Saya pertama kali mengenal nama Saul Bass pada sebuah majalah desain. Adapun kata-katanya yang menginspirasi saya adalah : " Design is thinking made visual ". Itu terlihat dari karya-karya beliau, yang menurut saya cukup tepat dan padat dalam mengkomunikasikan bentuk.
Biografi ini saya comot dari http://designmuseum.org/design/saul-bass,
SAUL BASS (1920-1996) 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.
When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs
movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in
1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain
before titles".
Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie
titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains
to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his
audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part
of the film.
The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero - a jazz musician
played by Frank Sinatra - to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by
the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black
paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a
powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank
Sinatra’s famous face - as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its
promotional poster.
That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the
movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over
50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick,
John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Although he later claimed that
he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence "a little disappointing
now, because it was so imitated".
Even before he made his cinematic debut, Bass was a celebrated
graphic designer. Born in the Bronx district of New York in 1920 to an
emigré furrier and his wife, he was a creative child who drew
constantly. Bass studied at the Art Students League in New York and
Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who
had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to
the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian
Constructivism.
After apprenticeships with Manhattan design firms, Bass worked as a
freelance graphic designer or "commercial artist" as they were called.
Chafing at the creative constraints imposed on him in New York, he moved
to Los Angeles in 1946. After freelancing, he 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.
Now over-shadowed by Bass’ later work, Carmen Jones elicited
commissions for titles for two 1955 movies: Robert Aldrich’s The Big
Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But it was his next
Preminger project, The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass
as the doyen of film title design.
Over the next decade he honed his skill by creating 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 strikingly modern style. Martin Scorsese once
described his approach as creating: "an emblematic image, instantly
recognisable and immediately tied to the film".
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. For
his next Hitchcock commission, 1959’s North by Northwest, the credits
swoop up and down a grid of vertical and diagonal lines like passengers
stepping off elevators. It is only a few minutes after the movie has
begun - with Cary Grant stepping out of an elevator - that we realise
the grid is actually the façade of a skyscraper.
Equally haunting are the vertical bars sweeping across the screen in a
manic, mirrored helter-skelter motif at the beginning of Hitchcock’s
1960 Psycho. This staccato sequence is an inspired symbol of Norman
Bates’ fractured psyche. Hitchcock also allowed Bass to work on the film
itself, notably on its dramatic highpoint, the famous shower scene with
Janet Leigh.
Assisted by his second wife, Elaine, Bass created brilliant titles
for other directors - from the animated alley cat in 1961’s Walk on the
Wild Side, to the adrenalin-laced motor racing sequence in 1966’s Grand
Prix. He then directed a series of shorts culminating in 1968’s
Oscar-winning Why Man Creates and finally realised his ambition to
direct a feature with 1974’s Phase IV.
When Phase IV flopped, Bass returned to commercial graphic design.
His corporate work included devising highly successful corporate
identities for United Airlines, AT&T, Minolta, Bell Telephone System
and Warner Communications. He also designed the poster for the 1984 Los
Angeles Olympic Games.
To younger film directors, Saul Bass was a cinema legend with whom
they longed to work. In 1987, he was persuaded to create the titles for
James Brooks’ Broadcast News and then for Penny Marshall’s 1988 Big. In
1990, Bass found a new long term collaborator in Martin Scorsese who had
grown up with – and idolised - his 1950s and 1960s titles. After 1990’s
Goodfellas and 1991’s Cape Fear, Bass created a sequence of blossoming
rose petals for Scorcese’s 1993’s The Age of Innocence and a hauntingly
macabre one of Robert De Niro falling through the sinister neons of the
Las Vegas Strip for the director’s 1995’s Casino to symbolise his
character’s descent into hell.
Saul Bass died the next year. His New York Times obituary hailed him
as "the minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and
created an entire film genre…and elevated it into an art."
Sumber : DesignMuseum.org
