"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 30 Perfect Shots

by Cláudio Alves

Years ago, as part of the dearly departed Hit Me With Your Best Shot series, the Film Experience hosted a celebration whose theme was the 1977 Best Cinematography Oscar nominees. Much was written about the contenders' beauty, their visual storytelling, and aesthetic vices. None was more praised than Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whose lensing earned Vilmos Zsigmond a well-deserved Academy Award. It was the film's only victory on Oscar night, partly because another seminal work in American sci-fi stole its thunder. Even so, Spielberg's creation endures, as miraculous as it ever was.

American audiences now have the privilege of revisiting the film in a new 4K restoration. Last weekend, it played in selected theaters as a special event, and there's an encore this Wednesday. Oh, how I wish I could experience it on the big screen. In lieu of that, I re-watched the film at home and decided to write about thirty of its best shots – and there are so many perfect ones! Consider this my lengthy and much-delayed contribution to that Hit Me With Your Best Shot of years past…

Blocking is a lost art, and deep-focus staging is even more so. Yet, some paragons remain with us, and Steven Spielberg is one of them. Consider the audience's introduction to the Neary family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The dad tries to explain math to his eldest boy through a model train collision – Fabelmans moment #1 of heaven knows how many – but quickly grows distracted. Then there's the mother, anguished about her space being invaded by the husband's mess, while another kid loudly destroys a baby doll to everyone's annoyance. The director invokes domestic chaos within a pristinely controlled mise-en-scène, making you understand the dysfunctional bonds barely keeping the characters together.

Some of the most incredible cinematic tricks are the simplest ones. Such is the case of Roy Neary's first brush with extra-terrestrial presences. The light from above is a mix of terror and holy intervention, while the impossible movement of everything within the vehicle is a spike of unsettling motion, mayhap some violence. It's merely a matter of pulling the car vertical and having the objects inside fall on Richard Dreyfuss. But, oh, the effect is fantastic.

Not every great shot must be stuffed with information or blessed with movie magic. There's greatness in simplicity, too, as one can see here. Re-watching Close Encounters, you realize Roy's decision to pursue the strange flashes from above will break his life and his family. This is the exact moment when that choice consolidates, and the characters' fate turns inevitable. It's a plunge into the unknown, into the darkness, hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel.

Though the ice cream cum taco-shaped alien vehicles are more iconic, I've always had a fondness for this glowing red orb that always flies last in the formation. It reminds me of Peter Pan's Tinkerbell, and there's something enticing about its siren blare mixed with whimsy. Moreover, the color pops beautifully against the starry night, the moon's silver glow disrupted by this fidgety warm dot.

The prototypical Spielbergian look of wonder is complicated by the contrast between mother and child. Little Barry Guiler is all boyish innocence, cheeks flushed with enthusiasm and catchlights brightening the kid's gaze. But Jillian, played by Melinda Dillon, feels less certain. Her reaction is tentative, a more adult version of wonderment that encompasses a prickle of fear.

Sometimes, you praise a shot just because it's pretty. And isn't this one lovely? The color contrast, the nocturnal landscape still legible in the fantastical alien aurora, the painterly quality that makes it look like an illustration – one can understand why so much modern media, drunk on nostalgia, tries to harken back to this film's look. If only those copycats had Spielberg and Zsigmond's artistry.

And sometimes you praise a shot just because it makes you laugh. The Oscar-nominated production design is on full display here, encapsulating the pandemonium of little boys in their sacred sanctum, dead to the world until the lights turn on. The anamorphic lens distortion on the upper and lower edges of the frame adds to it, too, messing up the wallpaper's motif. It's a big old mess, but an intentional, perfectly presented one.

Ronnie and Roy's marriage is bound to ruin. Yet, she tries to make it work, even accommodating his sudden need to wake the kids and drive the family to the middle of nowhere. He claims he just witnessed something unbelievable, eyes already moving away from the others and inching away from them. In one elegant image, Spielberg encapsulates all that, framing Dreyfuss pushed to one side of the screen and Teri Garr holding on to him, pulling him to the center without success. Besides her, there's a chasm. While he's the one pursuing a cosmic mystery, she seems more unmoored, more isolated and untethered. Under the surface warmth, this is a sad tableau.

A ship lost in the sand waves of a desert is an incongruous idea that makes for an arresting sight. Adding two helicopters in the background emphasizes the size of the thing, beckoning awe at this monument of impossibilities. It's a bold image whose impact is akin to a comic book panel.

Zsigmond won the Oscar but wasn't behind every shot in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For example, Douglas Slocombe shot the scenes in India, including this incredible frame whose kinetic energy is impossible to transmit in stillness. The fingers all come up at once, punctuating the scene with such force it's almost comical. It certainly brings a smile to one's face, even as the picture's tonalities complicate themselves further. We've already touched on the wonderment of the mystery and the fear, but now Spielberg adds near-religious passion. The shot is also a promise of transcendence coming from whatever is above us all.

I don't know why, but this elderly couple has always fascinated me. Theirs is a wrinkled variation on the Spielberg "wonder" shot that comes with the implicit gravitas of age. Still, their expression takes the cake, how close to tears his eyes are and the softness of her smile. How cruel that, as it turns out, they are reacting to helicopters coming to disperse the believers who assemble to see those angels of candy-colored light.

On re-watch, I was surprised by how much the abduction of little Barry plays like a horror movie. Before the iconic image that heads this post, the orange alien light intrudes upon the Guiler household through a keyhole, the menace of a displaced twilight in a classical shot of domestic invasion. One feels a mother's terror and the kid's curiosity in tandem.

And even when Spielberg ups the ante, there's something oddly comforting about this midnight sun from outer space. Rather than the spotlight of a search party or the prison guard's glare, this sight trembles with the possibility of an invitation—the light beckons, sweet despite the maternal panic.

In contrast to the alien glow, these human lights feel so much colder and abrasive. The blue flare is a cut across Jillian's figure, trapping her in the media's bottomless hunger.

Tonally, Close Encounters of the Third Kind takes a dip in the middle. Though Spielberg keeps morality out of the narrative, thriving in ambivalence, some moments reveal the tragedy beneath the otherworldly spectacle he has conjured. None hits harder than this shot, as Dreyfuss depicts Roy's obsessive unraveling with joyful abandon while the older son cries quietly. He doesn't understand his father's erratic behavior and almost seems to sense that he's about to lose him. Once more, re-watching this '77 classic after The Fabelmans feels like gaining new insight into Spielberg's cinema. He truly replayed his parents' divorce film after film.

If this film needed to be nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, it should have been Teri Garr instead of Melinda Dillon. She brings so much to the underwritten part of a woman who, one day, looks at her husband and can't recognize the man she married. Or maybe she sees him fully for the first time, reckoning with the pain of knowing that, in the bigger picture, the marriage and the kids mean very little to him. It's all in this shot, in the actress' face, a ravaging wind of adult drama blowing through the picture like a hurricane.

I'd go even further and say that if Dreyfuss had to be our 1977 Best Actor champion, he should have won the prize for this instead of The Goodbye Girl. When other thespians would downplay the destructiveness of Roy's obsession, Dreyfuss gives himself to it, breaking the man and proudly showing us the shatters like a cat bringing its owner a dead bird. If the filmmaking flirts with horror during Barry's kidnapping, so does its leading man during Roy's manic episode. Even the cinematography seems to underline that quality, making him a black hole in the sunny domesticity of the family home. Only the mad glint of his eyes remains undimmed.

Again, sometimes you have to appreciate a shot that elicits genuine laughter. Putting the camera low to the ground in a composition style he never repeats in the movie, Spielberg frames Garr through her neighbors' fleeing ducks. In a sequence brimming with anxiety and mortification, this light touch brightens the whole thing. It's permission to breathe, to laugh, and maybe to cry between it all.

Nathaniel wrote plenty about this shot in his Hit Me With Your Best Shot entry, so I'll co-sign what he says. What an exquisite showcase for Spielberg's craft and ingenuity this scene is, so full of tension and strange comedy, suspense, and relief crashing in waves over the audience. He finally knows what that damned mountain is!

If I had to pick one component of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that keeps it from being perfect, or on the podium of Spielberg's career, it's got to be the romance (?) between these two believers. Their solidarity is understandable, but there's a leaning on amorous connection that makes little sense with the characters. At least, in shots like this, their bond feels visceral, two people recognizing themselves in the other and holding together as the world goes mad. Visual storytelling trumps weak screenwriting.

Conversation pieces are an arena where a filmmaker's worth is tested beyond the usual considerations of craft. They don't posit obvious challenges but represent an easy path toward perfunctory convention. In other words, while not difficult to frame functionally, they are hard to make interesting. Spielberg knows what to do, however. Here, as Roy and the Frenchman in charge of the alien investigation finally meet, he uses the presence of an interpreter to have a nesting doll dialogue, exchanges within exchanges. So, he has this profile shot of the two men considering whether they'll let Roy in on the truth or not. The tilting focus will delineate how the conversation goes, how the power shifts from the foregrounded men to the curious civilian who knows too much already.

The final act of Close Encounters is full of incredible shots of Devil's Tower. I could have picked any of them, but this one is special. Before the rainbow of lights reaches its climax, rolling clouds are the heralds of change. It's not a storm they presage, but the mothership's final arrival. It's one last touch of horror – merely the potential for it – and it must have been on Jordan Peele's mind when he made Nope, clothing Jean Jacket in a nebulous disguise high above.

The composite shots that tie the rocky surroundings with the army-made landing ground are a delight for those of us who love old-school filmmaking. This example delights me by announcing the mothership through a mother's expectant gaze. Moreover, the shadow play almost makes it look like she's holding the hand of a smaller body. Her baby boy is coming home soon enough.

Spielberg's sense of scale is off the charts, especially when he frames the mothership as he does here. More than a monument, it resembles a mechanical sunrise, with spaceship parts irradiating from the center like golden rays around our most familiar star.

Another beautiful note to give a sense of scale, now making the mothership's arrival hit like an eclipse. Or perhaps a great leviathan come to eat humankind. Oh, but there's no threat despite the shadows. Merely awe, childish and pure, unencumbered by terror or the caution that comes with it.

Putting every army and government extra in sunglasses and similar expressions of awe anonymizes them into a mass. Moreover, it contrasts them, who have lost nothing to the aliens, with a mother desperate to see her son again. She emerges from the shadow, inching closer to the light as if grasping for hope. And her eyes, even in the penumbra, are readable, so that we can appreciate the mood shift, the joy, the ecstasy of salvation.

The disco-floor-like kaleidoscope of the mothership is iconic beyond belief, but I'm always more enticed by the breaks in the cornucopia of color of this last act. As the two men who believed most in the alien's visitation wait for their revelation, we get this geometric beauty. Black and white dominate, with the graphic line of the opening anger announcing the end of oblivion, the beginning of something special, a new chapter in our collective understanding of the universe. Modestly designed, the shot triumphs through its barebones beauty.

The first humanoid alien is an interesting addition to the last act, always enshrined in blinding light, the abstraction of an imagined savior. Or maybe something more sinister. Perhaps something altogether beyond human comprehension. This shot synthesizes the mystery while making it familiar in gesture and form. It preserves the hope Spielberg has conjured while suggesting a different emotional dimension.

For my final perfect shot, I propose a reflection on a reflection. Spielberg said that, after having children of his own, he had issues with how Roy abandoned his family at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While parental abandonment is at the center of the film's human story, there's an ease with which Roy decides to go that feels on the verge of cruelty. But maybe young Spielberg already knew that and retroactive regret is overplayed. Look at this shot and take it as a breath of doubt, even if neither performance nor text follows suit. The aliens being played by children and this framing makes us reckon with Roy's reality as a father, heavenly light marred by the implicit sorrow of a broken family. Melancholy insinuates itself into the Spielbergian awe, illuminating the personal history underlying every one of the director's works.

If you have the chance, watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the big screen. If not, there's always streaming. Spielberg's sci-fi masterpiece is available on Amazon Prime Video and TCM.

Comments

[Mr Ripley79]

Excellent stuff,agreed on Garr,what did Dillon do in that film but look fretful,she doesn't even have the one scene to justify it.

[Adeferrer]

Thanks for this. The movie’s images, even the poster, are definitive symbols of the 1970s US.

The strong 70’s anti-government paranoia was lost on me as an 11 year-old but it was the 1st time I remember seeing an outsider culture of people who didn’t follow society’s rules and were bound together by a different belief system. And with that sweet old couple - you felt all types were welcome.

And yes, Teri Garr rules! How can a face so young look so worried? She was the establishment response if you dared to want to follow a different path. Weren’t her last lines “what, what??”?

[Lane Jancy]

Great work; I agree with Garr that Dillon did nothing in the picture except appear worried; there isn't a single shot that gives her any credit for her performance.
mapquest driving directions

[Leila Beer]

When you wonder what game to play, right now you can try this new game jacksmith. A very interesting game that helps you become a professional blacksmith crafting many weapons to defeat your enemies.