Episode 61 - James Bond Title Sequences (1962-2015) (with Ed Lamberti) (Part 1)

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.