Recently, over drinks with a friend, the conversation took a sudden turn from my preferred substance (vacuous) to something deeper when the friend began lecturing me on how the world was spinning off its political/environmental/cultural axis and soon would—mark his words—fling itself into the sun and reduce mankind to ash. Deservedly so, he added.
The recent release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the passing of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the great cinematographers, got me thinking about the two groundbreaking science fiction epics released back in 1977, George Lucas’ original Star Wars (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope upon its 1981 theatrical re-release) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the only movie for which Zsigmond received an Academy Award,
With the exception of a couple of experimental shorts using a process called “Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre” presented at the 1900 Paris Exhibition and, of course, the live piano/organ accompaniment prevalent in the silent era (which doesn’t really count), cinema was purely a visual medium for the first 37 years of its existence.