Saul Bass Information

Josh Smith

Saul Bass Report

Due: 11/4/13

            Once described as being blessed with the ability to identify the one image that symbolized an entire movie, Saul Bass made a name for himself by taking something that was know to be bland and he made it exciting. Saul was born in 1920 in the Bronx district of New York. He spent the first part of his life trying to make it as a graphic designer in New York. He studied there under hungarian graphic designer, Gyorgy Kepes. Once he finished school he tried being a freelance designer in New york for a while after he held a couple apprenticeships for some Manhattan design firms. He found himself dealing with some creative constraints, so in 1946 he packed up and moved to Los Angeles to see what it had in store for him. In L.A., he worked as a freelance designer until he could afford to open up his own studio in 1950. Bass spent most of his time working in advertising until Preminger asked him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Preminger was impressed by what he received so he also allowed Bass to design the movie’s title sequence. This was his best work so far and allowed him to get the opportunity to design the titles for two movies in 1955. These movies were Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. His work on these films did bring him some fame but his next work would be his masterpiece. Otto Preminger’s controversial new drug movie, The man with the golden Arm, was released in 1955. Saul Bass created the titles for it by using an animated black paper cut out of a heroin addicts arm. This image was so powerful that it was chosen to be the first thing seen in this movie rather than the famous face of Frank Sinatra who played the main character in the movie. The movie title was a sensation. This single piece reinvented movie titles as an art form. Over the next decade he sharpened his skills by spending his time working on an animated mini movie for Mike Todd. This movie was called Around the World in 80 Days. He also spent time working on a tearful eye for Preminger’s 1958  Bonjour Tristesse. Martin Scorsese once described his approach as creating: "an emblematic image, instantly recognizable and immediately tied to the film". Saul ended up dying in 1996. His New York Times obituary called him the “minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm into motion in 1995 and created an entire movie genre, and then elevated it into an art. Throughout his life he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Towards the end of his life he claimed that The Man with the Golden Arm sequence was “disappointing”. Though he might have felt that way, he will always be known as one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century.

Bibliography

Philip B Meggs, Six Chapters in Graphic Design: Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, Henryk Tomaszewski, 1997

Gerry Rosentwieg and Saul Bass, The New American Logo, 1998