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 center the beauty and innovation of a neglected body of works: experimental and artists’ films. 

They bring their extensive research and expertise to a remarkable study of 24 handpicked films from the collection at the Centre Pompidou in which visionaries like Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Michael Snow, and Yvonne Rainer open up the possibilities for creative interplay between typography and the moving image. Composed of rich explorative texts and specially commissioned photography of filmstrips from the collection, 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.