Pablo Ferro's titles for Dr. Strangelove are a provocation. Hand-lettered type — loose, irregular, conspicuously handmade — stacked over military aircraft footage in mid-refueling. The contrast between the delicacy of the letterforms and the weight of the subject matter is the joke, and the argument: what could be more absurd than the bureaucratic machinery of nuclear annihilation?
Ferro's approach was a direct rejection of the geometric precision of Bass and Brownjohn. Where they reduced to clean forms, he introduced mess and human imperfection. Where they were modern, he was handmade. The result looks as contemporary today as it did in 1964.
This is type as personality, as attitude. The letterforms tell you how to feel about the film before a single scene begins.