I watched a movie tonight. It was a thriller from the early 60s, with a conscious debt to Hitchcock. Not bad at all, especially considering it had a much lower budget than he would have been given. Anyway, just as the film takes from Hitchcock, the opening titles owe something to the work of Saul Bass.
Bass, who worked with Hitchcock, Preminger, and in his later years, Scorsese, came around at the right time. In the silent era and the 30s, opening credit sequences tended toward the functional. Lists of names in a nice font, sometimes over someone's face. After the war the graphics departments had more technical ability, and it didn't hurt to have something different that could catch the audience's attention.
Over the past twenty years or so opening titles have atrophied to the point where at the start of the movie you most often see the name of the production company, the title, and maybe the director. Streaming services have an option where you can skip titles and many people take it because they don't want to spend time on anything that doesn't advance the plot. We live in a philistine age where―to paraphrase Oscar Wilde―people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But titles can set the mood and tone of a movie, and have been in many cases a crucial part of the aesthetic experience. Case in point above.
2 comments:
Firstly, I'm delighted to see you watched The Wrong Box again, definitely one of the most ingeniously silly movies ever made. What a cast, eh? The leisurely pace of the opening credits certainly adds to the anticipation of seeing the film.
I hadn't known about Saul Bass's work until now but, considering your scholarly interest in films, it's no wonder you know about the man who introduced movement to movie titles. The list of films he, and later with his wife, worked on is pretty staggering and I agree that every one of them is memorable. Influential seems like an understatement.
You're right about current movie titles having atrophied. Sometimes they don't even have titles and just jump right into the action with maybe a nod to the introduction partway into the film. We should consider ourselves lucky to have been able to experience and appreciate what has gone before. Maybe it's time to watch The Pink Panther again.
While it's somewhat awkward to admit, I actually haven't seen The Wrong Box recently. The movie I did see didn't seem like the kind where you could find the credits themselves online, and as far as I can tell you can't. The Wrong Box did, and I like them. That said, I probably would enjoy seeing it again. The early Cook/Moore movies were very funny, especially Bedazzled.
I must have learned about Bass in a book about Hitchcock. He's one of the few titles designers who's known by name. And you sometimes see other people using elements of his work, and you know what they say about the sincerest complement.
The movie watching experience--be it at a theatre or at home--has changed in ways that I'm not sure are good. But yes, I do appreciate beautiful titles. I remember being pretty surprised that the whole Pink Panther character was created for the opening of the Blake Edwards movie.
Post a Comment