Saul Bass
The designer who taught Hollywood that the credits sequence is the first act — and then proved the same logic worked for corporations.
Before Saul Bass, film title sequences were typographic formalities — names scrolling over a static image. After him, they were miniature films in their own right, condensing theme, mood, and graphic intelligence into ninety seconds. The same reductive logic he applied to Otto Preminger's posters he later applied to the logos of AT&T, United Airlines, and Quaker Oats.
Bronx origins and graphic education
Bass was born in the Bronx in 1920 and studied at the Art Students League in New York, then under the Bauhaus-trained László Moholy-Nagy affiliate György Kepes at Brooklyn College. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1946, initially working in advertising. The move was decisive: proximity to the film industry gave him access to a medium that could make graphic ideas move.
The Preminger collaboration
His breakthrough came with Otto Preminger, for whom he designed both the poster and the title sequence of The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The jagged, off-axis arm — reduced to a near-abstract silhouette — was arresting precisely because it refused to illustrate the film's subject literally. The sequence for Anatomy of a Murder (1959) used cut-paper body parts that dissolved and reformed; the poster for Bonjour Tristesse (1958) reduced a face to a single drawn tear.1
His work for Alfred Hitchcock produced two sequences that remain canonical: the spiralling vertigo animation for Vertigo (1958) and the staccato, fragmented cut for Psycho (1960). Both were conceived as psychological experiences rather than typographic housekeeping.
Method: reduction and motion
Bass described his aim as finding the essential visual idea of a film and stripping everything else away. He worked with paper cutouts and flat color, avoiding three-dimensional illusion. Motion — when it came — was abrupt and purposeful: the scattering matchstick-men of Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), the falling figure of Vertigo. He later returned to film late in his career, working with Martin Scorsese on GoodFellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), and Casino (1995).
| Director | Film | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Preminger | The Man with the Golden Arm | 1955 |
| Hitchcock | Vertigo | 1958 |
| Hitchcock | Psycho | 1960 |
| Scorsese | GoodFellas | 1990 |
Corporate identity
From the late 1960s, Bass applied the same economy to corporate logos. The AT&T globe (1983), the United Airlines tulip (1974), the Quaker Oats man (1972), and the Girl Scouts trefoil (1978) demonstrated that the principles governing a two-minute title sequence — clarity, memorability, a single organizing form — transferred directly to marks that needed to work at any scale and in any context.
My initial thought about the title of a movie is that it should be a totality — that the audience should feel something before they see the film.
Footnotes
- Bass also served as a visual consultant on Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest, though the extent of his directing contribution to the Psycho shower sequence remains a matter of historical debate. ↩
