the following may or may not become an appendix to my thesis, but I thought you guys might enjoy it. the thesis is going well, so today I decided to have some fun.

Taking as a starting point Godard’s remark about wanting to live films, and in an attempt to return to the process of creation, I have recently been working on recreation of films. As outlined in my piece on mimicry, I am in no way the first person to do this. There seems to be an abundance of such material on YouTube. It is as id the viewer is so taken by the film, that his cinephilia so absorbs him, that he tries to live the film himself. Admittedly this is merely the playing of games, but I would argue that this phenomenon and its relationship to cinephilia is worthy of explanation.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that this imitation is always done with an audience, it is a performance. This could be live, e.g. a throw away act made for ones friends, or towards a camera thereby emulating the very medium of fascination. The latter would render the performance permanent.

I therefore decided to try to recreate the famous James Bond ‘Gun Barrel’ Sequence. This was done using a small webcam in my room. Such sequences usually consist of a figure in a suit walking onto the screen from the right, turning, and shooting at the camera. The screen then turns red and the pre-title sequence starts. When this is over we see the opening titles which in most films, consists of brightly coloured women dancing amongst the credits. I wanted to achieve the same effect, but also to combine this with my interest in transgressing gender boundaries. I also wanted to make a homage to the Bond series. Moreover, I find it ironic to have both 007, a man renowned for is physical fitness and the typically beautiful dancing women, portrayed by a man with moderately severe athetoid cerebral palsy. After all, what could be more post-modern?

I started with a shot of me, in a suit, in silhouette, instantly turning and ‘shooting’ a toy gun at the camera. A still was taken from this image, and, using photo editing software, a black ring placed around it to replicate the gun barrel. thereafter, this image was paced and replaced in the sequence several times, each time with the background getting redder and then blacker, until the screen turns black. In the absence of funds to make an opening action sequence, we then fade up to a moving image if myself dancing against a blank background. Given that the women in the original credit sequence are shot in silhouette filled with colour, giving them a certain anonymity, I chose to dance in a green zentai to recreate this illusion. However, to maintain constant reference to bond, this shot was interspersed with still photographs taken from the original bond films. Throughout, ‘Nobody does it better’ by Carly Simon plays nondiagetically.