Still life … homepage of the Movie Title Stills Collection website. Photograph: www.annyas.com/screenshots
I am grateful to Abraham Thomas, curator of designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for having written online about this fascinating website, the Movie Title Stills Collection. It is assembled by a Dutch web designer, Christian Annyas, who besides tweets news of new additions to the site under the name MovieTitles.
Like Mr Thomas, I am becoming more than mildly addicted to this site, which induces a prediction trance-like state. It is a enormous collection of film titles, that Annyas has taken taken in the character of screenshots and put up online, ordered by decade: 1920-1929, 1930-1939 etc, right up until 2010-2019, although as far in the same manner through I can see, Annyas has not hitherto got around to adding any substance later than 2009. He has two genre groupings, for film noir and westerns, and an “updates” section for new additions to the collection.
There is something about sight the screen compressed into the size of a playing card which gives a distinctive, piercing vividness to the frozen images, particularly the title lettering, which at this size all but seems to glow or scintillate, like an optical illusion.
Weirdly, a page full of movie titles almost seems to abolish generic differences between the films: they seem be pleased with single emanations from one startlingly unusual and imaginative mind. With very few exceptions, the titles are somehow unfamiliar: even a film you know well tends to have existence represented here by a grabbed, frozen image which is usually not one you associate with it.
There is a fascination in comparing, say, the title young hog. of Harold Lloyd’s Girl Shy (1924) with that of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). When I was a postgrad student, working on the rarefied universe of Renaissance literature, researchers prided themselves upon being able to glance at the title page of each early printed book, and not above seconds perceive from typography and layout if it was published in the 16th, 17th or 18th century; with a couple more seconds, they would apprehend which half of the correct century it was from. I think I can more or less do something similar with the movie titles here. Perhaps Mr Annyas could design software for a random generator – at a clink it would produce an undated pellicle title, without giveaways, what one. could test our innate historical sense?
However, perhaps what emerges from comparing the 1920s to the 2000s is how similar they basically are in form, how short the grammar of film has changed, and how young the artform in fact is. Anyway, this website is a treat.
