Read Frame Type Film: Or, Written on the Screen

This ambitious survey chronicles text and typography in 20th-century artists’ films and experimental cinema

From credits to subtitles to title cards and beyond, texts play a critical part in the structure of a film. Yet, away from the world of mainstream cinema, where the work of renowned title designers such as Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro has gained critical consideration, these textual―and visual―elements have often been overlooked. In Read Frame Type Film: Or, Written on the Screen, film curator Enrico Camporesi, graphic design historian Catherine de Smet and designer Philippe Millot aim to address this gap by focusing on an often neglected field: experimental and artists’ films. They bring their extensive research and expertise to a discussion of 24 works from the film collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that offer unique perspectives on the affinity between cinema and typography. Composed of a series of rich explorative texts, accompanying specially commissioned photography of analog filmstrips from the collection, the book is, itself, an experimental object, in which text and images mirror one another.
Read Frame Type Film: Or, Written on the Screen stems from the ambitious "TypoFilm" research project, initiated at the Centre Pompidou in 2020 and dedicated to constructing a genealogy of this understated yet pivotal element of design on screen.
Films include: Anémic Cinéma (Marcel Duchamp), L'Étoile de mer (Man Ray), The Flicker (Tony Conrad), Sailboat (Joyce Wieland), Film About A Woman Who… (Yvonne Rainer), Light Reading (Lis Rhodes).