4 reading summarys

Kinetic Emergence: The Theory and Practice of Motion Design, R. Brian Stone and Leah Wahlin (Editors), forthcoming (2017) from Common Ground Publishing

F R O M K I N E T I C E M E R G E N C E

Understanding Text-Image Composites in Title Sequences

Michael Betancourt

The relative independence of title sequence designs from the demands of drama and narrative in Hollywood’s feature films has allowed them a degree of formal experimentation atypical of these productions generally, and suggests a general theory for the analysis, discussion, and design of text–image composites. While superimposed text over photography used in title sequence designs are the focus of this discussion, the three interpretive modes identified can apply to any text– image composite. The development of this approach to titles follows from the lack, noted by media historian Jan-Christopher Horak in his book Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design, of any formal design theory. Instead, a collection of traditional views about the “ideal” relationship of title sequence to drama have been circulating since (at least) the 1950s. Established approaches to title design follows a hagiography of noteworthy designers—Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, Pablo Ferro, et. al who received on-screen credit—whose work was a model to emulate, neglecting uncredited designers’ work as of lesser interest and significance (Billanti 1982, 60-69; 70-71). These anecdotal approaches do not develop general theories, nor do they propose methods for discussing or analyzing the resulting designs (Horak 2014). What is of interest to the designer in a theoretical approach to design is very different from what is of interest to critical analysis. Theories that designers employ tend to be heuristic, concerned with the material production of work; critical theories are hermeneutic, addressing meaning and significance without concern for productive technique. There is little overlap between heuristic theories and the hermeneutics of use to analysis other than semiotics, which offers a description of general methods producing meaning, that can be used hermeneutically and heuristically. The three modes described in this analysis are adapted from Michel Foucault’s analysis of Rene Magritte’s painting in the book This Is Not a Pipe; Foucault’s theory about the semiotics of text–image composites as an ordering and dominating expression of vision-as-knowledge can be adapted for a general application to title squences. Title sequence design has varied greatly in duration, complexity, and independence from the rest of the film over its more than 125 years of history in the United States (Stanitzek 2009, 44-58). As feature films became the primary type of production, the visuals, running time, and quantity of title cards increased during the 1910s and ’20s paralleling the audience’s understanding of them. The basic modes of interpretation were in common use by the 1930s: the calligram and figure–ground mode, distinguished by their formal design (Betancourt 2015, Semiotica 239-252). Each title card either invokes the direct link of a textual label attached to an identifying image (calligram), or the composition does not propose an immediate association (figure–ground or rebus). The lexical aspect of these distinct modes is precisely the reason for their appearance and deployment in title

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sequences. Foucault’s theorizing of interpretation organized and ordered through a specifically visional dominance equates seeing with understanding, and is embodied precisely in metaphors of vision-as-knowledge; observers gain power over the observed. He uses this conception of sight as a foundation for exploring text–image composites, through Foucault termed the “empirical gaze” in The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault 1975). Seeing dominates what is seen; vision is Foucault’s central paradigm for comprehension, linking visual experience to knowledge contained by language in a relationship of telling::showing. Vision transforms entanglements of text and image, rendering image supplemental (secondary) to language. For audiences, these familiar semiotic modes of text– image relationship (figure–ground, the calligram, and the rebus) render visual designs “transparent” in exactly the same way that written language functions without the need for a self-conscious consideration of the individual letterforms. Each mutually exclusive mode interprets the elements contained by a specific title card (image, text). The two primary modes (figure–ground and calligram) provide a methodology for organizing and designing title sequences that renders their comprehension immediate for the viewer; the title sequence as a whole may employ different modes individually as/in particular title cards. The third, rebus mode provides a model for rhetorical meaning through metonymy and synecdoche that illuminates the shifting interpretations and recognitions of how text–image relate between each title card and the whole sequence. These modes’ heuristic application comes from marking the differences between title designs that produce complex sequences commenting on the main narrative and those that do not.

THE FIGURE-GROUND MODE The Figure–ground mode is the most basic text–image structure. Audience perception of the relationship between typography and image determines the resulting meaning: whether the typography and photography are recognized as being illustratively linked, or remain as separate, distinct “fields” on screen. In the figure–ground mode there is no link between text and image, they are simply shown at the same time. Individual parts of the image remain in separate ‘fields’ articulated independently: there is no intersection between text and image, and they remain unrelated. The figure–ground mode employs text and image remain separate, independent “fields” that are not have no immediately apparent relationship, nor do they imply a connection: historically, it is common for the superimposed text to entirely obscure the background photography. This independence of text–image elements is reflective of categorical differences between connotation (language) and denotation (image): the text is read, while the image is seen (Barthes 1985, 141). The figure–ground mode remains consistent. Designs produced in 1935 and in those made seventy-five years later in 2011 employ the relationship in the same way: in Rumba (1935) the list of names are superimposed over a collection of dancing women; in Unknown (2011) the credits are superimposed over the opening shots of the story. Both Rumba and Unknown were chosen as examples for the figure–ground mode because they are specifically average, typical representatives of the same standard approach. In Rumba, the dancing shadow- women provide a rhythmic background disconnected from the music. Their presence is merely to provide a motion counterpoint to the stillness of the typography. As there are only six title cards in a two minute sequence, this movement is essential to creating a dynamic composition since the text is entirely stationary. In contrast to Rumba, Unknown is organized as an “invisible” sequence, integrated with/into the opening shots of the drama. It does not obscure the important actions on screen. What is important about these compositions is the live action photography, not the credits. The type is placed within the

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photographic composition in empty space (“type hole”) that does not interfere with the photography; this approach to narrative integration was pioneered by Wayne Fitzgerald’s uncredited design for Touch of Evil (1958) (Betancourt 2013). The text is superimposed, arranged not to obstruct the narrative background, but is otherwise unrelated to it. Although the narrative runs continuously, eliding the independence of the title sequence from the rest of the film, the formal relationship of figure–ground remains unchanged. The “end” of the titles in Touch of Evil is only marked by the theme music ending; in Unknown the end is not clearly marked. Integrations of title cards and narrative background require the distinction of text from image that defines the figure–ground mode. The design must simply place the text so it doesn’t obscure the narrative imagery.

Figure 1: The Figure-Ground Mode

Source: All six title cards from Rumba, Paramount Pictures, 1935.

THE CALLIGRAM MODE The calligram functions as a “label” in relation to the background photography in a link commonly used to precisely identify the actors. Both the figure–ground and calligram modes can (and often do) appear side-by-side within the same title sequence. These relations of text–image depend on the recognition of text–image as fused. Foucault defines calligrams in This Is Not a Pipe as entangled text– image combinations where identification and illustration converge, establishing their meaning through the subordination of seeing to reading through a process of enculturation begun in childhood, since the calligram and its structure of image and text are commonly employed in elementary readers for young children:

In its millennial tradition, the calligram has a triple role: to augment the alphabet, to repeat something without the aid of rhetoric, to trap things in a double cipher. [...] The calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read. Pursuing its quarry by two paths, the calligram sets the most perfect trap. By its double formation, it guarantees capture, as

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neither discourse alone, nor a pure drawing could do (Foucault 1982, 20- 22).

Text and image are doubles for each other, teaching their connection as both a function of relationship—the text naming the fruit, ‘apple,’ and the image depicting that fruit converge—and of design, where the proximity and placement of text–image creates a form that reappears as both title cards and as subtitles in motion pictures. Understanding this relationship is necessary to understanding how calligrams are commonly employed: they identify the actors even when the rest of the sequence is structured by the figure–ground mode. In Unknown, a live action shot of actor Liam Neeson at an airplane window is simultaneously accompanied by the words “Liam Neeson” appearing next to his head. Similar direct relationships appear in Danny Yount’s main-on-end design for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): the credit “Robert Downey, Jr.” appears slightly overlapping the actor’s image as “Sherlock Holmes.” The distinction between figure–ground and calligram distinguishes this title card from the earlier ones in the sequence. Even though they also contain images of “Sherlock Holmes” type placement identifies their design as figure–ground, while the slight overlap and proximity of name to image render the calligram’s connections explicit. The audience recognizes this name is a label identifying this man as the actor, connecting his name to his image on screen; this recognition of text-as-label specifically defines the calligram mode.

Figure 2: The Calligram Mode

Source: Title card stating “Liam Neeson” from Unknown, Dark Castle Entertainment, 2011. In a calligram, reading::seeing are a dual articulation of the same idea. The image and the text do not compete for the audience’s attention and understanding, but are fused into a singular unit. In title cards, this linkage of connotation and depiction reiterates the text as the image: in both sequences, the actor—“Robert Downey, Jr.” or “Liam Neeson”—simultaneously appears on screen, identified and labeled with their name; calligrams appear in title designs precisely because of this mutually reinforcing illustration. In seeing the text placement that produces the apparent linkage of name to live action photography—typically in close proximity to the subject—the audience understands that this text is presented as a label; other text placements do not produce such an immediate connection, and so are not understood as calligrams, but as figure–ground. Calligrams link actors with their real world names, serving an essential function in commercializing cinema by identifying the “star” independently of the role played. It connects reading::seeing as mutually reinforcing illustrations through a logic of similarity and duplicitous naming/showing that acknowledges

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the fictitious nature of the drama: the name that the actor responds to on screen is not their own; the calligram counteracts this effacement of real identity by inscribing the “true name” of the actors onto their images, contradicting their behavior in the narrative: “Robert Downey, Jr.” is not “Sherlock Holmes” except within the film. This duality of reality and fiction reiterates Foucault’s understanding that calligrams as demonstrate the clinical gaze actively imposing order through a translation of visual experience into the knowledge contained by language—the label printed on screen: sight actively imposes a hierarchical order on the world. Thus the calligram embodies a subversive duality. By confusing the image with the text, it asserts the principles that make this hierarchy possible (it combines text and image into a mutually dependent relationship asserting what appears to be a singular meaning), while the drama seems to undermine the certainty of the label (the actor responds to a different name than the one shown). The complexity and contradiction of this relationship between text and image becomes apparent once the film drama begins: the actor named in the titles is not typically called by their real name in the drama. This mismatch is foundational; the actors who appear on screen are playing a role, different and distinct from their identities when not playing that role in the motion picture. The role of calligrams is to subordinate image to language: it establishes the boundaries of comprehension—the limits of interpretive and conceptual understanding—in the title sequence, this is the distinction between actor and character. This separation of live actor from fictional role presented/constructed in the film is governed by a set of conventions not least of which is the framing and staging of the film itself to hide and render invisible all the technologies required for its production. This superimposed text is non-diegetic, external to the “reality” on screen, reiterating the enclosed, independent nature of the drama through (paradoxically) instructing the audience in the real identity of the actor distinguished from their character in the story. The audience knows all of this in advance, and the pleasures and attractions of dramatic realism employed in Hollywood films emerge from accepting the fictional “world” (Lackey 1973). Distinguishing between real names and dramatic roles asserted through the calligram marks the boundary of the fictional realm within the film itself. The dualities of naming and showing actors is part of the conventionalized realism of dramatic film, where instead of rupturing the illusion, it draws attention to it as such, allowing the audience to acknowledge this realism is a construct in a complicit, knowing fashion.

THE REBUS MODE The rebus develops a dialectical contrast between image and typography via a rhetorical juxtaposition—metonymy and synecdoche. There are both simple and complex versions of the rebus mode. The simple version depends on the image for the rhetorical meaning; in the complex version, the graphic style of the letters provide this rhetorical content. Identifying rhetoric depends on the audience making connections invoked through the mismatch of one term with another—the text–image relationship draws attention to itself through the ambiguous form of the “rebus” or word–image puzzle (Barthes 1972, 114-116). The a new meaning, a rhetorical excess (Barthes 1972, 109-159), is a poetic transformation revealing itself through recognized, but absent, links and connections invoked in the mismatch of text and image (Barthes 1972, 114-116). The rebus is defined by how it realizes indirect connections between text–image; the simple (and most common) rebus implies its meaning by juxtaposing an independent text with a conceptually related image, making the title card into a visualized metaphor or analogy. The rebus draws from the audience’s past experience with recognizing implied connections: the imaginative (poetic) juxtaposition of text and image. Ambivalence is central to rhetoric, an elliptical combination that challenges

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established meaning by deflecting the image towards its metonymic potential. The various roles “played” by the cartoon panther in David DePatie and Friz Freleng’s design for The Pink Panther (1963) reflect allegorical connections: the choices of “photographic subject,” “conductor,” or “typing” all direct attention to the activity associated with the text. Each title card plays with the relationship between action (performed by cartoon panther) and production role: cinematography, music composition, screenwriting. This form is commonly used in title cards for production credits, distinguishing the unseen work of technicians from the actor’s playing their roles.

Figure 3: The Simple Rebus Mode

Source: Title card from To Kill A Mockingbird, Universal International Pictures, 1962. In discovering the connection contained by a title card such as “written by Horton Foote,” superimposed over a photograph of a crayon in Steven Frankfurt’s design for To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), the audience must recognize the links and ellipses between a crayon used by children to draw and scrawl words and the structured, carefully organized process of writing a screenplay. The superimposed text on this image is not a calligram. The crayon in To Kill a Mockingbird does not illustrate “written by Horton Foote” in the way that the actor illustrates his name “Robert Downey. Jr.” in Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. Yet there is an apparent link in To Kill a Mockingbird: these cards employ the familiar logic of metonymy—this crayon does stand for the act of adapting the screenplay from the novel. It is a strictly linguistic connection translated into visual form, deferring their connection until the audience acknowledges the relationship of text and associated image. These erratic features of language are specifically discontinuous, requiring imaginative leaps to join them in a logic of synthesis arising from a dialectical conjunction of elements, each specifically distinct from another. Rhetoric is incompatible with illustration—the picture is not the statement made by the text. Neither is dominant; text and image have equal weight in their interpretation. This precarious balance animates their meaning, forcing them to fuse into the rebus. The simple connections of crayon–writing are relatively direct links whose metonymy emerges from how the image stands-in for the activity identified by the text: writing is linked to crayon in an immanent relationship between the thing depicted and the activity named. By acknowledging this link, the audience recognizes the nature of these actions and their meaningful re-

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presentation on screen. Categorical classifications of text and image remain unchallenged: text remains linguistic, while image remains graphic. The metaphor rendered visual depends on perceived connections via metonymies between image and text. Their conceptual recognition directs attention away from the illustrative. Until the linkage is made between image and text—a sudden burst of comprehension produced by deciphering these dialectics—the rebus remains unrecognized, masquerading as the figure–ground mode. Indirect connections transform images into text via metonymy—the crayon evoking action of writing itself—mobilizing past knowledge and experience to unravel the rebus’ associative meanings. The same affirmation of dominant order visualized in calligrams (and title sequences generally) changes into an explicit assertion of that order in the rebus. Forcing a consideration of an allegorical meaning, independent of the images/texts alone, deflects photography’s representational status, transfiguring “connotation” to become “denotation,” as Foucault notes about the changed meanings produced by the rebus:

The similar develops in series that have neither beginning for end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obey no hierarchy, but propagate themselves from small difference among small differences. Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it (Foucault 1982, 44).

The rebus renders the image as denotation; Foucault’s distinction of semblance and resemblance describes the movement from mimetic depiction into the realm of semiotics where images become text in the shift between reading::seeing. Abandoning immanent recognition for a generalized meaning, necessarily rhetorical, defines the rebus. The crayon comes to resemble the associated activity—writing—as cyphers functioning not by their representation specificity (resemblance) but thorough abstraction as general signs; this rhetorical deflection is characteristic of the rebus. The similarity between depiction and concept invoked through the text resolves the rebus as a visualized metaphor whose meaning comes from a forced similarity between ambivalent image the lexical meaning. Foucault’s “similitude” is this condition of language, of terms whose meanings emerge from their contextual transformation; it produces what he identifies as rhetoric:

It uses the possibility to repeating the same thing in different words and profits from the extra richness of language that allows us to say different things with a single word. The essence of rhetoric is in allegory (Foucault 1982, 21).

Where a calligram’s joining of text to image produces a doubling or reinforcing of the same meaning, its dialectics creates a new meaning different from what the image shows. The rebus transforms depiction (which always aspires to be what it shows) into a sign whose meaning is other than the depiction. Rhetoric is not just a series of terms arranged, but their deflection and transformation via juxtaposition in series, one term altering the meaning of next—these changes happen fluently for the audience—as when “lightning” modifies and is transformed by “bug” (nobody confuses the meaning of “lightning” and “lightning bug”). The rebus resolves image as a sign, i.e. as connotation (language).

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By transforming vision into reading the rhetorical shift around crayon/writing in Frankfurt’s design allegorically allows these references to move beyond the immediate and superficial representation of writing by this crayon to become at the same moment also a statement about the nature and source of that writing—the choice of this crayon, worn and thick, which appears in use elsewhere in the title sequence rubbing over type to reveal the films’ title, drawing a bird—is necessary to firmly identify the writing as a child’s story; the narrative is from a child’s perspective. The entire sequence is implicated in this single title card. Thus the association of crayon with “written by Horton Foote” suggests the point of view employed in the film, beyond just the metonymic linkage of writing with an implement. The apparent challenge to vision-as- knowledge is a chimera since selection of a particular image (photography is always specific) foreshadows and anticipates the drama. Relations of title cards to drama are common in the rebus—the encapsulation of the film in the opening renders its metanarrative of the film that follows as a puzzle (rebus) because its lexicon is the drama itself: the story unfolding after the title sequence is over decodes the title design. Nevertheless, the decoding is spontaneous, a recognition of relationship and meaning the audience performs fluently. Differences between reading::seeing are fundamental, but familiar roles, readily navigated. Allegory transforms representation into metaphor, in the process shifting the significance of what is seen so its material form serves interpretative ends; instead of being, it signifies. The particularities of the image matter, but only in so far as they engage this new function, as a rebus born in the dialectical relations of text– image. Re-reading the image as language characterizes the simple variant of the rebus. In denying the representational mimesis of photography, the dominance of vision affirms the established hierarchies of thought and interpretation. These recognitions and shift happen readily and fluidly, this process being instantaneous since it is the same sequence of shifts between image and language commonly employed in reading text itself.

The Complex Rebus

The complex rebus develops a rhetoric around the form of the type and its arrangement on screen. The typography becomes an additional “image” commonly ignored in other modes. Shifts in the design and presentation of the text—its graphic style and dress—offers meanings not contained by the text itself. In Pablo Ferro’s first title design, created for Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (1964) has two distinct sections: a voice–over narrative preamble accompanying aerial footage of cloud-shrouded mountains running 40 seconds, and the title sequence itself, running approximately 110 seconds and containing 16 title cards made of irregular compositions mostly filling the screen with outlines of spindly hand-drawn letterforms that either fade– in and –out, or dissolve one into the next, overlaid onto eight live action shots (Heller 2005, 74-79). The film is a satire on the cold war, the title sequence compresses these thematics through the design and the particulars of the lettering used for the title cards. The screen design draws attention to them as graphics, denying language to assert the words-as-image, a reversal that requires an additional layer of interpretation—the rebus. In contrast to other title sequences of the time, these title cards are clearly hand-drawn. Irregular lines and wobbly letters form asymmetrical compositions where the outlines of words fill the screen, but their graphic character does not obscure the live action background. Their combination is comical, the use of hand drawn “type” and the odd sizes and arrangement of text suggests commentary on the events shown in the live action—without directly making any critical or comic statement; this additional meaning foreshadows the satiric drama to follow. Shifting from “letter” to “graphic” opens language onto other types of meaning—a formal rhetoric of

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shape and design that violates fundamental conceptions of typography as primarily a vehicle for reading in an existential challenge to the Modernist conception of typography as focused on legibility, as Jan Tschichold theorized in 1926: “The essence of the new [Modernist] typography is clarity” (Tschichold 1998, 66). This reversal defines the complex form: language becomes something that must be seen rather than read, in the process undoing the semiotics of writing to give primacy to the visuality normally hidden in/by “reading.” Rejecting language returns lettering to its foundations—graphics composed and superimposed over other, photographic materials in a reflexive (and thus potentially critical) re–assertion of sight as organizing process rendering meaning possible.

Figure 4: The Complex Rebus Mode

Source: All 16 title cards from Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, Columbia Pictures, 1964. Displacement and transformation are hallmarks of rhetoric, rendering its meanings apparently natural and immediate, hiding what creates their significance: the excess meaning of the rebus in Dr. Strangelove is contained by neither text nor image. The critical meaning of the title cards in the Dr. Strangelove title sequence is contextually determined by their subversive relationship to then–dominant modernist conceptions of order expressed through typography and design. The oscillation between reading::seeing establishes the complex variant as a repudiation of demands for an untheorized legibility common to Modernist design noted by Horak in his discussion of Saul Bass (Horak 2014, 89-92). In a rare theoretical discussion of this approach, graphic designer Douglas C. McMurtrie identifies this “modern approach” in 1929 with a denial of the graphic nature of the both typography and its arrangement:

“Pretty” layouts on the one hand, and exceedingly bizarre arrangements on the other are to e frowned upon as diverting attention from the message itself to the physical form of its typography, which is always to be considered not as an end in itself, but only as a means to the end that the message can be read (McMurtrie 2001, 147).

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This Modernist bias against the rebus may be the reason for its relative rarity. His denial of meanings presented through the design and composition affirm Foucault’s systems of control and order focused on vision. This dominant system and its hierarchical roles is parodied by the excessively mismatched and out-of scale credits in Ferro’s design: the title sequence itself acts as an affirmation of these systems. The names appear in a certain order, at certain sizes agreed upon governed by traditions and often formally written into the contracts. The “designer title” introduced by Saul Bass in 1954 with Carmen Jones and visibly “signed” with his on-screen credit makes the prestige and egotism of having a spot in title sequence a feature of title design itself—precisely the concern with dominance and the projection of power that the Dr. Strangelove title sequence satirizes as a futile attempt at demonstrating virility (Rosen 1970). This critique emerges through the mismatched scale of names/roles and screen-filling compositions of text. The same aspirational, dominant virility is reiterated throughout the narrative as well—the eponymous doctor’s “ten women to each man” required for the survival of the human race being the most self-evidence example. Yet, the shifts between text-as-language and text-as-graphic are insufficient to create an allegorical meaning without their contrasting superimposition over the B-52 bomber refueling. The instrumental counterpoint of Laurie Johnson’s “Try a little tenderness,” and the sexual innuendo of airplanes mating midair authorizes the satiric/parodic meaning of the rebus: the sequence begins with a view of the refueling line from below (resembling a large metal phallus); only three shots are backgrounds for superimposed type: two from inside the refueling plane, looking down onto the B-52 bomber, and a side view of the fuel line linking the two aircraft. Repetitions joined by a cut—back inside the refueling plane—make a longer sequence than the quantity of footage otherwise allows, rendering the background recognizable even when obscured by a large quantity of text. The complex rebus depends on instabilities of text/graphics in counterpoint to live action imagery; the dialectic of typography, graphics and live action in Dr. Strangelove is not merely a function of the hand-lettering. The title card designs reinforce the graphic identification of the letter-forms as both image and text. Disproportionately large words are self-aggrandizing in contrast to their actual contents: the giant “AND” accompanied by a list of ten names, or the equally outsized “DESIGNER” paired with a small “KEN ADAM” or medium-sized “PRODUCTION” where the name is smaller than the role performed. Even without hand-lettering, the composition of text on screen parodies the title sequence’s self-importance: “MAIN TITLES BY PABLO FERRO” is wedged in- between much larger names—Ferro has repeatedly claimed his credit was literally an after thought, added at the last minute (Walters 2004, 58-62). Similar in approach to the complex rebus, Kyle Cooper’s design for Seven (1995) employs white, scratched text on black title cards combined with a montage of close-up and extreme close-up live action photography. There is a tension to this design between control and catastrophe—the same ambiguity Foucault identified as the fundamental condition of the rebus: cyphers whose meaning depends on their abstraction as general signs. The rebus emerges from how these text/graphics mimic mechanical camera errors. Streaks and smears of hand scratched type reproduce misregistrations of film in the camera as it is being shot, creating irregular flutters, stutter and jitter on screen. “Glitches” in film exposure make the text partially illegible, drawing attention to it as the product of a mechanical, autonomous process, but multiple variants of each title card insure their legibility (Betancourt 2015, Hz). The minimal superimpositions in this design alternates between live action and typography so each receives full attention, the distinctions between title card and image remaining almost inviolate during the title sequence’s two minute running time.

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While the clear distinction between text–image in Seven might appear to be a distinct approach to title sequences, the occasional superimposition and slight overlaps between title cards and live action suggests the separation may be a compromise to allow for a greater degree of graphic manipulation of title cards. In spite of the distortions and “noise” introduced by the simulated mechanical errors, these title cards remain highly legible, a fact that invites a consideration of how the scratched-in letters shift between being graphic and language as the sequence develops. The difference between the credits-as-language (text) and credits-as-broken technology (streaking, jittery graphics) is a conflict between two incompatible systems of interpretation apprehending these images as signifiers of either textual information or technological failure—a pairing that uneasily coexists throughout the title sequence. The resulting tension and conflict within the title cards themselves is accentuated by both the choice of music, Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, and the disturbing and apparently obsessive and psychotic activities shown by its synchronized live action montage. Vision as a dominating and controlling force structures the background montage sequence to Seven: of particular note is the photocopied picture of a child whose eyes are blacked out with a marker; later in the sequence his entire face will be obliterated. The (extreme) close-ups function throughout this design as a focusing of attention on particular actions that due to their isolation in each shot assume an iconic character. Collapsing the difference of text–image reintroduces the affect of visual design into the meaningful interpretation of titles; this concern for issues of composition, style and dress of type is not problematic for the audience. Each image is fragmentary, yet when considered as a sequence suggest repeated, obsessive activities performed over time. This instability of the typography as text undermines the distinctions between reading::seeing that are the foundation of written language, undermining the order this separation creates. The insertion of title cards in between these live action shots thus act as narrative ellipses within this sequence; yet this elliptical understanding is precisely a function of their juxtaposition, the mismatch between title card and photograph— both shift ambiguously between being images and being signs for obsession and madness. Semiotic complexity announces title design as an independent production paralleling the drama—this formal distinction between opening design and narrative reinforces the enclosed filmic “world” as separate from mundane reality. Dr. Strangelove, To Kill a Mocking Bird or Seven exemplary designs, recognized as noteworthy because these shifts between illustration and rhetoric create a reflexive commentary on the drama is the idealized function for a title sequence generally, and is a complex rhetoric closely linked to the identification of a sequence as critically “noteworthy.”

REFERENCES

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