The evolution of opening credits

Saul Bass’s credit sequence for The Man With the Golden Arm prefigured today's corporate identity approach.

In Enter the Void, Gaspar Noe shows us things we’ve never seen before, beginning with opening credits of a rare intensity: big throbbing letters in English and Japanese, pulsating so rapidly they’re almost reduced to a stream of subliminal imagery. It’s dazzlingly modern and in your face, even though it’s essentially just a bunch of different typefaces.

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Noe has taken an intrinsically old-fashioned approach to credits and given it the ultimate makeover.

A lot of today’s movies dispense with opening credits altogether, which is a shame, because there’s nothing like an exhilarating launchpad to give a film lift-off. Until the 1950s, the usual method was to present names and titles on cards, or against an unmoving backdrop, though prestige productions sometimes tinkered with the format: the titles of Gone With the Wind, for example, play out over tranquil vistas of fields, flowers and cotton-picking slaves.

More common were credits like the ones in Casablanca, rolling out against a static map of Africa. It was Otto Preminger who changed things by hiring Saul Bass to pep up the credits of Carmen Jones in 1954 with an animated flaming rose.

The following year, Bass’s credit sequence for The Man With the Golden Arm played with a strong graphic image — white lines rearranging themselves into a junkie’s twisted arm — which was carried over into the film’s publicity, prefiguring the corporate identity approach of modern film advertising, in which everything from Twilight to The A-Team has its own special logo.

Bass, who approached his commissions in the spirit of a problem-solving graphic designer, continued to take his lines for a walk for Alfred Hitchcock at the starts of North by Northwest and Psycho, with the lines morphing into a vortex of whirling spirals in the sublime opening credits of Vertigo. Bass’s ascetic strategy fell out of favour in the 60s, when animated sequences went a bit bananas.

My favourite credits of the 1960s include the eight-minute music-free sequence at the start of Once Upon a Time in the West and Richard Williams’s animated Punch cartoons, fusing historical exposition and political satire with breathtaking economy, for Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. And Binder fans should check out his opening credits for Billion Dollar Brain. Jean-Luc Godard, meanwhile, had the opening credits to Le Mepris read out loud, a ploy repeated by Francois Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451, but one that never caught on in the mainstream, making it still seem pretty avant garde today.

Bass made a comeback courtesy of the movie brats in the 1970s, and went out with a bang — his last completed credits sequence (with his wife, Elaine) was Robert De Niro blasted by a car bomb through a raging inferno of Las Vegas neon in Casino. “When his work comes on the screen,” said Scorsese, “the movie itself truly begins.”

Kyle Cooper’s innovatory titles for Se7en sparked a trend for scritchy-scratchy credits that look as though they were cobbled together by maniacs with OCD. Also notable is Brian de Palma nearly spoiling half the plot of Mission: Impossible in the opening credits.

So what’s next for opening credits? Will Enter the Void trigger a trend for flashing typography? Will Woody Allen continue to use his trademark plain Windsor font? And is the Pope Catholic?

— Guardian News & Media 2010