Compare and contrast a Saul Bass film poster to a Russian Constructivist poster created by Gustav Klutsis. Discuss the use of line, tone, color,...

One's
understanding and interpretation of Gustav Klutsis's art must take into account its basic
purpose as propaganda. His posters were evidently intended to glorify the Soviet state and its
ideals, and the purpose of Constructivism in art was a negation of the dominant ethos of the
previous age, "art for art's sake." Art becomes "functional" and must serve
an outside cause.

Of course, in the hands of Klutsis the functionality, or
propaganda value, is still done artistically. There is an emphasis on a forceful, linear
directness in which abstraction is linked to photographic representation. We see, for instance,
a figure of Lenin in an almost mechanical pose superimposed on straight-linesuggestive almost of
an Egyptian pyramid, while workers are shown apparently constructing a dam. The effect is to
juxtapose the heroism of the present, in the form of the "leader" and his workers,
with the mythic power of the past, existing largely in the unconscious but here awakened by the
artist.

What Saul Bass achieves in his posters and film title sequences is in
a sense the opposite of a propagandistic aim, but the outward technique is similar to that of
Klutsis in the linear images that convey an almost frightening message in their immediacy: their
stripped-down forcefulness.

An iconic Bass image is that for the film
The Man with the Golden Arm in which an arm and hand are silhouetted in an
angular, rigid form that suggests seizure or paralysis. The film was the first to break the
Hollywood production code and to openly depict drug addiction; hence, Bass's poster implies
literally the arm into which one is shooting drugs but figuratively the dysfunctional, frozen
mental state into which addiction plunges one. The harshness, the dry unadorned quality of the
artistry is similar to what we see in Klutsis.

But Klutsis projects a
"clean," confident message of the Worker's Revolution. Bass is showing, by contrast,
an image of despair. Similarly in his poster for Anatomy of a Murder (like
The Man with the Golden Arm a film directed by Otto Preminger) Bass shows
us a negative-like portrait of a body, the head, limbs, and torso of which are detached from
each other. It is like a cardboard cut-out, dehumanized, depersonalized, and fragmented. As a
kind of mechanical man it has the same robotic nature as the realistic, photographic
representations of Klutsis's posters, but again, Bass projects a mood almost of terror in
contrast to the intended optimism of Klutsis's propaganda for the Soviet
state.