“ Old Dog , New Tricks ” James Bond ’ s Digital Chaos

The James Bond flm series has, since the turn of the millennium, evolved an increasingly vexed and ambivalent relationship to digital visual efects and computer graphics, one that can be squared to the perceived ideological and stylistic fracture between the opposing tones of the Pierce Brosnan (1995-2002) and Daniel Craig (2006-present) eras. The signifcance of 007’s grittier, revisionist renewal and the framing of more recent Bond cinema since Craig’s debut in Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) as an active “going against”, has been critically and culturally understood as a move intended to correct the franchise’s increased encroachment towards digital imagery and computer processes as vital support for Bond’s unique brand of suave endeavour, physical dexterity, and heroic heterosexual masculinity. As Orit Fussfeld Cohen argues, “the gradual increase in digitization” across the James Bond franchise since the release of GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995) reached its pinnacle with the 20th instalment and 40th anniversary feature Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002), a flm that marked a clear shif in aesthetic priorities from the “careful and discrete deployment of digital technology towards a combination of multiple digital techniques” (2016, 108). Responses to the flm in the Hollywood trade and British press (both at the time, and particularly following Craig’s darker, moodier tenure as 007) have routinely expressed reservations at how Brosnan’s fnal outing as the British

produced simulated lasers" organised by a "digitally-controlled system" (Burgess 1979, 987), the Bond series has been widely celebrated for its sophisticated predigital efects traditions. Figures central to Hollywood's history of practical modelmaking, such as Frank George (special efects assistant on the frst four Bond flms)l Roy Field (who provided optical cinematography and visual efects in the Sean Connery and early-Roger Moore eras)l John Stears (who won the Academy Award for Best Visual Efects for Thunderball [Terence Young, 1965] and, later, Star Wars [George Lucas, 1977])l and Wally Veevers (credited for visual efects on Diamonds Are Forever [Guy Hamilton, 1971]), had all worked across both the 007 series and popular Hollywood fantasy/science-fction cinemas. Matte artist Albert Whitlock -who had been hired by Alfred Hitchcock and then recruited by the Walt Disney Studio in the 1950s -also produced background matte paintings for Diamonds Are Forever, while renowned special efects artist and designer John Richardson joined for the production of the Oscar-nominated Moonraker and went on feature in four of the fve Bond flms released during the 1980s, continuing his role as the "of-camera Q" (Lee 1988, 4) in Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and The World Is Not Enough (Michael Apted, 1999) as miniatures supervisor. However, the Bond series' achievements in more practical effects traditions are channelled largely through the contributions of veteran modelmaker Derek Meddings and his close industrial relationship with Production Designer Ken Adam. Meddings' background was building models (ofen repurposing pre-existing plastic model kits) and mattes/sets for a number of Gerry Anderson puppet-animated television series, including Four Feather Falls (1960), Supercar (1961-1962), Fireball XL5 (1962-1963, Stingray (1964( -1965( ), and Thunderbirds (1965( -1966. From Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973) to GoldenEye (his last flm before his death in September 1995), Meddings supervised a variety of underwater/fying sequences using scaled miniatures, in-camera efects utilising forced perspectives and matte paintings, and compositing techniques that integrated models with live-action background plates (McGregor 1981al 1981b. It is precisely these enduring material traditions of efects production that contributed to the framing of Die Another Day as a post-millennial digital detour away from an otherwise successful history of practical special efects, models, and miniatures (despite Richardson's work as model efects supervisor on the flm). In his review of Die Another Day for The Hollywood Reporter, Todd Longwell noted that "Bond flms are famous for keeping it real with live stunts and explosions, along with massive sets enhanced by hand-built miniatures, not CGI" (2002, S-8). Yet by digitising signature elements of the Bond formula ("every-thing from gadgets, vehicles, elements of explosions, chunks of ice and set and model extensions, to a few CG stunt performers and complete environments"), Die Another Day's strong "CG dimension" aimed to situate 007 frmly within the "digital revolution with a vengeance" (ibid.). However, the increased engagement by the Bond series in computer processing was not simply manifest in Die Another Day's "risible special efects" (Bell 2015, n.p.) and unconvincing digital illusion, but in how Brosnan's fnal flm also rhetorically ofered digital media as part of its narrative preoccupation with technological progress. The invisible car (the Aston Martin Vanquish, a.k.a. the "Vanish") and experiments with virtual reality headsets (that fnally aford Miss Moneypenny [Samantha Bond] a romantic encounter with 007) refect a hyper-consciousness towards the "digital" both in its guise as a persuasive technology of illusion within contemporary flmmaking practice, and as a pervasive plot device that accentuates the series' longstanding investment in hi-tech gadgetry. As Bond actor Roger Moore proclaimed "I thought it just went too far -and that's from me, the frst Bond in space! Invisible cars and dodgy CGI footage? Please!" (2008, n.p.).
Moore's comment surfaces perhaps the Bond series' main paradox. Despite 007's venerable profciency with technology and a mastery of gadgets as a signpost to his heroic masculinity, imperial neo-colonialist adventures, and sexual potency, as a franchise the 007 flms have historically "fared far worse in dealing with the digital revolution in flmmaking" (Millard 2018, 183). In the case of the earlier Star Wars-infuenced Moonraker, André Millard argues that computer-generated images "transformed the making and the look of action flms […] which forced the Bond flms to keep abreast of the technological developments in both space travel and motion picture special efects" (ibid.). The relationship between computer animation and the Bond franchise has certainly been far from smooth. Indeed, the series' chaotic oil-and-water relationship to digital VFX (rather than more practical "special efects") has prompted the view -staked largely in response to the "computerized feel" (McCarthy 2002, n.p.) of Die Another Day -that the franchise historically holds a "poor record on computer graphics" (Bell 2015, n.p.). Yet if the "multiple digital techniques" in Die Another Day marked "a signifcant transformation in the aesthetics of the series" (Cohen 2016, 108), then they did so by intensifying the franchise's longstanding, if highly contradictory, engagement with digital efects technologies.
Images and icons of the digital progressively -and somewhat problematically -had already entered into the generic lexicon of Bond flms throughout the 1990s, as the series gradually increased its application of CG imagery. The primary home for such technologies was undoubtedly the sophisticated digital animation of the opening titles (that aligned technology with gender, sexuality, voyeurism, fetishism, and desire), yet the flms themselves equally began to experiment with computerised efects. However, the Bond series' turn towards CGI with GoldenEye was nonetheless framed by an enduring industrial narrative that sought to strengthen the series' commitment and "devotion to the analog", typically achieved via criticisms made by members of production (miniature efects, special efects, and second unit stunt co-ordinators) at the overwhelming "tendency to use CGI as a result of labor-market pressure" (ibid., 107). In truth, while the pristine digital animation of GoldenEye's CG title sequence (designed by Daniel Kleinman, and animated by the Framestore studio) and use of greenscreen technologies in the climactic duel between Bond (Brosnan) and Alec Trevelyan/006 (Sean Bean) does indicate the series' emergent interest in computer graphics, "the use of traditional special-efects techniques and live-action shootings dominates […] [the flm's] action-scenes" (ibid., 105), with only 140 CGI shots in total. 1 However, "the scope of digital procedures" and "assimilation of digital techniques" would expand signifcantly in Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough, with both flms more readily exploring digital intermediaries, blue-/greenscreen shooting, CG image reconstruction, digital simulation and composition, and "layering techniques that steadily replaced the in-camera optical efects" (ibid., 107-108). As a result, The World Is Not Enough contains a total of 250 CGI shots, though still some way of the 680 used in Die Another Day.
The progressive reliance by the Bond series on computer efects in this period to augment model and miniature work was refexively matched by narratives that were themselves preoccupied with complex and innovative technologies. The rapid development of information technology, sophisticated military science/weapons, surveillance systems, personal computers, mobile telephones, the Internet, and other forms of digital communication between the Timothy Dalton (1987Dalton ( -1989 and Brosnan eras meant the 1990s iteration of the secret agent was required to be altogether more "technologically astute," assuming the role of a "technological maestro who uses his virtuosic skills to alleviate increasingly hysterical millennial anxieties" (Willis 2003, 152-154 C. Holliday · "Old Dog, New Tricks": James Bond's Digital Chaos more to tell the story, defne the characters, and explain the equipment. What the audience ofen sees in Bond flms are screens in which characters watch other characters on screens" (2018, 183). GoldenEye's plethora of digital maps, screen interfaces, and computer tracking systems all refect the "technological excesses of Brosnan's Bond" (Willis 2003, 156). The electronic bank heist on the London stock exchange and broader "hacker" narrative of GoldenEye also sits frmly within a cluster of mid-1990s science-fction features (all released the same year as Brosnan's debut) that each took as their theme the dangers of cyberspace, and particularly the as-then unknowable world of the Internet. Programmed from something of the same code, Hackers (Iain Sofley, 1995), Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), Virtuosity (Brett Leonard, 1995), The Net (Irwin Winkler, 1995) and Johnny Mnemonic (Roberto Longo, 1995) -as well as sequel Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (Farhad Mann, 1996) that arrived the following year -each comprised an internet-paranoia cycle of cybercinema that predicted an industrial futurism that perhaps would never fully come to pass. These flms also anticipate more contemporary speculations on computer-based media and posthuman identity formation, alongside cultural and critical anxieties around the political, ethical, and spectatorial implications of forms of digitally-mediated representation.
These cybernetic sensibilities were further centralised in Tomorrow Never Dies. The flm's opening sequence cuts between a Terrorist Arms Bazaar on the Russian border and an MI6 command satellite with its array of consoles, control/communications panels, and television monitors. Directing 007 through a series of surveillance technologies ("Zoom in on that can you?"), the opening sequence both counterpoints the more "analogue" language of chess used to instruct Bond's movements ("White Knight, show us the Pawns"), but also fnds a later parallel in the virtual remote meetings, video playback, digital tablets, control rooms, and computer screens that defne the insidious activity of media mogul Elliot Carver ( Jonathan Pryce). Even 007's customised BMW 750iL replete with "all the usual refnements" (machine guns, rockets, GPS tracking system) includes internal voice capabilities as part of its onboard AI system. This particular modifcation anticipates traditions in what Liz W. Faber has recently termed the gendered voice interactive technology that supports female "artifcial intelligent personal assistant" applications (such as Alexa, Cortana, and Siri) (2020, 2). As Bond playfully proclaims regarding the electronic female voice, "I think we've met". However, Tomorrow Never Dies equally incorporates a range of digital techniques and motion graphics as part of its computer media narrative, such as the CGI rotating blades added to the helicopter during the motorbike chase with Bond and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh)l the post-production compositing of greenscreen elements together with model plates for the underwater sequencesl and the virtual extension of the imposing Carver Media Group Network (CMGN) tower in Saigon that augments its architectural monumentality via computer graphics (Bond and Wai Lin's descent down the building's exterior was similarly a greenscreen composite). These imperceptible efects moved the franchise away from the self-refexively "technological" or "technofuturist" application of CGI in GoldenEye that suited its cybersecurity narrative, and more towards the seamless integration of photoreal computer graphics to craf a "simulationist" visual order (Pierson 2002, 101) relying on an authentic phenomenological "perceptual" correspondence (Prince 1996) between spectator and digital image. Provided by the Cinesite and Rushes Postproduction studios, the CGI of Tomorrow Never Dies ultimately refects the progressive shif towards a kind of digital efect previously created in the studio or on location, while anticipating a form of digitally-enhanced "invisibility" that would mark the subsequent Craig era. It was also during this 1990s period that the franchise was regularly adapted into several successful "open world", frst-/third-person shooter and role-playing videogame formats, thereby introducing an alternate technological dimension to the franchise's cultural circulation through convincing digital avatars. Ranging from straightforward flm interpretations -such as A View to a Kill (1985), The Spy Who Loved Me James Chapman's suggestion that, in the immediate post-9/11 geopolitical climate, the "CGI-heavy" Die Another Day "tipped the balance too far towards cartoonish spectacle and excess" (2017, 11), ultimately charges the widespread understanding of Casino Royale as a "reboot" with greater impetus. Drawn from the very language of computers, the notion of a "reboot" within flmmaking industries as a specifc kind of remake that starts anew "comes from the term for restarting a running but failing computer system" (Tryon 2013, 90). Within the Bond series' signature modulations between repetition and diference, continuity and rupture, familiarity and novelty, pastness and futurity, it is therefore a label that explicitly signals how Casino Royale was a necessary ideological and stylistic "reset" following Die Another Day's technological excess. Indeed, in an article titled "'Casino Royale': Returning to Bond's Roots" for Animation World Network, Alain Bielik notes that Craig's debut provided the series with an essential corrective, due in part to how "when Pierce Brosnan took over as secret agent 007 in 1995, the saga progressively incorporated digital efects into its arsenal" (2007, n.p.). However, despite the critical and cultural (re)positioning of Die Another Day as the Bond franchise's turning point for integrating digital spectacle, its identity as 007's technological nadir has crafed something of a false narrative. Casino Royale's revisionist credentials are certainly challenged by its altogether more discreet application of sophisticated digital technologies and computer graphics than its predecessors. In his analysis of the Bond series' multiple intersections with digital imagery since the mid-1990s, Cohen argues that "while indeed fewer digitally enhanced shots -up to 580 shots were featured versus 680 shots in Die Another Day, the previous Bond flm -Casino Royale still incorporates digital procedures in main action scenes" (2016,111). The application of digital grading processes to erase "rigs, safety harnesses and airbags" (ibid.) was matched with the use of computer graphics to extend physical sets, compositing the live-action footage with greenscreen technology to manage the horizon lines and perspectives in post-production.
Bringing the Bond series into alignment with foundational digital VFX discourse (Prince 1996l Darley 2000l Pierson 2002 alongside writing in popular efects journals, Cohen identifes the ofen-invisible role played by a number of digital simulation processes that regularly support the series' practical stunt work and materialities of the lived body, particularly in the more recent Craig era. While CGI certainly reached its peak with the release of Die Another Day, the "back to basics" approach of Casino Royale nonetheless required digital imagery to fulfl several of its spectacular action sequences. Bielik explores the contribu-  (2007, n.p.). All of these studios had already worked as VFX vendors on Die Another Day, where they combined Maya and Houdini sofware (and its digital lighting/shaders) with Cinesite's "proprietary water-generation and particle-rendering programs" and Richardson's model work as part of Die Another Day's computerised illusion (Magid 2002, n.p.). Perhaps surprisingly, then, Casino Royale (580) ultimately contains more CG VFX shots than GoldenEye (140) and The World Is Not Enough (250) combined.
The acceleration of CGI efects within the recent Bond flms has been further refected in their intensifed appearance within trade and efects journals, despite the broader industrial narrative of invisibility and hybridity that has sought to reclaim the corporeal/material in the post-Die Another Day era. While Richardson's "full-scale physical efects" and "cleverly integrated miniatures" were the subject of a 1988 dossier by Nora Lee (1988)  Quantum of Solace's extensive computer animation included the "CG planes" involved in the aerial encounter between Bond's DC-3 aircraf and a Marchetti (animated by DNeg), the rendering of "digitally-generated environments" that used proprietary sofware Stig and DoubleVision, and "volume carving" that seamlessly composites actors, virtual objects, and textures into one complete shot (Desowitz 2008, n.p.). In December 2012, Skyfall was also the subject of an extended feature by online magazine Computer Graphics World, which explained how Cinesite, DNeg, and MPC again contributed digital VFX to support the original plates shot in-camera by cinematographer Roger Deakins. Skyfall was "the frst [Bond] flm to be shot digitally, and the frst to feature more than 1300 visual efects shots" (Cohen 2016, 104). This included digital modifcations to the flm's opening chase sequence through (and above) Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, which incorporated post-production greenscreen close-ups of the actors and CG lighting rigs together with the building of wholly "CG environments, a digital double of Craig, and rig removals done at DNeg by artists using a pipeline based on Autodesk's Maya, Pixar's RenderMan, and The Foundry's Nuke." Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data was also sourced to produce high-resolution 3D digital elevation models (DEMs) of the Bazaar itself (Robertson 2012. n.p.). for Spectre's multitude of computer screens, monitors, laptops, mobile phones, satellite tracking systems, and user interfaces "to display various and complex analytical data infographics and adapted news footage" (Burns 2015, n.p.). These computer efects were then played back "live" on set and photographed in-camera in ways that recall the pro-flmic integration of data interfaces within Moonraker's space control rooms (Burgess 1979) and Carver's rotating CMGN logos that play on several of Tomorrow Never Dies' television screens.
The diference between the "show" and "tell" of VFX production -between the visual incongruity of computer graphics in Die Another Day and the seamless application of CGI in the "revisionist" Casino Royale (and follow-up features Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre) -might ultimately be considered one of degree, rather than of kind. What is clear, however, is that at the centre of the appreciation of the Bond series' digital efects is the importance of spectatorial connoisseurship, and the complex relationship that audiences can (and do) have with the "seams" or "joins" of VFX. This is because "the mediating presence of a technology involves an ongoing process of negotiation" (Wood 2007, 96), meaning that the intercession of moving image technologies, CG manipulations, and other kinds of digital intermediaries and interfaces within popular flmmaking, might be "frequently invisible within the fnal product" (ibid., 62). A variant of these scholarly debates is provided by Laura Mulvey, who asserts that the predigital rear or back projection technique -as an "aesthetic emblem of the bygone studio era" -occupies a historically "poignant" example of how the cinematic illusion can be ruptured by the unconvincing "clumsy visibility" of what are evidently processed, composited shots (2007,3). Similar charges of the false have been levelled at more contemporary digital efects imagery. The destabilsing of ontological certainty through CGI's potential artifciality discloses its truth as a visual sleight-of-hand, as its identity as a trompe-l'oeil trick cues the sudden awareness of the image's manufacture. In the case of Die Another Day, the flm's "standout" CG sequences are exemplars of this disingenuous "clumsy sublime", one whose transparent inauthenticity stakes out historical contingency within Hollywood's desire for ever-more realistic representation. By comparison, the digital's perceived invisibility in the Craig era has allowed for the shoring up of discrete periods of Bond history along the fault lines of supposed technological paucity. So just as the notion of a skilled "bluf" and "tell" underscores the narrative drama of Casino Royale's signature poker game -involving 007's (in)ability to detect unconscious signs of doubt, weakness, and pretence expressed by his opponent -the Craig era has sharpened the franchise's longstanding and troubled engagement with digital efects imagery by keeping its cards a lot closer to its chest.
The myriad ways that computer processing techniques and digital imagery move between invisible "support" roles to a more central, obtrusive conspicuousness (and, crucially, back again) with contemporary blockbuster flm production is one of the central predicaments of computer-generated VFX. A number of scholars have spoken of the importance of seamlessness versus visibility or "leakage" (Wood 2007, 25) within the stylistic repertoire of Hollywood efects imagery, thereby nicely reprising the spy genre's language of espionage (denial, detection, concealment, disavowal, masquerade, mystery, transparency, intelligibility, deception, signifcation, misdirection). The rhetoric of efects tech-

nology also explains what separates Renard's digital hologram in The World Is Not
Enough -intended to be understood as a digital asset, or artefact, within a technological demonstration -from the computerised mouse in Spectre (developed by Cinesite animator Sandra Guarda, compositor Alex Webb, and creature FX artist Wiebke Sprenger) rooted in more subtle digital trickery. For William Brown, such a discourse of disclosure is fundamental to the power of digital cinema, as efects imagery ofen hides behind a rhetorical photorealist front as a way of veiling its presence, and diverting spectators through its apparent imperceptibility. Employing the analogy of the superhero, Brown argues that "[f ]or the sake of ftting in, digital cinema might look like analogue cinema (Clark Kent), but it is in fact of a diferent nature (Supercinema)" (2013, 10). This distinction holds due to digital cinema's computerised "alter ego" whose diference is frequently masked to "ft in" under the veil of analogue aesthetics (that are equated to the inverse fgure of Batman, whose true identity as "ordinary" is hidden by a superheroic exterior) (ibid.). Given the Bond series' chaotic relationship with computer graphics across the Craig era, this parallel to superheroism becomes an intriguing footnote to Robert P. Arnett's defnition of Casino Royale as a remix of the superhero genre through its emphasis on origins and narrative of reinvention, which converge to mark "the arrival of Bond as a superhero" (2009,8).
When taken together, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre are thus collective examples of a cinema whose superhero persona (their digital trickery, or "tell") are kinds of creative expression, technological manipulation, and ontological hybridity routinely hidden behind the rhetorical front of analogue flmmaking conventions (their everyday persona, or "bluf").

DIGITAL NEUROSES AND "CHAOS CINEMA"
Where the "superheroic" presence of computer graphics within the Craig era has been able to surface, however, has been in precisely those technological spaces that permit digital media to function as a narrative signifer of Bond/MI6's technological profciency and knowledge in a pervasive cyber-culture. One of the HQ to obtain background on industrialist Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), for example, the glass partition separating M's ( Judi Dench) ofce from the adjacent cubicles transforms into an (inter)active computer screen with swirling digi-tal graphics that divulge Greene's personal information. The layering of planes of action creates a confusing digital spatial palimpsest, as 007's repressed "internal psychic confict" (ibid.) becomes transposed onto the fagrantly "superheroic'" digital mise-en-scène that prioritises computer graphics, moving typography, touchscreen technologies, data fles and digital maps, personal profles, and ID database matches across the screen.
Later, when Bond infltrates a public meeting held by the Quantum organisation at a performance of Puccini's opera La Tosca upon the foating modernist stage at Bregenz, Austria, classical and digital worlds collide as Bond sends his employers back a series of camera images that are similarly run through the MI6 database. As the resulting snapshots pixellate into full resolution against the musical crescendo of Scarpia's number "Te Deum", the sequence's use of "operatic" montage, rapid editing, and shifing perspectives fully captures the "blunt subjective clarity" and isolation of Bond (Citron 2011, 328). As Binotto explains of the flm's broader hypermediacy, "[n]ot only is the hero split and traumatized, the whole world has become neurotic," with even "actual presence and mere refection" becoming irretrievably merged amid the confusion to refexively evoke the broader crisis of simulation inaugurated by CGI's photorealistic capabilities and indexical illusion (2013,55). The sudden technological visibility or outfow of digital media onto -and into -the screen interface in several scenes throughout Quantum of Solace therefore constitutes a convergence of focal points and spatial markers, while fully identifying the pervasiveness of digital-enhancement within MI6's primary control centre. These moments showcasing the digital image's capacity for movement, manipulation, and plastic transformation also counterpoint (perhaps, even override) the flm's more latent efects imagery, which are seamlessly able to pass themselves of as unremarkably analogue in their authentic simulation of indexical reality. 3 3 Prior to Brown's "superheroic" theorisation of digital efects, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) discussed a process of "remediation" whereby new media technologies simulate or "remediate" older media in the aesthetic pursuit of standards of photorealism as part of their aesthetic project. Andrew Darley similarly proposed the notion of a "second-order realism" to explicate the digital aesthetics of Pixar Animation Studios' computer-animated shorts and its attempts "to produce old ways of seeing or representing by other means" (2000,83). In each case, the stylistic aptitude of CGI is anchored to its fundamental "pastness" -the graphic recollection of analogue cinema as a lens-based medium now reworked and available in the present thanks to the appropriative qualities of pristine digital imagery.
In "performing" 007's fractured and disoriented psychological state, the digital neuroses in Quantum of Solace therefore works alongside -and is entirely embedded within -what has been understood as a contemporary "chaos cinema" that self-consciously amplifes and "perverts" David Bordwell's (2002) model of "intensifed continuity" in its formal and aesthetic exodus from the classical style and composition. Whereas studio-era classicism ofered strenuous illusionism, and "intensifed continuity" became its rapid and intricate successor dominating American flms afer the 1960s, recent "chaos cinema" is altogether more "fragmented, imprecise, and precarious" in its overwhelmingly assaultive qualities and promise of a "sensory overload" (Stork 2013, 7-9). Tied inexorably to "the rise of digital efects cinema and the institutionalization of digital editing [that] trumps any concern for broader continuity -whether on the immediate shotby-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative" (2010, 123).
Bruzzi calls "men's cinema", which examines the interrelationship between masculinity and flm style by considering how cinema organises and creates gendered images that extend beyond the presentation of male bodies (2013,159).
The importance of mise-en-scène in telling "a man's story" is refected in the exchange between screen action and character interiority, and the manner in which "male psychology and introspection [is shown] frequently via a convoluted, layered visual style" (ibid.). In Quantum of Solace, the hectic energy of its action sequences and broader technological excess likewise suggest how popular cinema ofen conveys maladjusted, refective, fragile masculinity by making the audience feel identifcation at a corporeal level.
While Quantum of Solace usefully articulates the ways in which a digitally "chaotic" mise-en-scène becomes a vital component of cinematic masculinity, there is potentially another form of "chaos" in the Bond series that is less tied to the expressive plurality of enveloping digital media. In fact, it is a disorder anchored more to the hidden articulation of digital processing and seamless use of computer efects that seeks to imperceptibly make order out of chaos. Following the flm's traditional gun barrel opening (the frst Craig flm in which it appears at the start), the opening sequence of Spectre comprises a four-minute long take, in which a seemingly unbroken tracking shot depicts Bond's pursuit of assassin Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona) through the streets of Mexico City. Navigating the revellers of the annual Day of the Dead celebrations, Bond is frst picked out by the roving camera as he surreptitiously follows his target. The camera continues to follow behind and alongside 007 and his female accomplice as they next enter the lobby of the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México, ascend several foors via the French art nouveau style internal elevator, arrive at their hotel room, before impressively moving out a window and onto the roofops of the neighbouring buildings located in the Zocalo -the main plaza in Mexico Citywhile the parade unfolds below. Despite the seamless intimacy of the sequence, there are several "hidden" cuts and six disparate set-ups (or plates) spliced together by the ILM London VFX studio. Carolyn Giardina describes how the digitally-enhanced shot "was accomplished with several meticulously choreographed long takes edited together with shrewdly placed wipes and a smattering of CG (though [cinematographer Hoyte van] Hoytema insists there are no fully CG shots in the sequence)" (2015, n.p.). The sequence also incorporates many further subtractive and additive processes germane to digital image processing, from the erasure or "clean-up" of safety wires (fguratively "supporting" Craig's performance) and the integration of wholly digital doubles to green-screen matte projection and the creation of virtual environment extensions (Frei 2015).
Even without such substantial digital intervention, the long take as a phenomenon of editing has ofen been linked to structural complexity, labour, and precision. In Spectre too, the Steadicam and famboyant Technocrane shots navigate through the space in ways that self-refexively control distinctions between onscreen and ofscreen, background and foreground, and rehearse the long take's stylistic claims towards refection, contemplation, extended duration, and spatio-temporal authenticity. But the largely invisible digital editing (that comprise Spectre's opening "bluf") allows the flm to reproduce the virtues of the long take through the creative freedoms and achievements of digitally-assisted camerawork. Lisa Purse has discussed the role played by "computer-generated images and digital compositing" in providing "the technological conditions for a return to the mobile long take," and the narratological possibilities of a camera that is unencumbered by the limitations of human perception (2017,(221)(222). This fgurative "unfxing" of humanity has led to popular conceptions of new digital cinema as a mode of flmmaking that works against anthropocentricism and anthropocentric optics -a contemporary inhuman or, perhaps, "posthumanist" cinema that amalgamates real/organic and virtual/biomechatronic elements (in a composite, cyborgian fashion)l which emphasises elastic spatial continuity at the same time as it (falsely) stresses continuous and unbroken temporalityl and which efortlessly claims for and confgures new viewing positions. This reconfguration of "the frame" and "the shot" as central to a new mode of "posthumanist realism" has presented a digitally-mediated cinema that in its visual logic ofers "nonanthropocentric spaces and times" (Brown 2013, 3). Posthumanism's apprehension of -and encounters with -such post-anthropocentric thinking also "leave the human behind […] [which] only causes it to return in spectral forms to haunt our philosophy, popular cultures, and the arts" (Lummaa 2019, 41). This fts neatly too with the form and function of Spectre's audacious opening sequence, and in particular the "spectral" dimension of the camera's movements through, across, and above spaces and characters. Digital technology as a medium "produces the spectre of physical authenticity" (Riquet and Zdrenyk 2018, 20), and its manufacture of ghostly avatars, virtual objects, and uncanny computer-generated artefacts at the level of production is matched to the ghostly, skeletal fgures that populate the flm's deathly parade. The digital manipulation of faces (removing of blemishes, fxing expressions, addition of facial masks) during Spectre's opening only adds an additional element to their invaded, posthuman identities. Furthermore, the foating, ethereal camera that rotates dizzyingly around Bond to interrogate the architectural splendour of the surrounding Mexico City itself becomes a ghostly apparition because its unique ontology remains "not-quite-human" (Lummaa 2019, 41) -it is a sequence caught, trapped or compressed between analogue and digital spaces.
In its free-foating virtuosity, if not its bravura technical precision, the long take of Spectre undoubtedly provides an immediate counterpoint to the freneti- Studios in the UK) as well as ontologies (live-action shooting, models/miniatures, computer graphics), with digital editing smoothing out the transitions between its variant constituent parts. Despite such convincing digital re-alignments, this careful layering of environments functions just as "chaotically" as the frenetic opening to Quantum of Solace. Spectre's VFX Supervisor for ILM London Mark Bakowski explains that when the hotel room door of the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México opens in Spectre "you're actually looking from Mexico into a Pinewood set and out through a blue screen behind the open balcony door back into a digital matte painting of the view in Mexico City" (qtd. in Frei 2015, n.p.). Yet these conditions of mixed media production are not matched in those of reception, with Maya and Nuke computer sofware used to "stitch the disparities" (ibid.) between the transitions to create a unifed coherent diegesis.
A central element of Spectre's digital chaos therefore lies precisely in its coexistent times and spaces. Recalling the codeword of Casino Royale, its opening "bluf" seeks to hide in plain sight its persistent ontological "ellipses" as a way of distracting spectators from the pervasive sense of its incompleteness. Brown's work on "supercinema" alludes to digital media's substantial cultural-aesthetic changes by considering the role played by chaos not just as a symptom of the assaultive, immediate aesthetics of a commercial flm style that is "headache-inducing and nauseating" (Stork 2013, 12), but at the level of (dis)continuity. Brown talks of the "chaos aesthetics" of digital cinema largely through a philosophical understanding of chaos theory, and the ways in which digital media remains chaotic because it can involve the ability to represent "the interconnected nature of time and space, across the micro and macro scales" (2013, 105-106). Chaos theory suggests, then, that in "digitally enabled" images and narratives "there is no element that we can discount from contributing to the events that we see in a flm" (ibid., 106). With digital efects, these combinatory macro and micro elements speak to a range of efects technologies and processes. Among its armoury of digital VFX, for example, Spectre's opening sequence incorporates both smaller costume enhancements that employed "facial tracking and digi-double replacement" together with the rendering of larger CG crowds "generated to fll the street extension and add a denser population into the existing crowd in the [liveaction] plate" (Bakowski qtd. in Frei 2015, n.p.). The flm therefore utilises one of digital technology's many "calling cards" and a staple of popular Hollywood cinema's application of CGI, that of the "digital multitude" (Whissel 2010, 91). The multitude combines new forms of image-making (digital split-screen techniques, crowd simulation engines) to virtually reproduce sweeping formations of digital fgures. In Spectre, the scale of the Day of the Dead becomes a spectacular digital asset or emblem, whose visual pleasure as an ever-expansive group resides in its panoramic reach and recession seemingly far into the urban horizon.
Despite its relative technological invisibility, then, the chaos of Spectre's opening sequence lies in the construction of photographic verisimilitude through the convergence of simulations in several possible combinations. The long take's "chaotic" reality is rooted in how the smallest virtual elements are related to -and inextricably bound together with -the largest, working together as part of the complete dramatic illusion. For Drew Ayers, such CGI/live-action compound images that ofen imperceptibly populate Hollywood flmmaking "become chimeras, or impossible combinations, of human and non-human forces, imagining a hybrid space in which analogue pro-flmic and digital agents might seamlessly coexist in a posthuman utopia" (2015,99). The chimera is a mythical fgure or phenomena of transgression, ambivalence and tension, a "phantasm" (even, perhaps, a "spectral" fgure) that functions as a "utopian fantasy" fully representing exactly how "analogue and digital forces can be easily and unproblematically transferred and exchanged" within popular cinema (ibid., 100). Chimera is also the name given to Sévérine's (Bérénice Marlohe) yacht in Skyfall, recalling both the mythical Manticore vessel in GoldenEye, but also refecting the technological, aesthetic, and formal hybridity of a flm that -as with all of the Craig-era flms -combines disparate sources into one complete organism.
As Sévérine herself coldly notes to Bond, "[i]t's amazing the panic you can cause with a single computer". Indeed, the "chimeric" dimension to digital efects/media composites that propose a continuous screen image also works well as a metaphor of the digital, largely because it (dis)embodies the crisis paradigm that has been central to the critical and popular understanding of increasingly digitised technocultures, and the element of dread that envelopes the impact of technology on cinema as a mass media industry. But as a symbol of cunning (certainly within traditions of Christian Art), imagination, and deception, the chimera points more readily to the turbulent, hostile, broken, distorted, and disorderly properties of a digital efects image passing itself of as holistic, rather than simply defning its complex ontology as a simple mixing of media. More than the afective dualism of the two-faced Janus that holds such prominence in GoldenEye, the vacillating hybrid monster chimera with its multiple connectivities and "joining of incongruities" (ibid., 108) helpfully defnes the scope and spectacle of James Bond's pervasive digital chaos. As 007 walks amid the Day of the Dead celebrations in Spectre's seemingly continuous (yet technologically discontinuous) opening shot, the scene ultimately stands for the ways in which the franchise's chaotic VFX traditions blend technical genealogies at varying levels of visibility. The scene is a turbulent mixing zone of the pro-flmic and the virtual or computer-generated, whose chimerical dissonance and compound identity of incongruous parts and individual components are all part of the franchise's ongoing game of CGI "bluf" played by a set of flms that -like all good secret agents -must keep their true identities frmly hidden behind the most unassuming of pseudonyms.