Why Man Creates

https://vimeo.com/27784020

Good morning Monday! Here’s a 1968 short film by legendary designer Saul Bass, ‘Why Man Creates’, for some start of the week inspiration. 🙂 Via OpenCulture:

An eight-part meditation on the nature of creativity, the film mixes animation and live action, using Bass’ advanced repertoire of optical techniques, to look at the issues surrounding how and why humans have, throughout the history of civilization, kept on making things. It begins with early hunters felling a beast and making a cave painting out of it. From that cave rises a tower built out of every major phase of human civilization: the wheel near the bottom, the pyramids somewhat higher up, the literal darkness of the Dark Ages as the camera rises higher still, ultimately capped by a heap of planes, trains, and automobiles. One wonders how Bass might, in an update, have stacked his representation of the internet atop of all this, but the sequence’s datedness costs it none of its virtuosity.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass is best known for his work for filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, and was particularly known for his title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm, so visually iconic that it continues to inspire creative work today.

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