Film students from East Sussex have recreated the iconic opening titles to Goldfinger, subverting the presumed-to-be straight male gaze by substituting the buxom female form with a muscled male model.

When a team of film students from East Sussex got in touch with me to share their latest project, I knew it would be right up our alley.

Gaze is an idea we return to again and again at Licence to Queer. It’s endlessly fascinating. It stems from a seminal essay by Laura Mulvey, first published in 1975. The idea has become so popular that it has stepped well belong academic discourse, although a lot of the time it is only partly understood or wilfully misinterpreted.

In Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, Mulvey made the persuasive case that most films are made by heterosexual men so their camera will often linger on female bodies, treating them as sexual objects, to be gaze upon by a presumed-to-be straight, male audience. Mulvey did not use the Bond films in her examples, but her thesis fits the 007 series - up to a point. In the intervening fifty years since Mulvey first published her essay, she has taken pains to point out the various shortcomings of her argument; she largely overlooked the female audience and omitted consideration of queer viewers entirely.

I’ve made the case repeatedly that the Bond films are equal opportunities objectifiers, treating Bond’s body (and those of male characters) as things to-be-looked-at. Women, gay and bisexual men and - dare I say it - straight men who are secure enough in their identity to admit it, may garner some pleasure from looking on the beautiful male form.

So what better way to celebrate more than 60 years of Goldfinger than recreating Robert Brownjohn's iconic title sequence shot-for-shot, switching actress Margaret Nolan for a male model?

The film students behind the project told me that their goal was to “subvert the expected straight male gaze of the 1960s”. But semi-naked women are a hallmark of many Bond opening titles, so why Goldfinger specifically?

"We're all massive vintage Bond movie geeks, so when thinking of cool ways to experiment with projection techniques, the opening titles for From Russia with Love and Goldfinger sprang to mind - as none of us can belly-dance, Goldfinger it is!"

The team revealed to me the work that went in to creating the final product:

"AI-created imagery and human-made digital art are becoming indistinguishable, so we wanted to explore more practical old-school visual effects and graphic design. Filming took about four hours, setting up each shot to match the original composition as closely as possible.

"The most time consuming part was actually finding the correct Goldfinger scenes beforehand, as several clips used in the original title sequence aren't in the finished movie or they're broken up by cuts!"

"Other issues included getting the projector focused on a 3D surface, unwanted light shining on the black backdrops behind, rogue tripod shadows, and accidentally leaving the mouse cursor on screen in one shot, aaagh! But in fact, all this doubled down on our belief that some roughness and human error give a more interesting end result than overly slick CGI visuals.

"And yes, the gold paint did wash off eventually."

You can view a selection of stills from the film below.