Title sequences as film heritage. From informative documents to artwork
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/Fotocinema.2019.v0i18.5512Keywords:
Title Sequences, Opening Credits, Graphic Signs, Film Archeology, Ramón de Baños, Manuel Hernández SanjuánAbstract
During the first decades of Cinema History, before the electronic character generators were invented, title sequences were drawn in paper, filmed and manually edited in the movies. One of the many anonymous members of the technical team, usually skilled in the craft of design, was put in charge of drawing the signs, the textual and graphic symbols with whom the film story begun. The vast majority of those papers has been lost, but there are still examples that allow us to study how credit titles were made before the electronic and digital systems irrupted in the cinematographic industry. This article analyzes the physical, functional and symbolic role of these documents based on the study of a collection of signs and credit titles that are preserved in the Spanish Film Library and that have been catalogued by the author of this contribution. These papers include title sequences designed by Ramón de Baños and Manuel Hernández Sanjuán, two important filmmakers in the History of Spanish Cinema.
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