The Man Who Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star

While he was browsing in the bargain bin of a book store on Third Avenue in Manhattan, the young graphic designer Saul Bass was struck by the spiraling images in a book about the 19th-century French mathematician Jules-Antoine Lissajous. He bought the book and experimented with ways of replicating those spirals. “I made a batch. Sat on them for years,” Bass recalled. “And then Hitchcock asked me to work on ‘Vertigo.’ Click!”
Alfred Hitchcock had commissioned him to design the title sequences for his 1958 psychological thriller “Vertigo.” Bass chose the spiraling forms in the Lissajous book as his main motifs, knowing that they would reflect the frenzied tension of the plot. Beginning with an extreme close-up of a woman’s face as the screen is soaked in a bloody shade of red, his opening titles ended with a dizzying spiral fading into an eye.
It is very rare for a designer to be as revered in his field as Bass is in film graphics. The titles he devised for directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger, Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder and Hitchcock transformed what were once cursory lists of the cast and crew into thrilling complements to the movies. “The great thing in working with Saul,” said the composer Elmer Bernstein, “is that your music never got a better break.”
So accomplished were Bass’s titles that when a colleague suggested to Mr. Scorsese that they should commission him to work on the film “Goodfellas,” he replied: “Do we dare?” Luckily they did. But Bass’s dazzling work in film has obscured his other achievements as one of the most prolific graphic designers of the late 20th century. The first major book on his work, “Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design,” by his daughter Jennifer Bass and the design historian Pat Kirkham, redresses the balance by analyzing an eclectic career that also included the design of corporate identities, gas stations, record and book covers, children’s toys and a postage stamp.
Witty, gregarious and intellectually inquisitive, Bass executed each project in a seemingly simple, yet expressive style that reflected his fascination with constructivism, modernism and surrealism. In the book, Mr. Scorsese describes his designs as having “found and distilled the poetry of the modern, industrialized world...”

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Alice Rawsthorn @'NY Times'