Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Credits
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
388 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM