Saul Bass

Saul Bass

Saul bass was born on May 8th 1920, in the Bronx, New York City, USA. Died april 25th 1996, Los Angeles US

His Artwork : Anatomy of A Murder, Advise and Consent, Exodus, The Man With The Golden Arm and In Harms Way. 

Awards - Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. 

In the films like around the work in 80 days and carmen jones, he designed very abstract title credits and end credits. Saul bass was a graphic designer and a title designer, who used a number of styles like animation, live action and type treatments. Saul Bass is known as the man that changed graphic design, his use of lines and his crafting were surreal and abstract which everyone interpreted as his way of telling the nature of films. His time began in hollywood in 1940's designing print advertisements, for films including champion in 1949 and death of a salesman in 1951.

 

Before he did title sequences he also did logos such as:

 all his logos use a very abstract, cubist style, which we also see later in his title/end credits

during his 40 year career, bass worked for some of hollywoods most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, otto preminger, Billy Wilder. Bass designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in north America  including the bell system logo in 1969. He designed logos which became some of the most recognised in the industry. Bass became widely known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger's - The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955.  He chose the arm as the central image, as it relates to heroin addiction - the way it looks like it was cut out shapes from black paper, as he hoped, it caused quite a sensation.

Martin Scorsese opinions on saul bass. Martin states that before he had ever met saul bass or worked with him, "he was a legend in my eyes" taking into account his work, Scorsese says the that his work were images you could dream on and still are. bass said "the ideal trademark is one that is pushed to it's utmost limits in terms of Abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another, and are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.

Martin scorsese thought very highly of bass, my opinion of him myself, is he was a genius who had an amazing, abstract,cubist way of thinking, if you were to look at anything created by saul bass, you could clearly see his thinking behind it, especially with lines and shapes. for example in the man with a golden arm, it looked as if the shapes had been cut, a particular signature i like is the colours, shapes and lines and how he could use these over again but create something completely different, and would still look just as amzing . which makes him as an artist very unique as regular designers always look for somehting new instead of changing what you already had and thinking of a physcological impact that it could have on the audience, which links in very nicely to the lines we see in the prelude in physco, with the fenetic stabbing we see in the shower scene.