SI 520

Film Critique Notes

Fan Guo
Feb. 4, 2011

Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface of the same name, is filmed by

Gary Hustwit in 2007. I feel the film is informational, it poses the greatness of
this font, yet it doesn’t avoid how its prevalence has backfired. The film mainly
aims at common people who are not designers and even have little knowledge
about fonts, graphic design or visual communication.

The film is actually about visual communication. What we visually perceive

indeed have their own voices, which is capable of addressing ideas and emotions.
This particular way of communication is ubiquitous, it speaks in a “subliminal”
manner which is unaware of most people. Typefaces, as one of the designers
remarked, are “colors” of the text, it cast additional meaning to the words
beside the semantic content (though Helvetica is seen as “neutral”, some think
such lack of meaning would bore their sh*t out). To introduce the nuances in
visual communication is what the film intends, this is also the main focus of our
course.