Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design by Jan-Christopher Horak (review)

Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design by Jan-Christopher Horak University Press Of Kentucky, 2014

Jan-Christopher Horak's Saul Bass book is meticulously researched and historically rich. And as is appropriate to the subject's celebrated graphic sense, the book places a strong emphasis on formal analysis. The book is also a much-needed contribution to the examination of a figure who is, on one hand, well known to film fans but, on the other, marginalized by traditional film studies. Perhaps most importantly, Horak's book both enriches and provides a model for a discussion of cinema within a transmedia context in which cinema (especially feature-length Hollywood cinema) plays an important but not always central role. Bass's work in designing cinema titles for such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo or Martin Scorsese's Casino has received the bulk of the attention from scholars and enthusiasts over the years (and in this volume as well); but he and his collaborators' television spots, nonfiction short films, feature independent films, motion graphics, montage sequences, posters, and corporate logos create a prolific body of work to analyze as a whole. Horak admirably does so with close attention to both familiar and rare or difficult-to-access material, such as Bass's corporate identity campaigns for AT&T and ALCOA and his television advertisements, for example, the one for Mennen's Baby Magic (one of the few of Bass's TV ads available on YouTube). This variety has the advantage of creating a broad-ranging picture of Bass's atelier's signature look and variations within it.

Bass's graphic, eye-catching opening title sequences were sometimes, as Horak quotes contemporary critics, so striking that the subsequent films were not able to live up to them. This observation points to a gap in film scholarship. Frequently, the visually graphic elements of filmmaking, whether the titles, effects work, or other elements not obviously motivated or absorbed by the narrative, are treated as "excess" or otherwise purely decorative—eye-catching and dynamic, but not meaning generating. A particular strength of this book is its attention to visual aesthetics and what kinds of meanings and effects they express, and how. Throughout, Horak's careful visual analysis provides a model for film historians and scholars considering the graphic elements that appear in film. This could mean recognizing rhymes from the title to the body of the film, as Horak points out in the titles for Seconds, or, where there are no rhymes, as in the case of Walk on the Wild Side, which was believed by many to provide a too-jarring contrast to the somewhat stage-bound film that followed.

Likewise, when considering popular aesthetics, academic film studies still often exhibit a prejudice against advertising or other graphic work, especially from those figures who are deemed to "cheapen" high art forms through commercialization. Another considerable value of Horak's study is a close attention to the historical context of the formal elements of Bass's work within this dynamic. Horak successfully addresses the considerable challenge of what it means for an artist to distill high art forms for a popular context without succumbing to such a prejudice. Moreover, creating strict high–low divisions would be especially misleading in Bass's particular context. As David James has pointed out in The Most Typical Avant-Garde, artists in Los Angeles frequently blurred the line between work-for-hire and what is generally considered the "purer" expression of the artists' self-expression. Most West Coast–based, but especially Los Angeles–based, artists who produced work for gallery shows and other traditional art world contexts also either had "day jobs" across the spectrum of the entertainment industry or were occasionally subcontracted for special projects. Most famously, this includes Oskar Fischinger for Disney and Jordan Belson's filmed material produced for The Right Stuff. Although Bass exhibited what Horak calls "gallery versions" of his posters, stripped to their...