The University Press of Kentucky
Opening movie credits were usually an uneventful scroll-down, just names in a list against a backdrop, until Saul Bass. With Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), Bass interjected Modern design into the credits, transforming a set of acknowledgments into an artful preface.
Although Jan-Christopher Horak’s Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (University Press of Kentucky) isn’t the first book length treatment of the designer, the author focuses on Bass’ place in art history and his role as poster boy—almost literally—for marketing Modernism in commercial design. Since Bass’ time, the best movie credits have sometimes been better than the movies themselves. Bass also designed movie posters, which rose above their utilitarian function of displaying names and faces of the stars, were memorable for their striking imagery and lack of clutter.
Horak, director of UCLA’s Film & Television Archive, also examines the usually unheralded contributions of Saul’s collaborators, including his wife, Elaine. Working like a Renaissance master, Bass employed helpers in the Saul Bass Studio but assigned all credit to himself. In a tiresome but useful word Horak employs often, Bass considered himself a “brand” and strove to maintain his standing. Even in the corporate work he did outside Hollywood, Bass was dedicated to the Bauhaus credo that in the age of mass production, design is essential for bringing art into the materials and images of everyday life.
Horak devotes attention to Bass’ secondary career as a movie director. Although he won an Best Short Documentary Oscar for Why Man Creates (1968), his film credits have overshadowed his filmmaking. Anatomy of Film Design sorts through Bass’ effort to simplify his past in service to his brand, and his occasional tendency to laim more credit than was his due. Did he really design Psycho’s shower stall sequence for Alfred Hitchcock? Bass may have contributed, but the last word was Hitch’s.
