Read Frame Type Film : Or, Written on the Screen

Read Frame Type Film stems from the ambitious “TypoFilm” research project, initiated at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020 and dedicated to constructing a genealogy of this understated yet pivotal element of design on screen. Long before the advent of the digital realm, we have been reading on screen. 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 narrative, industrial cinema, where the work of renowned title designers like Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro has gained critical consideration, these textual and visual elements have often been overlooked. In Read Frame Type Film, film curator Enrico Camporesi, graphic design historian Catherine de Smet, and designer Philippe Millot aim to address this gap by focusing on a neglected body of works: 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 that capture the affinity between cinema and typography. Composed of a series of rich explorative texts, accompanying specially-commissioned photography of analog film strips from the collection, the book is itself an experimental object in which text and images mirror one another. It spotlights the endless possibilities of interplay between images and text and centers a long-overlooked art form in the history of moving images. Read Frame Type Film is a book developed from the ambitious “TypoFilm” research project that was initiated at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020, dedicated to constructing a genealogy of this understated yet pivotal element of design on screen. Bringing together graphic design historians and specialists in artists’ film and video, the project, a book in which text and images mirror one another, set out to pay rigorous attention to the practical, historical, and theoretical relationship between cinema and typography.