Before the opening scene, before the first line of dialogue, there was an art form that set the stage for everything to follow: the title sequence. From the 1950s through the 1980s, designers like Saul Bass, Maurice Binder, and Robert Brownjohn transformed opening credits into miniature masterpieces—kinetic, atmospheric, and essential to the film's identity. Bass's spiraling graphics for Vertigo, the haunting simplicity of To Kill a Mockingbird, the playful cat-and-mouse elegance of Catch Me If You Can—these weren't mere lists of names but carefully crafted overtures that established tone, built anticipation, and signaled that something special was about to unfold. This essay explores the golden age of title design, examines why this art form has largely disappeared from contemporary cinema, and celebrates the designers who understood that how a film begins is just as important as what it becomes.

Why do films from the 1940s look more vivid than movies made last year?

The answer is three-strip Technicolor—a process so expensive and complicated that it required splitting light through prisms, printing three separate negatives, and transferring dyes with microscopic precision. For forty years, it created the most gorgeous images ever committed to celluloid: the impossible reds of The Red Shoes, the hallucinatory colors of Black Narcissus, the pure visual intoxication of Powell and Pressburger's cinema. Then, in 1975, the last lab closed. The cameras were scrapped. We replaced perfection with convenience—and we've been chasing that magic ever since. This is the story of how cinema lost its most beautiful look.

When Kurosawa shot Seven Samurai, he framed every battle, every desperate face, every rain-soaked sword within a nearly square frame. When David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia, he stretched the desert across a frame nearly three times wider than it was tall. These weren't technical decisions. They were artistic ones. The shape of the frame determines what you see, what fits in the composition, what the film can mean. This is your guide to understanding the formats and ratios that define cinema—and why they matter more than you think.