Firelight

I've been watching, off and on over the last month or so, Close Encounters of the Third Kind on hulu. Hulu remembers where you left off, which surprisingly has resulted in me actually working through this movie, rather than just watching the first couple of minutes and stopping. I wonder if that was purposeful. I mean, I know it was purposeful that Hulu programmed the site to remember where you left off, automatically, but was it to make it so that people would finish movies that they didn't intend to finish in the first place? Brilliant, if so.

Watching the movie after all these years, I was surprised by what little I remembered of it. For instance, there's a scene about 30 minutes in where Richard Dreyfuss - after having already had some contact with the UFO - is driving trying to find them again, and the scene shifts perspective to a bird's eye view where we see his truck driving across farmland, dirt roads. Then, as he's driving, a giant shadow of a UFO passes over him in the moonlight. It had the kind of under-emphasized, suspenseful quality of those mid-1970s Spielberg blockbusters (like shots where you never see Jaws but see his presence indirectly), and was amazing. Also amazing is the sheer lack of technological sophistication in the film. Case in point: at one point, they're trying to pinpoint earth coordinates, and have to drag a "$2500 globe" out of a guy's office to do it. It makes the scene so much more exciting to see a group of 15-20 men trying to use their collective wits to figure out very basic things which today would be solved in a fraction of the time by a guy using his iPhone. Makes me kind of sad, in a way - there's a lot of really anachronisms in Spielberg's film that are suspenseful only because technology was so primitive. The more powerful humans are in collecting and analyzing information, the less those scenes really seem to work (maybe).

So of course, I dug around and ended up here, at Firelight, a 1964 movie that Spielberg made when he was 16. Spielberg shot the film on a budget of $600 and turned a profit of $100, which he gave to a local charity. The prints were eventually lost, so we don't know what the movie was like, but from what I understand, he eventually remade shot-for-shot several scenes in Close Encounters. Spielberg is a director that I would love to study in a really serious way. Not because I think he's one of the greatest (though I think he's too often written off as merely someone doing popular movies). Rather, he has a grasp of story structure that I would like to better understand.