Latest Bond Study Completed!

I have just finished writing a dissertation, entitled 'For Queen and Country: James Bond and National Identity in the Daniel Craig Era', which explores the evolution of Bond's Britishness over the course of Daniel Craig's 3 films. I will be presenting this work at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association's annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA this coming February.

http://southwestpca.org/

Here is the abstract for this study:

The most recent James Bond adventure, Skyfall (2012), sees Daniel Craig proudly flaunting his character’s British nationality with many a carefully placed union jack, chase scenes on the London Underground and a climax set in the Scottish highlands. A segment of the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, involving Craig as Bond and the Queen, had already gone some way in representing Bond’s Britishness even before Skyfall was released. However, not so long ago, in Craig’s debut outing as Bond, Casino Royale (2006), he was defying the British spy protocol, displeasing his nation’s representatives and generally downplaying his nationality. The aim of this paper is to explore why and how the British aspects of James Bond have shifted so dramatically within the Daniel Craig era alone. The research methods, which form this investigation, include looking at marketing and preview literature for all three of Craig’s Bond films in order to identify the themes and values attached to each one. This is followed by textual analysis of the films themselves and a summary of their reception by reviewers. This paper presents and evaluates the findings of this research in order to identify the various factors that have shaped Craig’s Bond’s Britishness and how the relationship between these factors has worked.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum

A crucial part of the research material I need for the dissertation I am currently working on was recently collected at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter. The museum specialises in film ephemera and artifacts and I was able to view a variety of preview literature and marketing material for all 3 of Daniel Craig's Bond films... my conclusions from this will be explored in my dissertation, to be completed in December.

I also enjoyed viewing some rare gems such as a Sean Connery Bond figurine and a James Bond 007 Secret Service board game from 1965.

Anyone interested in the history of film and film merchandise should pay a visit to this museum. You can use their website to have a look at the items they hold as not everything will be in the display cases. Click on the image below:

Cliche HQ

A friend and fellow academic is launching the final project of her MA tonight: a performance at The Basement, Brighton, incorporating various remade cliches, which will kick start 3 days of interactive cliche-subversion fun!

http://www.brightondigitalfestival.co.uk/events/clichehq/#.Ui8N0RyHf8d 

If you can't get to Brighton you can join in on Twitter and tweet your own remade cliches to @clichehq

In support of this project, I have come up with my own, Bond related of course:

Cliche: After sleeping with the hero, Bond girl #1 is killed

Remake: She comes back from the dead to seek revenge on the 'hero' whose male chauvinism ultimately led to her death

Some Comic Relief...

Despite critically analysing the Bond films both aesthetically and with regards to its role within a wider cinematic and cultural context I am also a fan of the franchise and get a geeky kick out of some of the more fun places it can inhabit in popular culture.

The Bond films, with their extensive location filming and quick product turn around, are prone to continuity errors, for which websites have been set up so that fans may spot and submit movie mistakes. Having recently discovered a set of 'Honest Trailers' on youtube, the one for Skyfall takes this one step further by listing many a faux pas with the plot, narrative and editing. If taken with a large dash of salt and ignoring the completely irrelevant Miss Moneypenny comment at the end, this is a comical way of showing how many of the Bond film conventions, which audiences take for granted, can actually be rather ridiculous when attempting to contextualise the film within a plausibly real scenario.

Enjoy!
(Click on the image below)

MeCCSA Postgraduate Conference

I had the pleasure of sharing more of my work on James Bond at the MeCCSA Postgrad conference at the University of East Anglia this month. http://www.uea.ac.uk/film-television-media/news-and-events/meccsa-network

This time I presented my research into the reasons for Skyfall's success (see abstract below). I was pleased that my fellow academics' engagement with my work caused them to ask me some very useful and thought provoking questions, which have influenced me to continue this research with a stronger emphasis on the nationalist elements of the film; their role in representing an image of the UK to both domestic and foreign viewers and how this is received by both of these audiences.

Some other points that were made to me after my presentation was the negative representation of Scotland as a rather desolate, weary and cold place. What do you think?

Also the fact that Adele won an Oscar for best original song when the melody is based on the James Bond theme tune, therefore making it not so original. Do you agree?

The Success of Skyfall (2012)

‘And we’re back,’ the words used by an enthralled Mark Kermode (2012) in his review of the most recent instalment in the Bond movie franchise, Skyfall. With the critical failure of the preceding film, Quantum of Solace (or ‘Question of Sport’ as Kermode mocked in reference to its rather forgettable title) the producers of Skyfall had to produce something big: not only a commercial success but, essentially, a ‘good’ film, one that justified its big budget and inevitable hype. Skyfall achieved just this, becoming the most successful British film to date by making £94 million at the box office within the first 40 days of its release and, crucially, it received the thumbs up from renowned movie critics such as Kermode. I would like to investigate the reasons for Skyfall’s success. 

My research methods have been influenced by Barabara Klinger’s idea of a cinematic ‘histoire totale’: an approach to documenting the impact of film by considering a variety of different sources outside of the film text. Klinger explains that, ‘A totalized perspective thus depicts how social forces invite viewers to assume positions, giving us a range of possible influences on spectatorship’ (1997: 114). That is to say that one can look beyond the film itself in order to determine the reasons for its positive reception. With this in mind, I have analysed related artefacts from the build-up to the release of Skyfall in an attempt to understand the high expectations that were set up for the audience. I have followed this research with a textual analysis of Skyfall so I can see how these expectations have been carried through and met by the film itself. In this way I will effectively be presenting a history of Skyfall, albeit a very limited and specific one, documenting the facts surrounding the film, which may have been responsible for its popularity. 

Works cited:

Kermode, M. (2012) ‘Mark Kermode Reviews Skyfall’ from Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review 

[radio clip] 26^th October, Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0109stz 

[Accessed: 1^st March 2013]

Klinger, B. (1997) ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception 

Studies,’ from Screen, 38(2), pages 107-128

Trans-(media) conference, College of Staten Island, New York

I have been inspired to document my academic research online by my recent attendance at the Trans-(media) conference at the College of Staten Island, New York. http://www.blog.csimediaculture.com/?p=21
This two day event provided attendees with a plethora of interdisciplinary talks and I also enjoyed sharing my research (see abstract below) with fellow academics. I would not have been able to attend this conference without the travel grant awarded to me by the Alumni Foundation at the University of Bristol and I feel very privileged to have represented this organisation to an international audience.

Licence to Trans-Genre:

An analysis of the ways in which Licence To Kill (1989) adopts narrative properties of the Western genre.

According to Kitses, The Western is ‘the most popular and enduring of Hollywood forms.’ (1969: 7) The history of cinema is adorned with iconic images of cowboys, saloons and desert landscapes, however, key to the Western’s popularity are the aspects of its narrative: the characterisation, plot and moralistic values. As Kitses suggests, these revolve around a negotiation between the wilderness and civilization (1969: 11). Often, the hero, as a man of the wild, spends the film trying to remain independent from the community until he eventually succumbs. These narrative aspects, I believe, have been adopted by the Bond film Licence To Kill in an attempt to give new life to the franchise; a response to opinions at the time that, ‘the longer the [Bond] films continue the more derivative and depressingly formulaic they become.’ (Chapman, 2003: 91) As a result, Licence To Kill adds a wild side to the character of Bond, presenting a more complex hero, who is unpredictable, morally unstable and emotionally driven. Amongst the recognisable formalistic conventions of the Bond franchise lies a narrative in which our hero is constantly negotiating with the civilized ways of his profession and the wilderness to which he has strayed. In this paper I will identify elements of the film which combine conventions of Western and Bond and explore their effects.

Works cited:

Kitses, J. (1969) Horizons West, London: Thames Hudson

Lindner, C. (2003) The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, Manchester University 

Press