an addict’s body language. The cutout arm reinvented the movie title as an art form. He became known to have a gift to grasp the one image that best symbolized a movie. He was able to aid other movies by creating visual metaphors such as: Exodus’s outstretched arms, West Side Story’s simple lines that recall the fire escape, and Vertigo’s silhouette of man that the audience was able to identify to a Alfred Hitchcock’s production.
Until Saul, cinema posters were images of famous celebrities to lure an audience. Saul Bass was the first to reduce a movie into a single image, which conveyed the atmosphere and premise of the film. He also was able to create icons that single-handedly represent companies. I find his simplification with imagery to be the strongest and most compelling method for advertisement. His use of bold, limited colors and his straight forward, conceptual images attracts me to his work. He revolutionized film titles and other works have become the criterion for designers.