SAUL BASS (1920-1996)

Saul Bass was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.
Part of his success came for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese.


Even before he made his cinematic debut, Bass was a celebrated graphic designer. After apprenticeships with Manhattan design firms, Bass worked as a freelance graphic designer or "commercial artist". He then opened his own studio in 1950 working mostly in advertising until Preminger invited him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.
Over the next decade Bass created an animated mini-movie for Mike Todd’s 1956 Around The World In 80 Days and a tearful eye for Preminger’s 1958 Bonjour Tristesse. Blessed with the gift of identifying the one image which symbolised the movie, Bass then recreated it in a striking modern style.


In 1958’s Vertigo, his first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock, Bass shot an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and then her eye before spinning it into a sinister spiral as a bloody red soaks the screen. This is slightly similar to our production logo – a close up of a woman’s face and her lips prior to the lipstick highlighting her lips as the logo spins onto the screen.