"Vertigo" (1958, Hitchcock) title sequence

Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 — April 25, 1996) was a graphic designer and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his design of film posters and title sequences.

During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Martin Scorsese. He became well-known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955. For Alfred Hitchcock, Bass designed effective and memorable title sequences, inventing a new type of kinetic typography, for North by Northwest, Vertigo (working with John Whitney), and Psycho.

Bass also designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America, including the original AT&T “bell” logo in 1969, as well as their later “globe” logo in 1983. He also designed Continental Airlines’ 1968 “jetstream” logo and United Airlines’ 1974 “tulip” logo which have become some of the most recognized logos of the era.

Bio from Art of the Title.

The Lissajous curves were created by John Whitney, who for some reason remained uncredited.

"Westworld" (1973, dir. Michael Crichton) pixelation sequences

This is a montage of sequences from Michael Crichton's film Westworld (1973), which was followed by Futureworld (1976, dir. Richard T. Heffron) and the television series Beyond Westworld (1980, prod. Lou Shaw).

John Whitney Jr. used a pixelation technique to graphically illustrate the robot gunslinger's point of view. He completed the effect in four months, using the mainframe computer of Information International. Each frame was digitized individually. Now a common technique, this was the first time pixelation had appeared in a film.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) stargate sequence

Stanley Kubrick's masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) combined both realistic scenes of space exploration with the the metaphysical. No sequence is more famous than the stargate approach, which was credited to Douglas Trumbull. However the slit-scan process was invented by John Whitney Sr. ten years earlier, used first in the title sequence for Vertigo (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock). Whitney had sent test footage to Kubrick, who apparently preferred not paying an outside contractor.

"Girls on Film" (2008) by Julie Buck and Karin Segal

Started in 2011, the Leader Ladies Project presents a collection of “China Girls” (or “Leader Ladies,” as we’ve heard at least one person call them) – the test images of (most often) women that sometimes appear in the countdown that begins every reel of motion picture film meant for exhibition, often accompanied by color bars and gray patches. Their images were used by film lab workers setting color timing or black and white density – and they were sometimes film lab workers themselves. These images are a mix from-the-rewind-bench snapshots we’ve taken ourselves, as well as scans and photos from archivists, projectionists, and film collectors from around the world. Normally not visible to anyone outside a fairly small subset of the film industry, this is the largest publicly viewable collection in the country.

Leader Ladies Project at the Chicago Film Society.

"Rhythmus 21" (c1921) by Hans Richter

One technique of animated film is to draw directly onto the film stock, painting, exposing, or otherwise marking each frame. The technique is painstaking, early directors sometimes working for years on a short work. Or, in other cases, drafting in entire teams to accomplish the task.

The earliest surviving example of abstract film is "Film ist Rhythmus: Rhythmus 21". This short makes its point clear from the title. It reduces film to its simplest component, the rectangle of the frame itself, in order to explore how representations of this frame can move in time. The visual rhythm marks out space with form, and articulates time with successive motions. The function is similar to dance, and it would be appropriate to describe Richter's work as choreographic. 

The following is "Filmstudie" (1926), originally silent. A good number of silent films that you will find online have added soundtracks. These have been created either by the uploader or some anonymous source. I recommend listening without sound at first, since this can skew your perception of the visuals quite dramatically.

Lichtspiel Opus I (1921), Opus II (1921), Opus III (1924) by Walter Ruttmann

Walter Ruttmann's Lichtspiel Opus I premiered in Germany in 1921, the first abstract film to be publicly screened. In the film, Ruttmann mastered the technical means to realise his abstract imagery in film. He patented his particular technical methods in 1921. William Moritz provides an interesting description of his method: '[Ruttmann's] first animations for Opus No. I were painted with oil on glass plates beneath an animation camera, shooting a frame after each brush stroke or each alteration because the wet paint could be wiped away or modified quite easily. He later combined this with geometric cut-outs on a separate layer of glass'.

Ruttmann also envisioned his Lichtspiel Opus I film to closely relate to music and commissioned the composer Max Butting to compose a string quartet for it. In the music score Ruttmann provided many indications to ensure that the music precisely synchronised with the visual elements unfolding on screen.

-- Jennifer Valcke, "Static Films and Moving Pictures: Montage in Avant-Garde Photography and Film"

Parabola (1938) by Mary Ellen Bute

 

Based on a sculpture by Rutherford Boyd. Small models and bent rods are rotated on a turntable. Music is "Création du monde" by Darius Milhaud.

Science Friction (1959) by Stan VanDerBeek

"It is imperative that we quickly find some way for the entire level of world human understanding to rise to a new human scale. The scale is the world. The risks are the life or death of this world. The technological explosion of this last half-century, and the implied future are overwhelming, man is running the machines of his own invention... while the machine that is man... runs the risk of running wild. Technological research, development, and involvement of the world community has almost completely out-distanced the emotional-sociological (socio-"logical") comprehension of this technology. The "technique-power" and "culture-over-reach" that is just beginning to explode in many parts of the earth, is happening so quickly that it has put the logical fulcrum of man's intelligence so far outside himself that he cannot judge or estimate the results of his acts before he commits them. The process of life as an experiment on earth has never been made clearer. It is this danger — that man does not have time to talk to himself — that man does not have the means to talk to other men. The world hangs by a thread of verbs and nouns. Language and cultural-semantics are as explosive as nuclear energy. It is imperative that we (the world's artists) invent a new world language..."

-- Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984)

For more, see the page on UbuWeb and the official website.

North By Northwest (1959, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) titles by Saul Bass

Saul Bass was a famed film title designer, who worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) alongside many other films. From this same era Anatomy of a Murder (1959, dir. Otto Preminger) is a particularly worthy case.

As a designer of studio publicity, movie posters, title sequences and montages, commercials, and corporate logos from the 1940s to the 1990s, Bass heavily influenced the look of both film advertising and Hollywood films. Bass’s poster designs and his credit sequences for Hollywood feature films were extremely innovative in terms of their formal design, use of iconography, and narrative content. His graphic work resembled no one else’s in Hollywood, and his film credits changed forever how audiences looked at the opening minutes of a film. Simultaneously, all his film-related work incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modernist art, translating them into new commercial modes of address and thereby transforming film industry conventions that had remained relatively stagnant for decades. Bass’s designs influenced not only other studio publicity designers and filmmakers but also a whole generation of young designers that he personally trained in his studio.

-- Jan-Christopher Horak in Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design

"A Computer Animated Hand" (1972) and "Futureworld" (1976)

The first 3D computer graphic images (CGI), of the type common today, was created by Ed Catmull and Fred Parke while grad students at The University of Utah. The digitized hand is Catmull's own, from which a cast was made. Vertices were drawn on this shape to create a mesh of 350 polygons. These wer digitised and the sequence animated by moving the camera point of view. Catmull and Parke would go on to found Pixar.

This film was incorporated into Futureworld (1976, dir. Richard T. Heffron), which thereby became with first feature film to use 3D CGI.

"Faces & Body Parts" (1974, dir. Fred Parke)

Fred Parke's "Faces & Body Parts" (1974) demonstrated the first talking polygonal human, using advanced shading techniques. This film was incorporated into Futureworld (1976, dir. Richard T. Heffron), which thereby became with first feature film to use 3D CGI.

Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (1922/66) by Kurt Schwerdtfeger

Schwerdtfeger was born in 1897 in Deutsch Puddiger, now Poland. After fighting in World War I he studied philosophy and art history. From 1920 to 1924 he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar. "Reflektorische Farblichtspiele" (translated as "Reflecting Color-Light-Play") premiered in 1922 at the home of Vassily Kandinsky. It was not documented until 1966, just before the artist's death.

The performers control a bank of coloured lights with a switchboard, while manipulating cardboard shapes. The resulting light-play can be seen to anticipate both expanded cinema and the psychedelic light shows of the late 1960s, though it has a formal grace not often encountered in those activities.