Romek Marber Film Titles

Psyche 59 Film Titles

Romek Marber’s work on the design of animated film titles began in 1964. Though movies always had some kind of initial titling to carry the film’s name and credits the 1960’s saw the emergence of a fresh approach. Here, the art of visual storytelling in small segments of time was raised to the status of an art where the mood, context and key plot elements were encapsulated. In this emerging genre Romek’s commissions included a powerful animated trailer for Peter Watkins’s nuclear war docudrama The War Game (1966) that was considered so powerful (and disturbing) as to be banned from public broadcast until its first re-screening in 1985 by the BBC. Though the techniques Romek used to create these film titles may now seem elementary (in comparison to current digital techniques) their inventiveness and directness delivered a significant visual shock to a nation unaccustomed to such strong graphic images. Prior to creating the trailer for The War Game, Marber designed film titles for Columbia Pictures, for Alexander Singer’s dark psychodrama Psyche 59 (1964) which stand alongside the titles of other designers, such as Saul Bass, who transported their talents into this new genre of graphic storytelling. His title designs for Mira Hamermesh’s Passport  (1967) similarly utilised the graphic qualities of handwriting and high contrast black and white portraits to create a haunting atmosphere of migration during wartime.

Bruce Brown
Emeritus Professor and friend