You Can't Miss This, vol. 9

This week, Eye provided me a gold mine of Lithuanian movie posters, which I had never seen before, but I love them. They remind me a lot of Polish movie posters, which I expressed my unending love of here. I like these posters for many of the same reasons I love the Polish posters. They're not limited by the money-grabbing limitations that American movie posters are, and therefore the studios don't impose requirements on the relative head size of actors and so on. I also really enjoy foreign movie posters in general because I don't know the language, and that lets me see the typography in the context of the art without processing the meaning of the words. Compounding this, foreign movie posters frequently use type that is more interesting and less standardized than American movie posters, so it is much more compelling.

My friend Ross showed me this a few weeks ago, and it's just incredible. I love looking at the progression of titles, and pinpointing where the video-makers felt compelled to suggest a change in styles of movie titles. To me, it seems apparent that there's a dramatic change when Saul Bass starts designing titles in the mid '50s, and I don't think that's just my personal preference for his work. After his work with The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, North by Northwest and Vertigo, movie titles change dramatically. They are no longer type and art but kinetic and meaningful elements of the film. That is not to disparage the early ones — they are excellent as well (particularly Citizen Kane and The Thing) — but Saul Bass is clearly a game-changer here.

Speaking of Saul Bass, my coworker Andrew (upon my discussion of Saul Bass at work) sent me this link. It shows several of Bass' more enduring logos, which have an average life span of 34 years, according to the blog post.