Design in Film Exhibition - Block Museum, Evanston

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 30, 2017 | permalink |  |  

I will be attending a day-long conference that is to help organize the 2018 Designers in Film exhibition at the Block Musuem of Art in Evanston on October 5. It looks like a great exhibition and I'm glad to see they will be publishing a catalogue to accompany it. The exhibition presents the work of Chicago-based design firm, Goldsholl Design Associates, (Morton and Millie Goldsholl and the associates affiliated with their firm) showing these practitioners’ extensive impact on design and film nationally from the 1950s through the 1970s.

image: Millie Goldsholl, Morton Goldsholl, Wayne Boyer, Larry Janiak, and Dick Marx, Still from Kimberly-Clark Corporation “Fortune and Faces,” 1959, 16 mm film, 12:48 minutes. Mort and Millie Goldsholl Collection, 1942–1980, Chicago Film Archives.

story © Michael Betancourt | published July 1, 2016 | permalink |  |  

The title sequence has been a common element in the presentation of motion pictures throughout their history in the United States. The organization of title sequences has varied greatly in complexity, duration and distinguishability from the central drama over the more than 125 years of motion picture production in the United States; the earliest examples were produced by Edison's Black Maria studio in the 1890s. These title sequences were minimal, a simple title card that served as a unique identifier for purposes of copyright registry; however, with the shift to dramatic, feature length narratives the need for text on screen became increasingly necessary to present dialogue and other narrative information.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published June 29, 2016 | permalink |  |  

The design of motion picture title sequences in 1930s Hollywood employs one of two approaches: (1) the figure-ground, where superimposed text where the background is independent of the typography, (2) the calligram, where the integration of the type and background imagery to produce a single, composite effect. The title design for the 1936 film The Big Broadcast of 1937 enables a consideration of how these two approaches intersect with the structure and role of the title sequence in relation to the main narrative that follows, and the interpretative modes employed in deciphering this exemplary title sequence.

"The Calligram and the Title Card" was published in Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Volume 2015, Issue 204, Pages 239-252
ISSN (Online) 1613-3692, ISSN (Print) 0037-1998

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 7, 2014 | permalink |  |  

My article discussing the title sequence for Dorish Wishman's 1965 film Bad Girls Go To Hell is out on Bright Lights Film Journal.

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 30, 2014 | permalink |  |  

My article on the titles to Bullitt is now out on Bright Lights Film Journal.