Above: A Ridley Scott “money shot” from Alien's 7-minutedialogue-free introduction: beginning, middles, and end through the corridors of the Nostromo (film set) in a fluid 60-second single take.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only got it half-right for Alien in 1980. To say that Ridley Scott’s commercial breakthrough was robbed of its Oscar for Best Art Direction/Set Direction is a pathetic understatement not only about the film in its own right, but also about the film within the history of moving-image arts. Alien did deservedly win Best Effects/Visual Effects for integrating elaborate spaceship models and grotesque creature puppetry believably into the film as a whole. Accordingly, the uncannily disturbing beast earned its place in the pantheon of movie monsters. It has actually proven so hard to look past its horrors that ‘The Alien’ is regularly acknowledged as the primary factor that immortalized the film. Yet independent of ‘The Alien,’ Scott’s vision of the future is one of the great achievements of hyper-realistic film design, released in the summer of 1979 during one of the most pivotal transitional periods between big-screen theatrical movie-viewing experiences and small-screen home-video viewing experiences. As it has become increasingly likely for a movie’s ultimate destination to be the small screen, attention to detail is less of a priority. Even if designers do commit to a high level of detail, statistically fewer viewers have an option of seeing it, based on resolution alone.
Alien is a great example of the importance of seeing movies on big screen. For any director reliant on frequent long-takes, compositions naturally become less didactic: greater scope in field-of-vision grants greater freedom to the explorative viewer’s eye. For a filmmaker like Scott, compositions are so enlarged that it is as if the audience is looking at the film through a microscope. Though Scott’s cutting is relatively quick given the film’s many scenes of action, viewers are capable of catching glances of its very DNA, almost subliminally. I have probably viewed Alien 20 times, yet below are a few details I glimpsed for the first time at a screening at New York's Film Forum’s brand new print of Alien (screening in honor of the film’s 30th Anniversary (July 10th-16th).
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