CAMPORESI, Enrico; DE SMET, Catherine; MILLOT, Philippe
Read Frame Type Film: Or, Written on the Screen

From credits to subtitles to title cards and beyond, texts play a critical role in cinema. Yet, away from the world of mainstream film, these textual—and visual—elements have often been overlooked. In Read Frame Type Film: Or, Written on the Screen, film curator Enrico Camporesi, graphic design historian Catherine de Smet, and designer Philippe Millot discuss 24 handpicked experimental and artists’ films from the collection at the Centre Pompidou in which visionaries like Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Michael Snow, Maurice Lemaître, and Yvonne Rainer open up the possibilities for creative interplay between typography and the moving image. Gathering especially commissioned photography of filmstrips from the collection, with essays by Pierre Alferi and Robin Kinross, the book is a uniquely experimental object, in which text and images mirror one another.

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 set out to pay rigorous attention to the practical, historical, and theoretical relationship between cinema and typography.

Films studied in the book include Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge, Lis Rhodes’ Light Reading, Joyce Wieland’s Sailboat, Gianfranco Baruchello & Alberto Grifi’s Verifica Incerta …

[publishers’ note]

Published by Centre Georges Pompidou / MUBI, 2025
Design by SpMillot
Artists' Books / Film & Video / Typography