from russia with love film titles 1963

 

From Russia with Love Titles by Robert Brownjohn 1963

 
BJ’s titles sequence for ‘From Russia With Love’ begins with a belly dancer moving against a black background with a series of colored lights playing across a female body. The lights are a projection of the words ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond in From Russia With Love written in multicolored script, which at this point are entirely illegible. 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. Throughout the sequence the credits are written in the same brightly colored sans-serif capitals. In the third image, a woman’s wide staring eyes appear through the double OO of Bond’s OO7 identity. The projection of the numbers is whisked down her body, rests for a few moments on her gyrating hips, and disappears. The credits of the leading players, Sean Connery and Daniela Bianchi, are projected respectively onto the dancer’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 main bulk of the technical credits are either projected onto the undulating back of the dancer or onto her shimmying front. In every case, credits are distorted to the point of illegibility by womanly curves and are reprojected against a flat background. At the end of the sequence, the names of Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, the film’s producers, get a prime site within the dancer’s cleavage and Terence Young, the director, gets the last credit on her gently swaying left flank. The source of BJ’s inspiration for the form of these sexually charged titles has become the subject of myth. John Brimacombe, BJ’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. While this may be true, BJ would have first encountered these kind of images as a student at the Institute of Design. BJ once wrote: ‘I remembered that, many years ago, Moholy had proposed projecting advertisements onto the clouds at night’. As a student in Moholy’s Light Workshop in the 1940’s, he would have been encouraged to experiment by projecting light onto not only clouds but a variety of still and mobile forms.

The titles themselves were very complex to produce. Trevor Bond, who assisted BJ in animating the From Russia With Love sequence, recalled the difficulty of keeping the type legible: ‘The lighting cameraman tried to take a reading from the projected typography and noticed that the needle hardly moved on his Weston master. So the whole thing was shot with a wide open shutter! Its old hat now, but then it was a new frontier. 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 focus’. BJ told a similar story:

‘A 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 final result achieved what I now call instant opticals – with everything done in the camera rather than the laboratory’.

BJ was the first to exploit this technique commercially and he became celebrated for his ground-breaking work.

BJ 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. ‘It’ll be just like this’, he exclaimed, ‘except we’ll use a pretty girl!’ And, pretty much, it was. 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. BJ had never worked with live action before he made the titles, and, unknown to him, nor had his animation assistant Trevor Bond. Unlike Saul Bass, a man who mapped his sequences to the second, BJ dived into the process without much of a plan. Interviewed a couple of years later he explained:

‘It was all done in the camera, which is the way I like to do films, you know. I hate storyboards and scripts. It’s nice just to have an idea and go on the floor and play around with the camera and the lights, and then shoot what you want.’

The From Russia With Love titles would undeniably set the stage for BJ’s most famous, iconic and memorable work – Goldfinger!

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

From Russia With Love Titles

From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

From Russia with Love poster – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love poster  London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

From Russia With Love

From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

From Russia With Love Titles(2)

From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

From Russia With Love

From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

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BJ in front of projector testing out the idea – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963

 

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From Russia with Love title sequence stills – London 1963