American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 51

York

Opening With a Flourish

graphic-design studio that
"But as
you watch the film and think back to
created the title sequence.

the titles, the themes start to slide
into

place."
Like any

good haiku, the
looks easy but required
great care. "The whole sequence falls
flat if every image isn't just stun¬
ning," notes Jakob Trollback, whose
firm also designed credits for Mira
Nair's Monsoon Wedding and
Hysterical Blindness.
At first, Wright and Trollback
considered using layered imagery in
the transitional shots. They tried
shooting through prisms, rippled
Plexiglas and other transparent
objects that would distort, split or
move the image. The aim was to
create something dreamlike, as
though "you see something that's
sequence

The film's

opening credits
establish

a

sumptuous tone
with

symbolic
subtext.

38

Sometitle sequences set upa film's

storyline, whereas others estab¬
lish a mood. The opening credits
for Vanity Fair are more like a haiku:
spare, elegant and suggestive. A
peacock's iridescent head fills the
screen, followed by a rose, then a
female hand closing around a strand
of pearls, then a swirling Indian
skirt, and then a dry leaf falling into
a
lily pond. Each fleeting image is

September 2004

presented in extreme close-up
against a pitch-black background,
and each suggests an underlying
theme in Thackeray's classic novel:
the mating dance, surface beauty, the
corrupting power of money,
Orientalism, the passage of time.
"When you're watching the titles for
the first time, these things won't
necessarily resonate," says Joe Wright
of Trollback and Company, the New

real, then reach out and find it's

gone," says Trollback. Despite the
beauty of some shots, all but one
were rejected. "It seemed cheap, in a
way," explains Wright. "It felt like we
were adding effects just for the sake
of it."
But the iconic

objects defi¬
nitely needed to be special, almost
"hyper-real," he adds. "The idea was



American Cinematographer - September 2004

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