Roy Neary, an Indiana electric lineman, finds his quiet and ordinary daily life turned upside down after a close encounter with a UFO, spurring him to an obsessed cross-country quest for answers as a momentous event approaches.
EN
“I’ve never had a close encounter of any kind – except with a $19,000,000 movie.”
Steven Spielberg1
“Why have I been back to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind six times, braving lines, wait, cold and four-buck-fifty admission price? Can it be I love the movie? Listen. I have been back to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind six times to see if I have been ripped off. I mean. Scorpio Rising. The toys, the kid. I mean. Lucifer Rising. The saucers. Subject dear to my heart.”
Kenneth Anger2
Marshall Shaffer: In interviews, you mentioned Steven Spielberg as the first formative filmmaker you remember. Subconsciously, do you think Memoria might at all be indebted to his early fantasies? Jessica is convinced of something strange, potentially paranormal, that she experiences alone and cannot find solace from in logic or friends.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I came to the realization later that this is like the sound and communication with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But when I was there shooting, no. It must be an unconscious thing. But I admire Spielberg a lot in terms of the way he pulls out emotion for a character. I think he’s really classical. He has a link to very classical film that I admire.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul in conversation with Marshall Shaffer3
Dear François,
We have finally seen Close Encounters. It is a very good film, and I regret it was not made in France. This type of popular science would be most appropriate for the compatriots of Jules Verne and Méliès. Both men were Montgolfier’s rightful heirs. You are excellent in it, because you’re not quite real. There is more than a grain of eccentricity in this adventure. The author is a poet. In the South of France one would say he is a bit fada. He brings to mind the exact meaning of this word in Provence: the village fada is the one possessed by the fairies.
These fairies who reside with you have agreed to let themselves be briefly borrowed by the author of the film in question.
Love from Dido and I.
Letter from Jean Renoir to François Truffaut4
Richard Combs: Did the story come from any particular incident?
Steven Spielberg: Nothing that ever happened to me. It was a compendium of research I had done. I read everything on the market, including the clippings from the National Inquirer and the wire services, and even tried to get into the Blue Book archives, long before the project was declassified, to no avail. I was mainly inspired when I began to meet people who had had experiences, and I realised that just about every fifth person I talked to had looked up at the sky at some point in their lives, and seen something that was not easy to explain. And then I began meeting people who had had close encounters of the second kind, where undeniably something quite phenomenal was happening right before their eyes. It was this direct contact, the interviews, that got me interested in making the movie. I interviewed enough people to know that all of them could not possibly be lying. A lot of the sightings people have at night are because they never look and are just discovering the sky; so many reports are easy to explain astronomically, conventionally. There are other reports that are impossible to describe conventionally, but the basic scientific community isn’t ready to change Einstein’s rules.
And close encounters of the third kind?
That’s when you meet them. It’s much more outspoken in Europe than it is in America, where there’s a sort of hush-hush about these things that go bump in the night. Somehow, in Brazil, in France, in Italy, throughout South America, there’s much more open-mindedness and a general acceptance – there’s less scientific scepticism. In America, how can UFOs exist over the sky when Phyllis and Maud and all the family are on television at the same time? When do people go outside and look up any more?
Steven Spielberg in conversation with Richard Combs5
- 1Steven Spielberg, cited in Mitch Tuchman, “Close Encounter with Steven Spielberg,”Film Comment (January-February 1978), 50.
- 2Kenneth Anger, “A Short Review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Film Comment (January-February 1978), 54.
- 3Marshall Shaffer, “Interview: Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Orchestrating Human Expression in Memoria,” Slant Magazine, 20 December 2021.
- 4A letter from Jean Renoir to François Truffaut, from Jean Renoir, Letters, eds. David Thompson and Lorraine LoBianco (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). Dido Freire was Renoir’s second wife, from 1944 until his death in 1979.
- 5Richard Combs
FR
« Rencontres du troisième type contient le plan qui, plus encore que l’image iconique de la silhouette d’Elliott et E.T. se détachant sur une lune pleine, synthétise à elle seule tout un pan du cinéma de Spielberg. Un enfant, émerveillé par les objets qui s’animent par la seule force d’un vaisseau extra-terrestre stationné au-dessus de sa maison, ouvre grand la porte pour y laisser entrer la lumière. Sa mère est terrifiée et se jette sur la porte pour la refermer mais le petit garçon, lui, est fasciné par la force attractive, résolument irrésistible, de cette lumière chaude et accueillante. Spielberg filme la scène à hauteur d’enfant ; il est de son côté et nous invite à contempler, nous aussi, la beauté de ce qui se joue dehors, indicible et mystérieuse, à la fois frontale (la lumière est aveuglante) et hors champ (on ne voit pas d’où elle vient). Avoir foi en l’inconnu, (s’)ouvrir littéralement pour se laisser guider par l’Autre : en un seul plan somptueux, Steven Spielberg signait son manifeste cinématographique pour les quinze années suivantes. Un manifeste pour un cinéma ludique et humaniste qui, loin de la naïveté qui lui a souvent été reprochée à l’époque, inverse le positionnement passif du spectateur en le tournant droit vers la lumière, vers sa source même (le projecteur) pour l’inviter à entrer dans le film. Spielberg enfonce le clou, à la fin, quand le vaisseau ouvert déverse ses petits aliens bienveillants dans un halo de lumière blanche, avant d’inviter le héros – et le spectateur – à son bord. « Ouvrez les portes, les fenêtres, et votre cœur ! », semble-t-il nous dire. « Le cinéma vous le rendra au centuple. » »
Fabien Reyre1
« L’infinité des messages violents, anarchiques, contradictoires qui dénient jour et nuil (au moins aux U.S.A.) sur le petit écran de la télévision, venant de tous les pays et de tous les Etats de la Terre, finissent par créer chez le spectateur le désir d’une mise en ordre, d’une reprise en main apaisante et peut-être même d’une synthèse philosophique que Rencontres vient aujourd’hui concrétiser à point nommé. Par delà les luttes sociales, les guerres, les massacres dont chaque téléspectateur reçoit sans cesse les images, il est enfin possible de voir, et avec toute la fidélité dans le rendu et la réalisation que permet encore aujourd’hui le grand écran, que l’humanité terrestre a un but et que son Histoire, si délirante qu’elle puisse paraître, a un sens. »
Jean-Claude Biette2
- 1Fabien Reyre, “La montagne magique,” Critikat.
- 2Jean-Claude Biette, “Rencontres du troisième type (S. Spielberg),” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 287, avril 1978.