Agent movie

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The agent film or spy film is a genre of film that deals with the work of spies and secret agents . The best-known representatives of the spy film are the James Bond films .

history

The world of espionage was already present in feature films in the silent film era , for example in Fritz Lang's Spione (1927) and Fred Niblo 's War in the Dark (1928). Alfred Hitchcock made a number of spy films in the 1930s and 1940s (such as The 39 Steps , The Foreign Correspondent and A Lady Vanishes ) in which the Nazis were portrayed as enemies and opponents. During the Cold War , the role of villains in western agent film production was mainly assigned to Soviet agents. After its end, this stereotype was abandoned and new enemies, such as international terrorists , moved into the focus of the filmmakers.

The first serial hero of the spy film was the character of Lemmy Caution , who paved the way for the Bond series since the mid-1950s with quite ironically used genre-typical ingredients such as seductive women, exotic locations and exaggerated action sequences. Starting with James Bond, Dr. No (1962), the top agent Bond experienced his adventures, which mostly involved the fight against overpowering international criminal organizations and the whole world always had to be saved from a deadly threat. The successful formal and content-related trademarks of the series were subsequently varied by imitators, for example in the Jerry Cotton films of the late 1960s. In the course of Bond's popularity, the agent topic was also processed in television series , for example in Kobra, you take over , With umbrella, charm and melon or Die Profis .

As an alternative to the exaggerated world of James Bond, spy films have been made since the mid-1960s that dealt more seriously with the profession and attempted a more realistic look at the mechanisms of international espionage, such as Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came From the Cold (1965), Raoul J. Lévy's Silent Arms (1966) and Sydney Pollack's The Three Days of the Condor (1975). The invincible heroes of the early spy films gave way to tragic characters who were worn out in international conflicts and who fought for their own moral integrity in the field of tension between fraud and self-deception, for example in John Schlesinger's The Falcon and the Snowman (1984), Marek Kanievska's Another Country ( 1984) or Luc Besson's Nikita (1990), which was followed by a television series of the same name . The topos of the female secret agent found further dissemination in series such as Alias ​​- The Agent . Modern spy films are the film adaptations of the Bourne film series by Robert Ludlum ( The Bourne Identity , The Bourne Conspiracy , The Bourne Ultimatum , The Bourne Legacy ).

Content and motifs

Especially in times of political instability, espionage films enjoy great popularity as a reflection of the discomfort in front of inscrutable opponents. For a long time, a sharp separation of good and bad was common: while the methods and motives of the heroes who fought for Western freedom and who served the audience as objects of identification were portrayed as morally at least acceptable, the opponents consistently appeared to be evil, reprehensible and immoral. Only in the course of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was this rigid motif increasingly varied. In Roger Donaldson's No Way Out (1987), for example, the surprised viewer is presented with the likeable hero as a Soviet spy towards the end. A series of films around 1990 ( Hunt for Red October , Das Russland-Haus ) presented the former opponent as “good Russians”, portrayed by actors such as Sean Connery and Klaus Maria Brandauer .

Spy films draw dramaturgical power from the double lives of their protagonists. Issues of identity, doubts about one's own value system, the fine line between deception and self-deception and the difficulties of an uprooted existence on the front lines of international conflicts are often dealt with in spy films.

The stereotypical patterns of spy films always gave rise to parodies and comedic adaptations, from Bond parodies such as Casino Royale (1967) to 00 Schneider - Hunting Nihil Baxter to film comedies such as Frank Tashlin's Spy in Lace Panties (1966), Irvin Kershner's S * P * Y * S (1974), Spies Like Us (1985) by John Landis and Undercover Blues - An Absolutely Cool Trio (1993) by Herbert Ross . A more recent example is Burn After Reading - Who is Burning Their Fingers Here? .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ursula Vossen : Spy film in: Thomas Koebner (ed.): Reclams Sachlexikon des Films. 2nd edition, 2007. Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co, Stuttgart. P. 661ff.