Cutting edge
Andrew Lambirth
Saul Bass
Design Museum, Shad Thames, SE1, until 10 October
On the first floor of the bright Thamesside Design Museum is an exhibition devoted to the work of Saul Bass (1920-96). You may be forgiven for not knowing his name, though you will probably be familiar with his work, for it was Bass who was instrumental in turning filmtitles into an art form. Before him filmtitles were simply lists of names of cast and crew. Bass, literally, animated them, employing his consummate skills as a graphic designer to make visually exciting the necessary informational prelude to the film's action. When he arrived at his first sensation — a stylised paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for the titles of Otto Preminger's 1955 film The Man with the Golden Ann — he had years of experience as a commercial designer behind him. He was ready to become an artist.
Born in the Bronx. the second child of Jewish emigres from the Ukraine, Bass showed early creative aptitude, designing posters at high school before winning a scholarship to the Art Students League in Manhattan. As a young man he worked in the New York offices of Warner Brothers and Twentieth-Century Fox, and then for a couple of advertising agencies while studying at Brooklyn College under the Bauhaus-influenced designer Gyorgy Kepes, a friend and colleague of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Something of the inventiveness and economy we associate with that great school of design can be discerned in Bass's mature work. In 1946 he moved to Los Angeles, and in 1952 he set up his own studio. Among his first clients was the director Otto Preminger who, Bass claimed, 'kicked me off on my film career'. Preminger commissioned Bass to design the advertising for his 1954 film Carmen Tones, a black version of Bizet's opera. The symbol that Bass created for it was a flame superimposed on a rose. Preminger suggested making it move, and Bass animated the image to striking effect. This was his first title sequence, and it was to win him a screen credit — the first graphic designer to be so honoured by the Directors' Guild of America. However, his long-standing collaboration with Preminger was not exactly a bed of roses. As he recalled in a 1994 interview with Peter Jones (shown on a monitor in the gallery), they had terrible fights, and he was always walking out. 'Otto taught me how to fight,' Bass averred. 'This man is challenging me, forcing me to play above my head.' The results of that running battle were spectacular.
Yet the first impression of the Saul Bass exhibition is not auspicious: the title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm is projected large in the show's anteroom, and it's out of focus. Although it's graphically arresting, it's also irritatingly imprecise, the text in particular being all juddery and fuzzy. Can the Design Museum (of all places) do no better than this?
It seems not. When you continue round the exhibition, whenever a title sequence is played on anything like the scale it should be, the imagery is slightly blurred. When it is shown small-scale on one of the dozen or more monitors scattered through the galleries, it is properly crisp. Presumably this is because it's been transferred to video from film and does not reproduce on the big screen. In which case we would be better off without it. Particularly infuriating (not to say embarrassing) is the fuzzy intro to Walk on the Wild Side (1962, Edward Dmytryk), the sinister stalking feline reduced to a vague shadow, and the frame of the film unbelievably too large for the screen it's projected upon.
To my mind, these are basic things that should be got right, otherwise they prejudice enjoyment of the exhibition. What would Saul Bass have thought of such poor production values? That said, there are many things to enjoy here, though fairly evenly divided between moving image and printed documentary material. For the Golden Arm project, there is not only stationery printed with Bass's jagged trademark arm, but also sheet music, album cover, billboard advertisement, and so on. For Bonjour Tristesse (1958, Preminger) the powerful image for the poster simply depicts schematised eyes, nose and lips, with a vast pendant teardrop. The poster for Love in the Afternoon (1956, Billy Wilder) is even more succinct: a pink hand pulling down a black blind. And then there's the vortex of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).
Bass employed Naum Gabo-like constructivist designs for his Vertigo title sequence, rotating a spiral-based form against a telling soundtrack. He had a gift for putting image to music, and a genius for superimposing and collaging, for cutting and sliding and eliding. The animation for Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson) — there are six storyboards for it on the wall nearby — is clever and amusing; the geometric patchwork dance for The Seven Year Itch (1955, Billy Wilder) is appropriately suggestive. In the opening to North by Northwest (1959, Hitchcock), a brilliant angled green grid becomes the sheer glass façade of an office block reflecting the city's traffic. The effects are thoroughly sleek.
Walking through the black-walled spaces (these lighten to white in the second half of the exhibition), with their carefully sited posters and flat-topped display cases, is a slightly cheerless experience. The monitors gibber cacophonously, or flicker in silence. The shower sequence from Psycho plays over and over, for Bass was involved closely in its planning and is credited as 'Pictorial Consultant' on this film. lithe later work (often done in collaboration with his wife Elaine) does not have the punch of his 1950s and 1960s imagery, this is perhaps only to be expected of a man who so brilliantly encapsulated the visual feel of an age. An exception is his opening for Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear (1991), in which he achieves wonders by filming a kitty-litter tray filled with ink-stained water animated by a hairdryer. As the abstract flickering reflections change from green, gold and blue to blood-red, so the viewer's mood of expectancy heightens.
All in all, a mixed show (there are some of Bass's own films showing, as well as examples of his logos for the likes of AT&T, Minolta and United Airlines), which left me with the pressing need to see a good film — from beginning to end. If you think the £6 entry fee is too expensive for one exhibition, be reassured, for there are other displays to be seen, including a special celebration of the E-Type Jag (until 28 November), and a tribute to the contemporary Brazilian designers, Fernando and Humberto Campana (until 12 September). Plus a History of Modem Design — In the Home (until 31 October), from modern to pop to postmodernist. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
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