Gives Credit
- Gives Credit
There is a scene in Annie Hall where Alvy (Woody Allen) waits impatiently in front of a theater for Annie (Diane Keaton). When she arrives late, Alvy hustles her to the ticket office and asks if the show they are there to see has started yet. Told that it “started two minutes ago,” Alvy throws up his hands and says, “That’s it. Forget it. I can’t go in.” Unperturbed, Annie still wants to go in, but Alvy is steadfast in his refusal to enter the movie late. “No, I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t do it. We’ve blown it already. I can’t go in the middle.” “In the middle?” Annie asks. “We’ve only missed the titles. They’re in Swedish.” But Alvy has already moved on. “You want to get coffee for two hours or something?” he asks.
This scene is obviously meant to showcase Alvy’s neurotic personality, but no doubt many viewers share his conviction that a film’s opening titles are an indispensable part of the moviegoing experience. Yet, curiously, film scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to opening titles in general. As Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu note at the start of Uncredited: Graphic Design & Opening Titles in Movies, “We are unaware of the existence or publication of any study attempting to offer a general overview on the topic.” Their book addresses this oversight.
It also, as the title suggests, gives credit to the designers—who for too long have been ignored by Hollywood, critics and scholars, and the public at large—responsible [End Page 92] for some of the more noteworthy opening sequences in movie history.
Befitting its subject, this is a big, beautiful book, lovingly designed and replete with frame-by-frame breakdowns of hundreds of title sequences. Pictures, not text, are the focus at all times. It even comes with a DVD containing QuickTime clips of 119 title sequences, a thoughtful gesture, even if the video quality of the clips is mediocre.
The emphasis is mainly, though not exclusively (Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, figures prominently), on the opening title sequences of American films. The authors begin by discussing the oldest and most basic type of titles: white text on a black background. By the 1920s, advancements in optical printing technology enabled title designers to superimpose text over images more easily. Suddenly, more was possible.
Among the highlights of the book is Solana and Boneu’s discussion of how, in the heyday of the studio era, the stylistic conventions of opening titles helped establish the mood and visual character of a film. “At some point,” they explain, bolstering their point with ample visual evidence, “someone got the idea that the ‘Wanted’ letterings used in 19th century circuses would automatically suggest Western, that ‘literary’ backgrounds on the pages of books would give a movie a more serious tone, that silks and glamour would evoke romance, and that gothic typefaces would transport people to German and to horror.”
As the studio system crumbled, however, these sorts of titles gave way to more ambitious and abstract sequences. Filmmakers, no longer able to rely on studio design departments, contracted the opening titles of their films out to designers who subsequently pushed opening design in new and various directions. Solana and Boneu refer to this period, from roughly the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, as the Golden Age of title design. This, of course, is the period of Saul Bass (Anatomy of a Murder), Pablo Ferro (Dr. Strangelove), Robert Brownjohn (Goldfinger), Stephen Frankfurt (To Kill a Mockingbird), Wayne Fitzgerald (The Godfather), Dan Perri (Star Wars), and Richard and Robert Greenberg (Superman). Numerous examples are included for illustrative purposes.
Though moribund in the 1980s according to the authors, a new generation of designers such as Kyle Cooper (Se7en) and design firms such as Picture Mill (Panic Room) reinvigorated title design at the turn of the century. The authors do a good job here of tracing the increasingly important role computers play in title design, emphasizing how an...
