Helvetica, The Film: A Movie For The Font For The Masses

Movie traces history, trends, entertains with unabashed opinions and unequalled insights

To watch the singular movie Helvetica is to laugh and to understand.

The movie, produced and directed by filmmaker Gary Hustwit, has been making waves ever since its debut at the South By Southwest (SXSW) 2007 festival, selling out its showing there, and selling out most every showing at every venue it’s appeared at, and generating the sort of buzz other pictures with they’d had along the way.

On one level it’s very simple, and on another it’s complex. One can enjoy it on either level, or none, just letting the skillful interplay of images and witty commentary delight and entertain.

Two Weaving Threads

While the thrust of the picture is about the font itself and its development, a parallel theme of action and reaction amongst well-known typographical names such as Sagmeister, Speikermann, Zapf, Hoefler, Frere-Jones and others plays in and out of the main motif.

The development of Helvetica is a matter of some, if a somewhat incomplete, record. In the 1950s, inspired by the call to modernism, the Haas Type Foundry debuted Neue Haas Grotesk, an updating of Akzidenz Grotesk. This was the dawning of the time of the so-called Swiss style of design, which the visual arts world seemed to have an insatiable hunger for. Re-christened with the more marketable name Helvetica, inspired by the Latin name for Switzerland (Helvetia), it was just what the world wanted at the time it wanted it. Faster than one could say “sans-serif”, it seemed, the font went ’round the world, conquering ads and annual reports with dizzying speed.

The story of the film doesn’t limit itself there, however. The filmmaker goes to great length to contextualize it in its times; from the time when Hevetica was fresh and new to the time when the visual arts world developed the contempt only thorough familiarity can breed. Interspersed with this are the pure unabashed thoughts of typographers and graphic designers from legends to young turks, which run the whole gamut of opinion from inspirational love to disdain.

Characters on Characters

The font is the thing that ties all the opining together, and the pure, unafraid comments are some of the decided high points of the movie. The sight of Rick Poynor contextualizing and demonstrating the impact of Helvetica in different ads is alone worth the price of admission, as is listening to David Carter explain why he set an uninspiring article on Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats (movie critic Roger Ebert expressed a similar emotion when he said a particularly bad movie did not improve on staring at the same spot on the wall for the same length of time).

There was laughter, but it was laughter borne of understanding, of watching someone pontificate unselfconciously, going as the spirit moved them; the designers interviewed are witty and entertaining in the truest best sense, and watching them being moved by their perceptions was warm and funny in the truest sense, and one felt the exhilaration coming from each speaker almost as a tangible thing.

A Threefold Path

It is said of some things that one either likes them or hates them, but with Helvetica it is indeed possible for one to either like it, hate it, or not to care, all as equally valid alternative emotions; lack of notice of Helvetica is a testament to its universal force, its capacity to simply carry information, simply. Naturally, the movie concerns itself with the worldwide reach of the font, and that much is true; from its humble beginnings as an Akzidenz Grotesk revival in the late 1950s, it has indeed conquered the world.

But it seems to me that Helvetica suggests that there’s room for all three opinions; that it’s okay to love, hate, or be completely indifferent to it.

It also bears mentioning that it’s simply a superb film, skillfully done and engaging whether or not you’re a typophile or designer.

For more information, visit the film’s site here. It’s currently on a worldwide tour, and may be coming to a screen near you soon.