Saul Bass Movie Posters

Saul Bass could boil a whole film down to one cut-paper shape: a jagged arm, a spiral, a body outline, a hand gripping a briefcase. This gallery collects his theatrical posters, from Otto Preminger's mid-1950s dramas to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining in 1980, shown as the printed sheets rather than modern reproductions. Every poster here carries a Bass design credit in a museum or dealer record. The famous West Side Story one-sheet is left out because it is the work of Joseph Caroff, even though it is often credited to Bass, and his title sequences belong to another list. Watch for the tricks he kept returning to: ragged hand-cut edges, one symbolic object doing all the work, and lettering that looks drawn rather than set.