Episode 61 and 62 - James Bond Title Sequences (1962-2015) (with Ed Lamberti)
The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The names Bond…James Bond in Episodes 61 and 62, as Chris and Alex tackle the official Eon James Bond 007 film series by casting their eyes over a longstanding staple of the franchise - the celebrated credits sequences. Beginning with Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) and culminating in Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), listen as they place in rank order their ‘Top 24’ title sequences, judging their audiovisual spectacle, structural elements and broader connections to traditions in animated fantasy (Part 1 focuses on Bond films #24 to #13, while Part 2 counts down from #12 to their #1 ranked 007 title sequence). Joining them for this extended double-header is Dr Ed Lamberti, an independent researcher in Film Studies who has been a teaching assistant at King's College London, a screenwriting mentor at the London Film School, and who is currently Policy Manager at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). In 2019, Ed published his monograph Performing Ethics through Film Style, which discusses the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas alongside films directed by the Dardenne Brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. He is also the editor of Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age (2012), and the assistant editor of the upcoming V. F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism (2020). Listen as the trio examine elements of design, movement, rhythm and pacing in the Bond titles; the gendered imaginaries and Anglophonic fantasies of race that support the sequences’ progress of imagery; authorial figures such as Maurice Binder, Robert Brownjohn, and Daniel Kleinman; questions of coherency and the relation between image and soundtrack; and the broader structural role of the credits across the Bond series. Quite simply, nobody does it better.
Suggested Readings
Béla Balázs, “Type and Physiognomy,” “The Play of Facial Expressions,” “The Close-up” and “The Faces of Things” in Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (trans. Rodney Livingstone, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 27-51.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 16-28.
Christopher Holliday, “James Bond and Art Cinema,” in The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007, ed. Jaap Verheul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 229–248.
Jan Christopher Horak, “Branding 007 : Title Sequences in the James Bond Films,” in The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007, 249-268.
Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
Mark O’Connell, Catching Bullets: Memoirs of a Bond Fan (Hampshire: Splendid Books, 2012).
V.F. Perkins, “Form and Discipline,” in Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (London: De Capo Press, 1993), 59-70.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962-3): 1-8.
Alexander Sergeant, “Bond is not enough: Elektra King and the desiring Bond girl,” For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond, ed. Lisa Funnell (London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), 128-138.