In elementary matte titling over a pictorial background,
two identical mattes of the printed and designed title
cards were produced, one printed black on white and
the second white on black. When the first was exposed in
an optical printer against the background footage the
director or producer wanted used under the titles, what
resulted was an image of the background with the text
initially represented as a blank area in the image corresponding to the precise shape of the lettering on the title
card. The second matte was then printed optically over
the picture, with its white (or sometimes colored) text now
perfectly registered with the blank areas of the picture.
This second optical pass printed or colored in the words
of the title, frame by frame. The main title of Hitchcock’s
Rear Window (1954), for example, unfolds over a screensized matchstick blind slowly being raised on picture
windows that look out on a Greenwich Village courtyard
(the largest and most complex set ever constructed on a
soundstage to date, dramatically revealed to an eager
audience when the matchstick curtain ‘‘goes up’’). Matte
titling was a laborious process demanding extremely
precise registration of mattes and background plates.
Nowadays, virtually all feature film titles are produced on the graphic designer’s computer, using a
graphics or animation program, and then transferred
directly to 35mm film. This procedure has made possible
the design of increasingly dazzling and optically challenging main title sequences, such as Gary Hebert’s main title
for The Bourne Identity (2002), with its superimposed,
horizontally racing type. Ironically, it is possible to design
title sequences in such a way that viewers become so
stunned and incapacitated by what they see that they
cannot read the credits.
Main credits need not be legible or even visible. In
The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942),
Fahrenheit 451 (Franc¸ois Truffaut, 1966), and
M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), the opening credits
are read by an offscreen voice; in Uccellacci e uccellini
(Hawks and Sparrows, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966), they
are sung. Nor is credit information invariably superimposed upon a graphic background in what appears to be a
simple textual overlay. In One from the Heart (1982),
Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939) re-creates the fabled
casinos of Las Vegas in miniature, placing the opening
credits on their neon marque´es as the camera gently
glides past. In Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994), the camera
lovingly pans over a decrepit environment containing
refuse and old signposts on which the main credits have
been painted as a part of the scene. A similar technique is
used with main titles embossed on road signs that float
above tinted aerial shots of New York in Jungle Fever
(Spike Lee, 1991) and on urban signage in Hollywood
Homicide (2003). In West Side Story (1961), Saul Bass’s
main title, involving considerable aerial photography as
well as tracking shots on the street, is designed with the
use of graffiti on neighborhood walls. The main title of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) is choreographed as a dance routine. Credits can zoom forward on
the screen (the main title for Superman [1978]) or backward (the receding signatures of the principal cast in the
end credit of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
[1991], and the receding text in the main title crawl for
Star Wars [1977]). An interesting variant on the movement of text is the top-to-bottom front credit roll of Kiss
Me Deadly (1955).
Not every mainstream fictional feature film has an
elaborate and optically stunning main title. Since Annie
Hall (1977), Woody Allen (b. 1935) has insisted on the
same credit sequence for every one of his films: title
information printed in white on a plain black ground.
Credits often imitate the style, tone, symbolism, or precise imagery of a film; in spoof films, the credits are often
spoofs themselves—for example, in the end credits of the
Airplane films (1980, 1982), viewers can spot ‘‘Worst
Boy: Adolf Hitler’’ (a parody of the Best Boy credit,
which goes to the cinematographer’s chief lighting assistant). End credits in Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986)
acknowledge not only a gaffer (a cameraman’s lighting
assistant) but also a goofer and a guffer; and not only a
key grip (the person responsible for handling the camera)
but also a key grope. The end credits of Hot Shots! (1991)
contain a brownie recipe.
In experimental films, such as those of Stan
Brakhage (1933–2003) or Bruce Elder, it is the norm
for the filmmaker to accomplish, or at least be intensively
involved with, most technical aspects of production and
thus to have what may be termed a ‘‘personal’’ relation to
the film. This is nicely exemplified by the scratched or
hand-painted credits used by Brakhage. In Normal Love
(1963), Jack Smith uses title cards that seem homemade,
even embodied: the credits are composed of awkward
squiggles of dark fluid, possibly blood, intertwined with
various grasses on a pale background.
The title name credit of a film is the producer’s to
determine. When film distribution rights are sold internationally, as is normally the case in the twenty-first
century, a film name may be changed to facilitate distribution abroad. A few significant examples: Les Deux
anglaises et le continent (Truffaut, 1971) became, for
release in the United States, Two English Girls, thus
omitting reference to a young man from France (nicknamed ‘‘le continent’’) for an audience who think of a
‘‘continent’’ not as a person but as a place. Antonioni’s
Professione: Reporter became The Passenger (1975). The
British film, A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell,
1946) was imported to America as Stairway to Heaven;
Du Rififi chez les hommes (Jules Dassin, 1955) became,
simply, Rififi. American film titles crossing the Atlantic
in the opposite direction are equally changeable: The
Errand Boy (Jerry Lewis, 1961) in France became Le
Zinzin de Hollywood.
Main title design typically aims to be eye-catching,
enigmatic (and therefore alluring), graphically exciting,
and allusive, if not part of the story itself. In Walk on the
Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk, 1962), to the sound of
Brook Benton (1931–1988) crooning the title song, the
camera shows a sleek and streetwise black cat striding
across the frame in linked slow-motion shots, symbolizing the tough, no-nonsense femininity of Capucine
(1931–1990) and Jane Fonda (b. 1937) and positioning
the story in the vulgar ‘‘gutter of life.’’ By contrast, for
the main title of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the
opening credits appear in plain, stark white letters against
a cosmic scenario in which the sun, the moon, and the
earth align at the moment of an eclipse. This is animated
as if seen from an extraterrestrial perspective of shocking
proximity, while the galvanizing opening bars of Richard
Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra are performed by the
Berliner Philharmoniker. The credit sequence for 2001
became both legend and the stuff of considerable affectionate parody. A similarly cosmic theme is struck in the
main title of 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002), in which
various graphic shots of the twin towers of light that
shone nightly in New York in tribute to the victims of
September 11, 2001, become background for the modestly sized principal credits. This chilling sequence
prepares us for a stark tale of a sad and troubled city
filled with sad and troubled characters.
Kyle Cooper’s title for Se7en, produced with rapidly
shifting type and several layers of integrated design superimposed upon one another, as well as large-grain photography and image fragmentation, has come to symbolize
the new wave of screen titling that began in 1990. Hard
to decipher and tensely poetic, the title projects a dark
foreboding to the audience. In an economical pre-title
sequence, we encounter Detective Somerset (Morgan
Freeman) dressing himself for work in the morning,
attending the scene of a murder, and meeting his new
partner, Mills (Brad Pitt), a slightly contentious younger
man. ‘‘I want you to look, and I want you to listen,’’
Somerset tells him. We then see him preparing to sleep, a
metronome clicking beside his bed as the background
fills with sounds of offscreen, argumentative voices. A
clap of thunder cuts to the main title sequence, which
is composed of shots glimpsed only briefly so that reading the overlaid text and the image behind it presents a
challenge. A notebook, a razor blade held in fingers,
blood in water are shot in macro close-up and held
onscreen far too briefly to be thoroughly ‘‘read.’’ The
text is composed in what appears to be handmade scribbles whose letters sometimes jiggle and shift. Photographs
are cut and pasted into a notebook, apparently badly
spliced film is mixed with hand-scratched film and multiple exposures, and the musical track vibrates rhythmically with sounds that occasionally seem artificially
speeded up. All of this gives us much to see and much
to hear, yet at the same makes it difficult to sort out the
fragments and to establish meaning. Since the film is
about detectives decoding the signals left by a particularly
elusive and brutal serial killer, the opening sequence
functions to prepare the ground for the narrative and to
establish the dark modality of the story.
Often, main titles are so fanciful that they stand
alone as films-within-films. Spielberg’s Catch Me if You
Can (2002) opens with a charming animated main title
sequence recalling both the 1950s graphic titling designs
of Saul Bass and the 1960s animated main titles used for
Jerry Lewis’s The Family Jewels (1965), here set to the
accompaniment of John Williams’s jazzy tarantella. For
Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2002), the film treatment of a comic book saga of a blind superhero, the main
title is designed to resemble the dark and highly saturated
color printing of comic book art: skyscrapers are seen at
night, their various windows suddenly lit up with the
principal credits in simulated Braille.
Touch of Evil (1958) opened in its first commercial
release with main title cards superimposed by the studio
over a much-celebrated four-minute-long sequence: a
detective (Charlton Heston) and his new wife (Janet
Leigh) walk through the streets of Juarez toward the US
border station, while street traffic slowly swirls around
them. One car is a flashy convertible, in the trunk of
which a man hid a bomb in the film’s first moment. The
couple trades pleasantries with the border guards as the
car purrs beside them. They circle the car nonchalantly.
‘‘There’s the sound of a clock ticking in my head,’’ says a
woman riding in the front seat. Nobody listens to her.
The car glides on. Just as the titles end, the newlyweds’
romantic conversation reaches its peak, and they kiss.
Boom!—there is an explosion as their lips touch. We
cut to see that the car has blown up. The director
Orson Welles himself regretted that the studio put titles
over this sequence, because it was meant to stand
independently, and the titles were to appear at the end
of the movie. In 1999, on the instigation of Jonathan
Rosenbaum, the restored film was released according to
the director’s intentions.