I am a big Hitchcock’s movie fan (but yeah!! who isn’t). Through his work, I got to know about Saul Bass-the guy behind the art work in most of his movies. He transformed the visuals of film advertising. Before Bass’s seminal poster for The Man with the Golden Arm(1955), movie posters were dominated by depictions of key scenes or characters from the film, often both juxtaposed with each other. Bass’s posters developed simplified, symbolic designs that visually communicated key essential elements of the film.
Here are few selected posters by Saul Bass.
Lets discuss “The Birds” poster, which I like the most.
Ok to start with..If you were to gaze at this movie poster for the first time (I know It has been around for quite some time but still..) without knowing about the movie’s plot..what ideas come to mind?
The Grid & The Negative Space:
Whole poster can be divided into three parts. The use of equal negative space, as a balance to positive space, in the composition gives the eye a “place to rest”. Negative space is being used as contrasting “Red” background to draw attention to the main subject – “Feather” and making it most evident. Still Red stands out as the main color theme of the poster – which can denote either love or fear or danger.
Typo:
The key here is – “Typo” the other major elements in this poster, support and reinforce the main visual, and don’t try to compete with it. It’s short, center aligned to rest of the text and to the point. Bass has used two fonts of the same family “Universe”: Univers Ultra Condense for movie’s name and Universe Light for director’s and staring cast.
Here you can see the numbers and names of each of the twenty types that exist in this font:
During my brief search on Saul Bass’s work , I stumbled upon Polish movie posters and I would like to briefly mention about them too. Polish, a strong culture and a taste for cinema continued to have access to foreign films even under the most severe communism, around immediate post-war period and until 1989 (though the distribution of these “western movies” film distribution remained a state monopoly governed by a single official, Film Polski).
Movies were duly chosen or censored. Anxious not to convey enticing imagery West commissioned a few artists, painters and designers, so that they make posters for Polish foreign films. It is in this context that, freed them from all constraints of commercial, contractual or advertising and which opened one of the most exciting graphic movements of the twentieth century. They could focus on a conceptual reading of each film.
While Hollywood built his machine “stars” (highlighting the castings), Polish artists could in turn seek the Saul Bass’s abstraction and symbolism, trying to summarize the essence or the subject of a film in one image.
Though I couldn’t find a lot of examples because of the language barrier but here are few from that school.
The posters are presented here by release year … in Poland: it was sometimes several years (and in some cases more than a decade!).
From Left to Right : Twilight Boulevard (Sunset Blvd.) (1957), Carmen Jones (1959), Casablanca (1947), Othello(1959), The great évasion- (La grande évasion (1967)), To Catch a Thief (La main au collet (1962)).
Gray White & Black 