We’re definitely suckers for a good film title sequence, so here is a pick of the best. Art of the Title is a compendium of film and television title design from around the world. The video below is a good summary of what they do. Check out the video on Vimeo for a full list of film titles used.
Posts Tagged ‘Film’
A Brief History of Title Design
Monday, April 4th, 2011Ry Cooder – Paris, Texas
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
Guitarist Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris Texas is an exercise in the beauty of simplicity. Cooder gave a twist on what was fashionable in 80s guitar music, a sort of pastoral and nostalgic take on melodies which would work well for any western. Very few instruments are used throughout, often only a guitar twang and scratching ambience working as mood enhancement (or diminishment) rather than traditional songs to complement this vision of the American mid-west from German master of the camera Wim Wenders. It’s for this reason that Paris Texas is one of the few films where it’s soundtrack can claim to be as equally good as the film itself. Give it a listen, here.
The film tells the story of a man who is found wandering in the desert by his brother who helps him pull his memories back from the life he led before walking out on his wife, 4 years previously. As his memory returns he makes contact with various characters from his past. The film was a deserved winner at Cannes, it’s power of image and story which starts in the imposingly beautiful border zone of southwest Texas. The lilting, eponymous opening song gives the audience an emotional handle to the scraggly, baseball capped man we see wandering alone in the desert.
The crux of the film is a group of characters who although love each other, have competing desires and interests. The various identities are shaped by pulitzer winning writer Sam Shepard and complemented so perfectly by Cooder’s soulful, improvised guitar licks. This goes some way to shaping Wenders’ introspective portrait of a family striving against their own disconnects and the reformation of a classic western hero, an essential loner who is crucial to saving a community of which he can never be a part.
There are few times in music where so few notes have said so much. The album’s opening title track and its closer, “Dark Was the Night,” (originally by Blind Willie Johnson) are prime examples of its plaintive, haunting sound. This is ghostly, atmospheric film music of the highest order. Give it a listen, here.
Check out other soundtrack reviews, here.
Bob Dylan – Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010From the beginning of film, music has been involved in its presentation. In the early 20th century, live music was used to indicate certain narrative and emotional cues for silent moving pictures. If the animated actor sensed danger, the music would speed up and if that same actor fell in love with the heroine, a ballad could be heard throughout the theater. A good soundtrack is inexorably attached to a movie and will, for good or bad, remind you of that film, just as the images are now married to your favourite songs. What is becoming a regular feature on the blog, we look at great films through their soundtracks – find the rest here.
Knockin' on Kristoffersons door
Billy: Ol’ Pat… Sheriff Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe ring. How does it feel?
Garrett: It feels like… times have changed.
Billy: Times, maybe. Not me.
Bob Dylan survived a near-fatal motorcycle crash in 1965, but his artistic persona of the day did not. The drug-fueled wild-haired rock poet who could churn out a million songs a minute was gone forever. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for if he had continued along that course, he probably wouldn’t have survived to the present. Instead, he calmed down a little, and for the next decade took a kind of whimsical, laid-back approach to his music. There’s some really interesting material from this period – anyone not familiarized with Self Portrait or New Morning should grab it yesterday – but the most unexpected project he undertook was a collaboration with famed director Sam Peckinpah on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
How's Jesus look to you now, Bob?
One of the finest westerns ever made (especially the director’s cut), it tells the story of Pat Garrett (Kris Kristofferson), erstwhile travelling companion of the outlaw Billy the Kid (James Coburn) who has become a sheriff, tasked by cattle interests with ridding the territory of Billy. After Billy escapes, Pat assembles a posse and chases him through the territory, culminating in a final confrontation at Fort Sumner, but is unaware of the full scope of the cattle interests’ plans for the New West. The powers that be want Billy out of New Mexico, not for ethical reasons, but rather so that things can be neatly protected for the approaching business exploitation. “Billy, they don’t like you to be so free!” proclaims Bob Dylan’s theme song, summing up why the power men find Billy so irritating – his refusal to compromise and his declaration of his own personal independence.
Director Peckinpah uses two regular themes in most of his work, the death of the West, and men living past their time and deciding whether or not to accept change. The cinematography is beautiful and haunting at the same time and matches the mood and characterization in the film. Pat Garret knew he had a job to do, but just could not handle the fact it was a friend he had to kill. The myth and actual facts of the last days of Billy the Kid play out the doomed friendship between the title characters – but the film is really about the death of an American way of life. The best and saddest moments in the film involve characters who know they are going to die and accept it. Using Bob Dylan’s score could have been intrusive to this subtle film, and made it feel tacky in a trying-to-be-hip kind of way. Instead the score works well and gives the film a soulful feel. It’s testament to the director’s skill that he chose to make a work about the end of the myth of “Billy the Kid” instead of glorifying it further. Neither Garrett nor the Kid are very admirable in this film, they feel distant because there is no moral centre to the film – as there was little or none to real 19th century West – an empty space, scenery and some misfits of various backgrounds trying to make a living in an inhospitable domain.
Hell, that was a year ago. I shot him straight up.
Dylan composed the score for the film, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything else in his catalogue. There is, of course, the signature acoustic guitar and harmonica, but the tracks (most of which are instrumental) have a windswept south-of-the-border feel. When you hear the Spanish guitar picking and the leisurely congo drums, you feel almost as if you’re wandering through prickly pear thickets in Sonora. The score is defined by the iconic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, which is one of the songwriter’s finest works. His version (which remains the definitive interpretation) is bare and sorrowful; in the film, it accompanies a scene in which an old outlaw watches the sun set while dying from a gunshot wound. Dylan recorded the final version of Knockin’ On Heavens Door at a session on Warner Bros. Records soundstage in Burbank, California. “It was very early in the morning,” recalls drummer Jim Keltner. “I think the session was 10 a.m There weren’t any overdubs on that, the singers were singing live, little pump organ and guitars. This was for a particular scene in the movie when Slim Pickens is dying and that’s the first time I ever cried while I played. It was the combination of the words, Bob’s voice, the actual music itself, the changes, and seeing the screen. In those days you were on a big soundstage, and you had this massive screen that you can see on the wall, with the scene running when you’re playing. I cried through that whole take.”
As an extra incentive, Dylan also acted in the film, playing the role of a knife-throwing outlaw. His character plays an important part, representing the storyteller that passes down the legend of this story to all generations. If you’ve ever wanted to see Bob Dylan slay someone with a knife, now’s your chance. If you’re planning to watch it, go for the full 122 minute director’s cut, which is immeasurably superior. Download the soundtrack here.
Download – Bob Dylan – Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid Official Soundtrack
Andy Warhol – Empire
Monday, February 8th, 2010A musical event took place in New York yesterday, 8 hours of solid sound – a live accompaniment from Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler and Jan Jelenik to Andy Warhol’s Empire – a film notorious for its one, unchanging shot of the Empire State Building. The eight-hour, five-minute film, which is typically shown in a theater, lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Warhol lengthened Empire’s running time by projecting the film at a speed of sixteen frames per second, slower than its shooting speed of twenty-four frames per second, thus making the progression to darkness almost imperceptible. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time. According to Warhol, the point of this film – perhaps his most famous and influential cinematic work – is to “see time go by.”
Angry dragon
The shot was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. on July 25-26, 1964. Empire consists of a number of one-hundred-foot rolls of film, each separated from the next by a flash of light. Each segment of film constitutes a piece of time. Warhol’s clear delineation of the individual segments of film can be likened to the serial repetition of images in his silkscreen paintings, which also acknowledge their process and materials. Warhol conceived a new relationship of the viewer to film in Empire and other early works, which are silent, explore perception, and establish a new sense of cinematic time. With their disengagement, lack of editing, and lengthy nonevents, these films were intended to be part of a larger environment. They also parody the goals of his avant-garde contemporaries who sought to convey the human psyche through film or used the medium as metaphor.
The live soundtrack / concert / event kicked off the Unsound festival. Krakow’s Unsound festival is working with local cultural institutes, organizers, curators and venues in New York to produce Unsound Festival New York. This 12-day event involves concerts, club nights, specially commissioned work, panel discussions, workshops, exhibitions and video screening. It will take place across Manhattan and Brooklyn, revealing connections between music genres and audiences, ranging from experimental to club orientated music. Later this week We Love… favourite Carl Craig will be performing a live electronic soundtrack to Warhol’s 1964, Factory shot, 35 minute long silent film Blowjob which depicts the face of an unaccredited man as he receives fellatio from an unseen partner.
Other acts appearing at various venues during the festival are Untold, Petre Inspirescu, Newworldaquarium, Moritz von Oswald and Vladislav Delay.
Cormac McCarthy
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010“The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.” Blood Meridian
There is no God and we are his prophets.
A master of the terrible and all things macabre, Cormac McCarthy is a firm favourite here in the We Love office. His tales of destruction and torment, from the scalp hunting gangs of the Deep South at the time of America’s birth to the scavenging degenerates of a post apocalyptic world, offer welcome relief from the sun-kissed paradise of Ibiza. And its not only us that think so, Hollywood it seems has the same opinion. The 2007 film adaption of his novel No Country For Old Men saw massive critical and commercial success winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture. With an adaptation of The Road (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and my personal favourite) set to hit the big screen any minute it seems McCarthy’s views on death, destruction, trials and tribulation have struck a cord with the cinema going public.
Frequently sited as one of, if not the, top american writers of our time, McCarthy has that rare ability of depicting a world the likes of which we have never seen.
“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.” The Road
Along with The Road, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men I also recommend Child Of God and Cities of the Plain. All great reads perfect for these long winter nights.
Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Heroes / Helden
The film itself is based on the testimony of a teenager (Vera Christiane Felscherinow) who gets involved in drugs at 12, hooked on heroin by 13 and a prostitute by 14 to support her habit. She became part of a notorious group of teenaged drug-users and prostitutes, mainly at the largest train station in West Berlin – Bahnof Zoo. Her story came to light after a meeting with two journalists while she was a witness in a trial against a man who paid underaged girls with heroin in return for sex. The journalists wanted to expose the problem among teenagers in Berlin which was plainly surrounded by strong taboos. Christiane provided an in-depth description of the life of drugs and prostitution that she and other teenagers in West Berlin experienced in the 1970′s. Her interviews were extensive, taking a total of 2 months to produce. A book was eventually published chronicling her life from 1975 to 1978, when she was aged 12 to 15. In 1981 the story was made into a film directed by Uli Edel. Christiane worked as an advisor on the film and much is shot on location in authentic and gloomy surroundings of Gropiusstadt and Bahnhof Zoo. The actors here are genuine teenagers, around 14 to 15 years old. This makes the film so much more powerful and shocking, and much more believable. The effects of heroin on these kids is staggering to behold; they turn into these sickly shadows of their former selves, like zombies, in search of their next fix. And strangely, Christiane and her friends never seem to enjoy the high from the heroin. You will never see such a bleak vision of kids lost in a surreal hell of drug addiction. And to add further to the intensity, the film is long, 138 minutes uncut, becoming steadily darker and seedier by the minute, until the viewer wonders just how long can this young girl go on like this without completely self-destructing. And amazingly, throughout the running time, the film never preaches, never becomes sentimental, as most American drug films often do. The film style is specifically German.
Verite
It’s interesting to note the film does not glamorize heroin, as soon as the hard drug abuse begins in the film, the mood changes entirely. The uplifting and snappy music of Bowie whom Christiane worships is heard frequently throughout the first section of the film – there is a moment of insight and revelation when Christiane goes to see Bowie in concert – where he appears as himself in the film. After her and her friends fall into heroin addiction the Bowie music symbolically disappears, to be replaced by the eerie Eno-driven sound-scapes. The atmosphere is gritty and dark, pulling no punches with its depiction of Berlin in those days. The days look dark and gloomy to begin with, as the film progresses the day resembles more and more the night. Great locations and beautiful if functional photography complete this unique, raw and graphic film. In it’s nature it completely takes away the idea of the highs and lows of the typical drug film.
Some of Bowie’s very best music is compiled here. There are the obviously cinematic tracks – the steely proto-techno glide of ‘V-2 Schneider’, the dark ambience of ‘Warszawa’ and ‘Sense Of Doubt’ – alongside the jagged pop of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. ‘Christiane F.’ holds one fascinating rarity, too: a version of his finest song, ‘Heroes’, that lapses into impassioned German halfway through (extracted from the German edition of the ‘Heroes’ album). As the faintly ludicrous climax of Bowie’s infatuation with the Deutsche scene, it completes an essential and compelling album. You can download that track here. By the mid-’70s, he developed an effete, sophisticated version of Philly soul that he dubbed “plastic soul,” which eventually morphed into the eerie avant-pop of 1976′s Station to Station, which took the plastic soul of Young Americans into darker, avant-garde-tinged directions, yet was also a huge hit, generating the top ten single ‘Golden Years.’ The album inaugurated Bowie’s persona of the elegant ‘Thin White Duke,’ and it reflected Bowie’s growing cocaine-fueled paranoia. Soon, he decided his Los Angeles lifestyle was too boring and returned to England; shortly after arriving back in London, he gave the awaiting crowd a Nazi salute, a signal of his growing, drug-addled detachment from reality. The incident caused enormous controversy, and Bowie left the country to settle in Berlin, where he lived and worked with Brian Eno. Once in Berlin, Bowie sobered up and began painting, as well as studying art. He also developed a fascination with German electronic music, which Eno helped him fulfill with the work which went on to make up the majority of this soundtrack album.
After the initial success of the book and the film, Christiane found herself becoming an unlikely celebrity, both in Germany and other countries in Western Europe. A subculture of teenage girls in Germany began to emulate her style of dress as well as making visits to the Bahnhof Zoo station, which became an unlikely tourist attraction. This surprised authorities on youth drug abuse, who feared that despite the film’s bleakness and the many sordid scenes (particularly those portraying the horrific realities of cold turkey), vulnerable youths may have regarded Christiane as a cult heroine and role model. Wolf Heckmann, West Berlin’s drug commissioner of the time: “The book and film have increased interest in drugs in this city. Kids who come to visit used to ask to see the Berlin Wall. Now they want to see the Zoo Station.” The book sold so well (it was translated into most major West European languages) that Christiane remains able to support herself from the royalties. Christiane still receives fan-mail and is occasionally contacted by the German media, wanting to know how she is doing after all these years.
Download: David Bowie – Heroes / Helden
Original Soundtrack on Discogs
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen
Monday, November 23rd, 2009The folks at Pitchfork have offered up this 45-minute film, offering a candid glimpse of Cohen’s pre-singer-songwriter days. Directed by Donald Brittain and Don Owen, produced in 1965, this 45-minute promo for the then youthful looking Leonard Cohen functions now as a faded cinematic snapshot of the man who, in the forty years since the promo was made, has evolved into arguably the world’s greatest living poet. You can buy this on VHS or DVD if you want to own it. The DVD has a few supplemental short films and a couple of marvelous video montages coupled with Cohen’s poetry.
Click to watch
Easy Rider – Route From The Movie
Monday, November 23rd, 2009The countercultural opus starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper followed a route which exposed spectacular landscapes and locations to a generation. A Harley Davidson fanatic over at Mr Zip 66 has put together a guide to following the route Billy and Wyatt took from California to Louisiana. He kindly provides a few tips to get you started: “First off, don’t sell coke to finance your trip. If you do, don’t tell anyone. Definitely don’t put coke money in your gas tank, because it’ll lower your gas mileage. If you want to go to Mexico and pretend to buy coke in an old truck, knock yourself out. Put it in 2 motorcycle batteries and go sell it to someone who looks like Phil Spector in front of the runway at LAX. Phil would probably still buy it from you, but he’s busy now serving his murder sentence. Don’t be offended if he fails to calls you back.”
First of all, watch this it will set the tone for the whole run:
He provides shots from the film along with pictures of how these places look now – some remarkably unchanged. For example: “The Sacred Mountain Gas Station. It used to be a gas station, but now it’s the home of someone. He’s a nice guy. He will more than likely tell you some good stories. He may not. Either way, you’re on an adventure. Tell the hippie he owes you a tank of gas.”
Sacred Mountain Gas Station in the film
Sacred Mountain Gas Station today
When you get to New Orleans, it’s Mardi Gras. Its Mecca man! Party like a rockstar, do whatever you do, because tomorrow you’re going to get shot by a short redneck. I’m not trying to be a downer, I’m just saying. It could happen. The rednecks in the Louisiana coffee shop who taunt the boys, and the two in the pickup truck at the end of the movie, were all local residents recruited by the filmmakers. In the case of the coffee shop denizens, the filmmakers were preparing to audition a group of local theater people when Dennis Hopper saw Buddy Causey Jr., Duffy Lafont and several others watching them and making wisecracks and decided to use them instead.
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Look sharp
Sitting comfortably in a dark room, dazzled by the light and the movement which exert a quasi-hypnotic power … fascinated by the interest of human faces and the rapid changes of place, cultivated individual placidly accepts the most appalling themes … and all this naturally sanctioned by habitual morality, government, and international censorship, religion, dominated by good taste and enlivened by white humor and other prosaic imperatives of reality. – Luis Buñuel
Controversial?
Luis Buñel and Slavador Dali created this 16-minute short film in 1929 featuring a series of startling and horrifying visions. Iconic imagery such as a womans eyeball being sliced slowly open with a razor blade crosscut with a similarly shaped cloud moving across the moon was received well by surrealists of the time and continues to be shown regularly in film schools and societies today.
At this time, cinema was still a new art-form prime to be experimented with. Buñel and Dali were not scandalists but definitely sought attention from intellectuals and newspaper editors alike. Buñuel and Dalí carried sacks of rocks in their pockets on opening night as self-defense, expecting a negative response from the audience. They were disappointed when the audience enjoyed the film, making the evening “less exciting”, according to Dalí. They followed a simple formula that if words can be poetic and a picture can tell a thousand words thus a moving image can be more meaningful still. For example: The French phrase “ants in the palms,” (which means that someone is “itching” to kill) is shown literally when ants emerge from a wound in a hand in a sort of Freudian stigmata. The filmmakers were fascinated by what the psyche could create through its suppressed emotions.
The film has been referenced copiously in pop culture, from David Bowie showing the film in its entirety at the beginning of every concert during his 1976 “Station to Station” tour. (If you’ve ever heard an audience groan at the opening scene, imagine an entire auditorium, most of whom were undoubtedly seeing it for the first time.) Most famously perhaps is Pixes song Debaser from the album Doolittle. Un chien andalou is referenced when sung by Frank Black “Slicin’ up eyeballs / I want you to know!”. To quote Frank Black: “I wish Buñuel was still alive. He made this film about nothing in particular. The title itself is a nonsense. With my stupid, pseudo-scholar, naive, enthusiast, avant-garde-ish, amateurish way to watch Un chien andalou (twice), I thought: ‘Yeah, I will make a song about it.’ [He sings:] “Un chien andalou”…. It sounds too French, so I will sing “un chien andalusia”, it sounds good, no?”.
Although many cinéastes have tried to psycholanalyse the filmmakers, Buñel made clear through his correspondence with Dali that “no idea or image lending itself to rational explanation would be accepted … Nothing in film symbolizes anything.”
The film is so powerful today because themes of love, sex, death, and decay are eternal and will always attract artists and audiences alike. If you are interested in surrealism, film or both, this would be a great place to start.
By way of Wikipedia sourced trivia we discovered both of the leading actors eventually committed suicide: Batcheff overdosed on Veronal on April 13, 1932 in a hotel in Paris, and Mareuil committed self-immolation on October 24, 1954 by dousing herself in gasoline and burning herself to death in a public square in Perigueux, Dordogne.
The 25 Most Shocking Moments In Movie History
I Love Hotdogs
Thursday, November 19th, 2009If your into classic and cult films it would be worth your while to check Shannon Maldonado’s I Love Hotdogs. Several times a week Shannon curates a selection of stills from a particular movie. Her selection process sometimes includes typographic and design details that can easily go unnoticed (think street signs, window lettering, etc.). For fans of the art of film title design, there’s plenty of that stuff as well.
Some of the more benign and banal films appear more powerful in still form. Try the slapstick (but hilarious) Airplane or a bit of computer love with Tron.
Teenage Mother - 1967, The voiceover of this trailer is the best: “Teenage Muhtha, means nine months a’ trouble!” and “May very well be the most impawtant movie you will ever see!”
Total Recall - 1990, Arnold Schwarzenegger in a turban. If I am not me, then who the hell am I? -Douglas Quaid
They Shoot Horses, Don't They - 1969, Who would ever envision a dance contest becoming so grotesque and absolutely heart breaking. Roberts sad eyes, the sleaze ball contest producer, the unraveling of Alice, that poor pregnant girl, the disco ball and let’s not forget Jane Fonda. Aside from the characters: the clothes, hair, the ballroom decorations and soft lighting - all perfect!
Airplane - 1980, Hilarious bits: the dance scene at the dive bar, “Jive Talking” with subtitles (Ah, 80s racism), the inflatable auto pilot.
Tron - 1980, “Trapped inside an electronic arena, where love, and escape, do not compute!”
