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

In Saul Bass’s Oscar-winning short film Why Man Creates (1968), an animated snail muses, “Have you ever thought that radical ideas threaten institutions, then become institutions, and in turn reject radical ideas which threaten institutions?” “No,” replies a second snail, to which the first responds, “Gee, for a minute I thought I had something!”

This humorous exchange might be read as an apt comment on the trajectory of Bass’s own career, as Horak observes. Having started out designing print advertisements in the 1940s, in the mid-1950s Bass diversified into creating film title sequences. His startlingly modernistic approach to titling brought him celebrity and inspired a great deal of copycat work. Wearied by the ubiquity of the new norms he had played such a role in creating, in the mid-1960s Bass almost entirely withdrew from titling work, returning only to produce a handful of highly acclaimed sequences in his final years. Instead, as Bass’s motion work gravitated toward short films, the philosophy of creativity, its origins, and its modes of consumption would become an explicit area of focus in his cinematic musings.

Although Bass found success in a wide range of design fields, with the bulk of his output falling under the loose umbrella of commercial art, today his name remains most intrinsically associated with film title sequences and with those film posters (such as Vertigo) that shared their iconography. Jan-Christopher Horak’s important new publication does justice to these celebrated projects—providing new insights in what might already seem a well-trodden field. At the same time, his extended analysis of Bass’s other motion work, including television advertisements, six short films (1964–83), and the sci-fi fiction feature Phase IV (1974), makes an extremely valuable contribution to an area that has hitherto been largely overlooked in both popular and scholarly writings about Bass.

As director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, whose previous studies range from American avant-garde cinema to Hollywood movie marketing, Horak is admirably qualified to offer an original, informed, and rounded analysis. Couching his arguments within a series of pertinent contexts, he presents Bass not as an unaccountable genius but rather as an outlier, whose career is best understood as that of a canny exploiter of industrial structures and needs (especially those of the Hollywood studio system and multinational corporate sponsors). He proposes, moreover, that the ways Bass came to fulfill those needs were shaped by his grasp of the opportunities offered by time and place (midcentury New York City) to develop his appreciation of emergent schools of modern art and to apply their logic and aesthetics within the burgeoning field of commercial design. Bass, Horak argues, “carved out a lifelong career by draping himself in that European modernist mantle, but with a romantic American touch, and then selling that aesthetic to the Hollywood entertainment industry as a form of moral uplift” (353).

Much of Horak’s source material is taken from the extensive Bass Collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which includes internal company memos as well as unfinished and unused designs. He supplements this with interviews and correspondence he conducted with more than a dozen of Bass’s colleagues and friends. Combined with Horak’s own considerable knowledge of twentieth-century art history and of the midcentury American film and design industries, these various components lend credence to the multilayered personal readings he later elaborates in a series of exquisitely close studies of Bass’s work.

Drawing on both interviews and archive resources, Horak lays out in his introduction and opening chapter a striking and useful argument that serves the double purpose of encouraging readers to reflect on their current understanding of Bass and his work and of ratifying the author’s own approach. Describing the level of control exercised by the Bass studio in the development of its brand, Horak shows how carefully the flow of interview material and images offered to newspapers and journals...