Helvetica
directed by Gary Hustwit
Swiss Dots, 2007.
There is nothing I love more than a person’s obvious enthusiasm for his or her work.
Passion attracts. It connects. It is a siren call.
Helvetica is a documentary about the place of font in the world of design and in our everyday cityscapes. It features interviews with many graphic designers from Europe, England and America, some of whom are positively giddy about their love for Helvetica. Giddy love for a font from a sixty-something Mike Parker is truly endearing. And now I am hearing Helvetica pronounced lovingly in a variety of accents, Dutch, Italian, German, the vowels musically drawn out. Helveeeticaaa.
The movie opens, predictably, with a typesetter setting the title of the movie in the eponymous font.
Do you remember the opening of Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park? It is at first hard to tell that the surfaces to which the camera cleaves so closely are the surfaces of ink, quill and paper. The extreme close-ups temporarily suspend meaning, and there is simply a loving, lingering look at the texture of pulp, feather and ink. A knife slices through a piece of paper, and the shot is lit so that the fibres of the paper stand out against a dark background and look like the fine hairs on skin. This, the shots suggest, is where it all began: with paper, quill and ink.
Flash forward to the next century.
Helvetica opens with the same kind of lingering, close-up sensuality: the ink-stained hands of a typesetter, the typesetter’s ancient wooden box of letters, the thick smack of the viscous ink onto the roller, the assured click of type locked into place. And at the end of the sequence, Helvetica, is expertly printed right before our eyes, apparently inexpertly filmed by an unsteady camera. The type is rock solid, the camera shakes.
Then a quick shift to Times Square and a rapid series of images that demonstrate the ubiquitous use of Helvetica in city signs, corporate identities, and bureaucratic forms.
The film was made to commemorate the font’s 50th birthday, and it traces how Helvetica has gone in and out of fashion in the last fifty years. I loved how Hustwit not only showed its use in cityscapes—restaurant signs, subway signs, advertising—but also the lives being led around it. His camera angle is wide enough to encompass the life of the city so thoroughly printed in Helvetica.
My brother-in-law, Greg Betts, told me about this film, so I ran out to buy it, and, well, you know the rest. It sat in a TBR (TBW?) pile for months.
O! Beloved blog, reducer of the TBR pile.
I am not a fan of sans serif fonts, myself, but this movie made me realize that my preference is with reference to small print (books and computer screens) and formal print (inscriptions in stone). For these, I think a serif is essential.
The film examines print on a much larger scale, and it makes the point that font is often supposed to erase itself so that the meaning of the word is paramount. I found this argument most eloquently made with reference to city signs: make them clear, legible and functional. Designer Eric Spiekermann says that the viewer should not be aware of the font at all, and his own erasure from the process of communication is what he strives for (ironic given his exuberance and strongly expressed opinions, including a dislike for Helvetica).
Interviews with graphic designers chronicle the changing fortunes of Helvetica: its rapid adoption by designers in the 60s, reactions against it in the psychedelic 70s and grunge 90s, and its return to favour at the turn of the next century.
The film captures is own closure neatly, too, by showing Freitag messenger bags being made out of recycled advertising canvas, some printed in Helvetica.
The film ends with Rick Poyner pointing out that, with the advent of social media like My Space and blogs, font is now equivalent to fashion in how we want to express ourselves to the world.
Looks like it’s time to upgrade my wordpress account so that I can express myself in Perpetua.
Nathalie Foy 
You know, I started reading this review thinking “Why would anyone make a movie about a font?” and ended it thinking “That actually sounds really cool.” 😛
It *is* really cool! I loved it. He gets that question a lot, apparently, and his answer is “Helvetica is just a film that I wanted to see.” He was a font designer for a while and then gave his fonts away for free on the web. This from the dvd liner notes: He once saw one of his “ugly” fonts in use for a CNN story. “My first thought was, ‘Wow, 500,000 people just saw that, I wonder if I influenced them somehow?’ But then I noticed the word they’d set in my scary, dirty, disgusting-looking font: ‘welfare.’ I mean, what’s so bad about our society helping those who are less fortunate? Why not a clean, optimistic-looking font? And who made that decision in the first place? I think that’s when I first realized the true power of typography.”