- Director:
- Gary Hustwit.
Yeah. That's a lot of Helvetica.
I’ve studied design — I have a degree and everything — I’ve dabbled with typography (and with lettering), and, beneath my veneer of post-modernism and cyborg feminism, I’m a modernist at heart. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Helvetica, the quintessential modernist typeface. Still, while its history and ubiquity are undoubtedly interesting, I wouldn’t have thought any typeface, even Helvetica, could generate enough material to fill a feature-length documentary.
Thankfully, director Gary Hustwit has realised the same thing, and instead uses Helvetica as a sort of jumping-off point to discuss broader issues surrounding typography and design in the modern and post-modern ages. Using a talking-head approach to documentary film-making, the film’s interview subjects cover not only the creation of Helvetica (by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann in the 1950s), but, more interestingly, a history of graphic design. The film explores the dialectic between designers and Helvetica: from being the signature of functionalism and 1960s corporate branding, to the post-modern reactions against the values seemingly implicit in the typeface itself, to a sort of synthesis or rehabilitation of minimalist tropes in contemporary graphic design. It’s a fascinating journey: the modernists who view Helvetica as ideal because it is empty, and doesn’t impose a meaning of its own on the design; the 1970s counter-culture designers who see in Helvetica, because of its ubiquity in corporate branding, the nadir of capitalism and globalism; the contemporary, post-modern designers who return to Helvetica as, simply, a well-designed font.
As a documentary about a typeface and that typeface’s impact, Helvetica is genuinely fascinating. But because it stays so close to Helvetica, it’s excursions into general design history never amount to much more than sketches. There’s not enough context to what the interviewees are saying to make it really work unless you come into the film knowing your design history, and it all ends up feeling a bit shallow. I know the film is called Helvetica for a reason, but I can’t help thinking it could have been a much more interesting film if it, instead of tethering itself quite so tightly to Helvetica, had just dove head-first into the history of typography and its relationship with the wider world of graphic design. At the very least, I wish they’d given a bit more information about the various talking heads, even if it was just a list of their better-known works. Still, it’s quite enjoyable to see people talk knowledgeably and passionately about a subject they clearly feel strongly about, and Helvetica is without doubt the best font documentary I’ve seen.
