Saul Bass' most iconic film posters, chosen by Pat Kirkham and Jennifer Bass

Date
30 August 2016
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Saul Bass: 20 iconic film posters by Pat Kirkham and Jennifer Bass, published by Laurence King

In this exclusive extract from new large-format book Saul Bass: 20 iconic film posters, Pat Kirkham and the designer’s daughter Jennifer Bass explore his lasting influence on film poster design.

One of the giants of 20th-century design and film-making, Saul Bass (1920 – 1996), was a visual communicator par excellence, who produced a diverse and powerful body of work. His highly evocative images, full of intense clarity and subtle ambiguities, are among the most compelling of the post-war years.

The ambidextrous Bass had a piercingly keen eye (Martin Scorsese once called it a jeweller’s eye), and an ability to freely sketch the myriad ideas that poured from his fertile mind. When art and design students asked him how they should prepare for future careers, he always told them to learn to draw. A voracious reader with a probing intellect, his endless curiosity, ingenuity, boundless enthusiasm for the task at hand, discipline, warmth, sense of humour, and sensitivity toward human emotions, all lay at the heart of his success.

Admired for his ability to balance content and form, Bass believed that in any successful design, content was paramount. In the 1990s he stated, “I’ve always looked for the simple idea,” and went on to say that he and his wife, Elaine (who worked with him on film titles and short films from 1960), continued to do so. “We have a very reductive point of view when it comes to visual matters,” he commented. “We see the challenge in getting things down to something totally simple, and yet doing something with it, which provokes … If it’s simple simple, it’s boring. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think – and rethink.”

Today he is best known for his iconic film posters, and more than 50 title sequences for Hollywood films, each featuring an image or symbol that served as a metaphor for the film itself. Because he always sought to create a design relevant to the commission at hand, there is no definitive “Bass” aesthetic; though his work shows a strong drive towards reductionism, distillation, and economy, features central to modernism, it also reveals a concern with fragmentation, layering, ambiguity, and metaphor, qualities evident in the 1950s but more associated with postmodernism. His bold designs are matched by bold and expressive colour palettes, and the posters incorporate finely honed lettering and typography.

His reputation in film sometimes overshadows his enormous and equally prolific work across a wide range of disciplines, from all manner of advertising and packaging, to logos and graphic identity programs for some of the leading corporations and institutions of the day, such as United Airlines, Quaker Oats, the Girl Scouts, Warner Brothers, and Minolta. The ideal corporate symbol, he believed, “is the one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable,” pointing out that they are usually “metaphors of one kind or another … [and] in a certain sense, thinking made visible.” This applies to the film posters featured here as well.

Born in the Bronx, New York City, he began his 60-year career as a graphic designer in Manhattan, where he attended evening classes in commercial art and advertising with two men who became his mentors: Howard Trafton at the Art Students League in the mid to late 1930s and Gyorgy Kepes at Brooklyn College in the early 1940s. In 1946 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked on trade ads for films before opening his own studio in 1952 so that he could take on a wider range of work outside the film industry.

His big break in terms of film advertising and title sequence work came in 1954 when the independent film director and producer Otto Preminger offered him the chance to achieve a long-standing ambition, namely to design a unified identity campaign for a Hollywood film that banished “realistic” and sensationalist illustration and removed or minimised images of the film stars. Bass created strongly graphic posters and title sequences for several Preminger films, including The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955; Saint Joan, 1957; Bonjour Tristesse, 1958; and Anatomy of a Murder, 1959; while for director / producer Alfred Hitchcock he produced three title sequences and an advertising campaign (for Vertigo, 1958).

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Saul Bass: The Man with the Golden Arm

The Man with the Golden Arm by Otto Preminger (1955)

This is a film about an aspiring jazz drummer who has cleaned up from addiction while in prison and returns to his old neighbourhood on Chicago’s North Side. Then, through a series of misfortunes, we watch as he slides back into his drug habit. Bass’ challenge was to find a symbol that would capture the horrors of addiction without sensationalism. The black, distorted, jagged arm suggests dysfunction and petrification, while the uneven yet elegant amber/gold lettering suggests the talent and potential of the main character, playing on the word “gold,” as slang for heroin. The blocks of solid colour and their abstract formation evoke the language of modern art and jazz, echoing the contemporary theme of the film. Bass named the film’s three stars in uneven lettering at the top of the poster. By including their names but not their images, Bass’ design flew in the face of film industry conventions.

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Saul Bass: Advise & Consent

Advise & Consent by Otto Preminger (1962)

Bass’ bold symbol for the film Advise & Consent is a clever visual pun that literally “takes the lid off” contemporary Cold War politics in the United States. Based on Allen Drury’s 1959 novel of the same name, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the film exposes scheming and blackmail in the US Senate, aimed at defeating the nomination of a liberal, who was open to rapprochement with the Soviet Union, to the office of Secretary of State. After creating several symbols representing politicians as puppets on a string or mechanical toys to be wound up at will, Bass came up with a solution which raises the question of what goes on beneath the surface of political life. Witty and pregnant with potential, Bass’ trademark found resonance at home and abroad and was used as a visual gag in various political cartoons in Europe and the United States.

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Saul Bass: Saint Joan

Saint Joan by Otto Preminger (1957)

Saint Joan chronicles the life of Joan of Arc, a young woman who led French troops against the English during the Hundred Years War. Coming up against the might of both a foreign state and the Roman Catholic Church, she was burned at the stake in 1431 after charges of heresy and wearing soldier’s clothes. Bass’ symbol for the film, a fragment of a black, charred body in armor, conveys her strength, while at the same time, forces us to acknowledge how she died. Bass’ Joan, like the main character in the film, is broken but not defeated. In his powerful design, the part of the sword that she still holds in her hand forms the shape of the Christian cross, thus foreshadowing her martyrdom, while the colourful background mosaic, reminiscent of the stained-glass windows found in medieval cathedrals, hints at her later sainthood.

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Saul Bass: The Cardinal

The Cardinal by Otto Preminger (1963)

Through the story of a priest who rises to the rank of Cardinal within the Roman Catholic Church, this film questions the Church’s position on several key issues, from war and politics to inter-faith marriages, sex outside wedlock, abortion, and racism. Bass’ challenge was to devise a symbol free of ecclesiastical associations, lest potential viewers understood the film to be narrowly religious. In the end he decided to make the name of the film the symbol. In a boldly modern composition, divided in two by a strip announcing “An Otto Preminger Film,” the gigantic black capital letters of “The,” representing the towering authority of the Roman Catholic Church, dwarf the power of the word “Cardinal.” The backward-leaning tilt of the monumental “The,” together with the large block of solid black below, hint at a dark side to this movie.

Saul Bass: 20 iconic film posters by Pat Kirkham & Jennifer Bass is published by Laurence King on 5 September.

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