Meet Your New Insect Overlords: Saul Bass' Phase IV (1974)

The result of super-ant efficiency

While I was at the park one day with my daughter, we found a black column of ants racing along the top of a stone ledge. There was hundreds of them. If you let your eyes blur a little, they looked like a single pulsing line, weaving smoothly back and forth.

I thought how remarkable it was that all these creatures were coexisting in perfect, peaceful efficiency. Though they scrambled over each other and gave each other no space, you never saw them stopping to fight or, really, stopping at all. They were completely focused on the task at hand. This is a skill humans have yet to master. In fact, we may not be capable of it at all, or even want to be.

Structures built by the evolved ants

That's the basic horror of movie credit sequence king Saul Bass' sole feature directorial effort, Phase IV. The leisurely-paced sci-fi features ants who are somehow altered by a cosmic happening, so that they evolve more quickly and achieve hive mind, a sort of collective consciousness, that gives the creatures the power to build structures, create ever more powerful societies, and overtake every other living creature, including the human race. Their chief previous weakness: fighting between different species of ants, suddenly ceases to be an issue and they all begin to work together. Now nothing can stand in their way, because they possess the perfect ability to organize and execute tasks without interruption.

The queen watches a lowly subject. Why didn't this girl grab her when she had the chance?

Just like a gaggle of blank-faced zombies, the ants' advantage over people isn't so much their technical abilities as the trouble they save because they are not distracted by emotion. As they are portrayed in the film, it is implied that perhaps these insects possess some sort of feeling, at one point they conduct a sort of funeral service for fallen comrades, but even then, everything is approached with cool efficiency and a complete lack of the messy disorder human emotions can bring. You're never sure if it is grief or a sense of duty that inspires their actions.

A funeral, ant style

The action in Phase IV alternates between the orderly underground world of the ants and a pair of scientists who are studying them from a sealed dome-shaped lab in the Arizona desert. In an area where all other humans have fled or been killed by the ants, they alternate between spraying the ants with yellow, sticky poison and trying to decipher the urgent messages they appear to be sending them. They are joined by a teenage girl who is the only surviving member of a local farm family that was attacked by the ants.

Another trouble-making ant

It never seems like the scientists are entirely clear as to what they should be doing. They don't hesitate to kill thousands of ants at a time with the easy fix of poison, and yet they also spend considerable time mulling over those messages. It never seems to occur to them that they shouldn't be angering this suddenly mighty force. They are accustomed to looking down on insects, and killing them at will. That attitude leads to their downfall.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Phase IV is its so-called lost ending, which was not so much lost as rejected and forgotten by Paramount Studios. This bizarre series of images shows exactly what the ants end up doing with the remaining humans, and it is a fate both disturbing and fascinating. The footage was rediscovered in 2012 and shown as an alternate ending at select screenings of the film, one of which I saw at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2013.

An image from the "lost ending" that ended up in the film's trailer

I've heard some grumbles that this remarkable sequence is on the pretentious side and a bit too heavy-handed with its message, but that won't matter to any fan of Saul Bass. It is the perfect culmination of his many years of visual experimentation and innovation, and it's presented like a never-ending acid trip. You can see how a room full of movie executives may have been put off by such a bold vision, but the marketing team seemed to disagree, as many of the images in the film's official trailer come from that sequence. While there don't seem to be any official DVD or Blu-ray releases that include the ending, it's easy enough to find online, and well worth a look.

Even sans the bizzaro ending Phase IV didn't make a splash at the box office. That's not too surprising. It's hard to imagine a moody, slow sci-fi film without big scares or effects, or even a charismatic star or two, attracting mainstream audiences. This was a film destined to attracted a cult following, which it has over the years. If you can accept it on its own low-key terms, and view it in a patient mood, it can be a rewarding watch. It definitely makes you afraid of messing with ants, and all without blowing them up to enormous size or resorting to cheap thrills and jump scares.

This is my entry in the Nature's Fury Blogathon, hosted by Cinematic Catharsis. Check out the site for more entries.

Five Things I Learned from Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design

Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design
Jan-Christopher Horak
University Press of Kentucky, 2014

Saul Bass is perhaps the only title sequence designer to have achieved superstar status among movie fans. His innovative take on the credits for films like Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) are almost as celebrated as the films they announced. In some cases, like with the mesmerizing cascade of bells in the opening of Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957), they were better than the film; a fact occasionally noted by critics, and which could inspire a cool reception from offended filmmakers.

Aside from credits sequences, Bass' posters, marketing campaigns and even his participation in aspects of making films were both controversial and highly influential. His style is still revered today, as can be seen in the very Bass-like design of titles and promotional materials for productions including Mad Men, Dexter, Catch Me if You Can (2002) and Django Unchained (2012). The influence was not only in the appearance of the sequences, but also in the way they engaged viewers from the first frame and prepared them emotionally for what was to come.

In his study of Bass, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive Jan-Christopher Horak examines the designer's cinematic career, influence and work in great detail. He also touches on the designer's early advertising designs, and how they evolved into the iconography that would sell films in much the same way he'd promoted other, less glamorous products. Horak addresses Bass' authorship, acknowledging his role as the leader of a creative team that was critical to his success, including Art Goodman, his wife Elaine Bass and most of all Herb Yager.

In addition to its thorough history of Bass' career in the film industry, the book is heavy on analysis, both technical and intellectual. There's lots of talk of "x-y axes" and "upper left quadrant" and each moment of Bass' title sequences is examined for various meanings. It's a volume best suited to design fanatics and academics, and I found myself glassing over as I waded through some of the details, but as a movie fan I learned many interesting tidbits about Bass.

Here are a few of the good ones:

1. Marketing films was only a part of Bass' decades-long career. His design studio is responsible for some of the most famous logos in advertising history, including images for Girl Scouts of America, Lawry's Seasoned Salt, United Way and Quaker Oats. Many of them are still in use today.

The Girls Scouts of USA logo is one of Bass' most enduring designs

2. Creating title sequences was a labor of love for Bass. They were expensive money losers, time-consuming and kept the designer from focusing on more lucrative work. Still, they were his lifelong passion. While there was a period where his style was out of vogue, he designed sequences for directors like Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas [1990], Cape Fear [1991], Casino [1995] and The Age of Innocence [1993]), John Singleton (Higher Learning [1995]) and Penny Marshall (Big [1988]) up until the final years of his life. This is a great compilation of Bass sequences from the early years to his final triumphs:



3. Movie posters were much more cluttered before Bass. They tended to be crammed with as many photos, credits and artist's renditions as possible. The designer had worked on film publicity for a few years when he changed all that by designing an elegantly simple poster for The Man With the Golden Arm which featured a graphic of a crooked arm, the names of the stars and a few colored blocks. Eventually the studio got nervous about the lack of glamorous faces and slapped a few photos of stars Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker around the design, but his bold vision made a significant impact:

Bass' original design

The more cluttered studio version of the poster

4. In the pre-digital days of its production, Bass and his team used manual means to create the high tension titles for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). They painted dozens of six-foot aluminum bars, which they then pushed at precisely planned distances and speeds. The sequence required several takes, as the bars would not always track smoothly.



5. Bass made the short film Bass on Titles, in response to designers and film fans who were curious about his methods. It packed a few screenings at film festivals upon its release in 1977. While Horak notes that it is as much, if not more a promotional effort than an educational one, it is nevertheless interesting to hear the designer talk shop:





Many thanks to University Press of Kentucky for providing a copy of the book for review.

Ten Great Saul Bass Posters

Today is the birthday of Saul Bass; awesomely talented graphic designer, credit sequence king and filmmaker. I'm celebrating by sharing some of my favorite Bass-designed posters. Not all of these were actually used for advertising movies. The studios were often wary of Bass' minimalist designs, and lack of star faces: