#From russia with love images series#

вЂIt was all done in the camera, which is the way I like to do films, you know. Interviewed a couple of years later he explained: Unlike Saul Bass, a man who mapped his sequences to the second, BJ dived into the process without much of a plan. BJ had never worked with live action before he made the titles, and, unknown to him, nor had his animation assistant Trevor Bond. Although the sequence works brilliantly in its context at the opening of a mainstream movie, it remains an extremely open-ended and positively experimental piece of film. вЂItвЂ™ll be just like thisвЂ™, he exclaimed, вЂexcept weвЂ™ll use a pretty girl!вЂ™ And, pretty much, it was. The final result achieved what I now call instant opticals вЂ“ with everything done in the camera rather than the laboratoryвЂ™.Д«J was the first to exploit this technique commercially and he became celebrated for his ground-breaking work.Д«J often told the tale of how he sold the idea for From Russia With Love: gathering producers and executives into a darkened room, he turned on a slide projector lifted his shirt and danced in front of the beam of light, allowing projected images to glance off his belly. вЂA projector lens has no depth of focus, and another major problem was therefore to make the dancer control her movements in a plane at right angles to the projector without destroying the illusion of dancing. The projector had a 3000 watt bulb and if the dancer moved just a little bit the wrong way the whole thing was out of focusвЂ™. So the whole thing was shot with a wide open shutter! Its old hat now, but then it was a new frontier. Trevor Bond, who assisted BJ in animating the From Russia With Love sequence, recalled the difficulty of keeping the type legible: вЂThe lighting cameraman tried to take a reading from the projected typography and noticed that the needle hardly moved on his Weston master. The titles themselves were very complex to produce. As a student in MoholyвЂ™s Light Workshop in the 1940вЂ™s, he would have been encouraged to experiment by projecting light onto not only clouds but a variety of still and mobile forms. BJ once wrote: вЂI remembered that, many years ago, Moholy had proposed projecting advertisements onto the clouds at nightвЂ™. While this may be true, BJ would have first encountered these kind of images as a student at the Institute of Design. John Brimacombe, BJвЂ™s assistant at the time, remembered that BJ had become fascinated with images of still type on moving bodies when people arriving late for one of his lectures had walked in front of the projector. The source of BJвЂ™s inspiration for the form of these sexually charged titles has become the subject of myth. At the end of the sequence, the names of Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, the filmвЂ™s producers, get a prime site within the dancerвЂ™s cleavage and Terence Young, the director, gets the last credit on her gently swaying left flank. In every case, credits are distorted to the point of illegibility by womanly curves and are reprojected against a flat background. The main bulk of the technical credits are either projected onto the undulating back of the dancer or onto her shimmying front. The credits of the leading players, Sean Connery and Daniela Bianchi, are projected respectively onto the dancerвЂ™s rippling belly and closed thighs, the credits of their co-stars appear upon her inner thighs and so on so until each part of the body has been appropriated by text. The projection of the numbers is whisked down her body, rests for a few moments on her gyrating hips, and disappears.

In the third image, a womanвЂ™s wide staring eyes appear through the double OO of BondвЂ™s OO7 identity. Throughout the sequence the credits are written in the same brightly colored sans-serif capitals. In the second image of the sequence this same credit is projected onto a flat background and the dancers arms play in light of the projector, she acts as a screen which catches and distorts the type. The lights are a projection of the words вЂIan FlemingвЂ™s James Bond in From Russia With Love written in multicolored script, which at this point are entirely illegible.

#From russia with love images series#

From Russia with Love Titles by Robert Brownjohn 1963Д«JвЂ™s titles sequence for вЂFrom Russia With LoveвЂ™ begins with a belly dancer moving against a black background with a series of colored lights playing across a female body.