“There was only one Saul Bass. He was a gentleman, a brilliant raconteur, a marvelous collaborator and, as I’ve said before, a truly great artist. And – let’s be honest – a giant.”
— Martin Scorsese
“Saul Bass wasn’t just an artist who contributed to the first several minutes of some of the greatest movies in history; in my opinion his body of work qualifies him as one of the best film makers of this, or any other time.”
— Steven Spielberg
“Bass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like Vertigo, a mini-film within a film. His graphic compositions in movement function as a prologue to the movie – setting the tone, providing the mood and foreshadowing the action.”
— Martin Scorsese
Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (usually labeled, albeit inaccurately after 1934, as the “Hays Code”) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.
As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence and homosexuality.
(via missavagardner)
“Horror films don’t create fear. They release it”. - Wes Craven
(Source: kennethangers, via howtocatchamonster)
“This shot is the most expensive shot in silent film history. It was filmed in a single take, that had to be perfect, with a real train and a ‘dummy’ engineer (notice the white arm hanging out the conductors window). Some of the locals who came to watch the filming, thought the dummy was a real person and screamed in horror; supposedly, one person even fainted.”
(Source: maudit, via thebubblyterror)
The orchestration of images and angles. It doesn’t mean you don’t have good dialogue. It just means you need to tell it visually. It’s not enough to just photograph people talking.
-Peter Bogdanovich
(via missavagardner)
Happy Valentine’s Day!
“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” - Dr. Seuss
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
—Oscar Wilde
“I am a French filmmaker who has thirty films to shoot in the years to come: some will succeed, others not, and it’s just about all the same to me, as long as I can make them.”
— François Truffaut, 1966
(Source: strangewood, via missavagardner)
