




| R2 and 3PO escape a red blast and depart the hallway's circular form and enter a circular entrance to a spherical tube (the escape pod), as they enter Lucas aims R2's hologram eye at the audience dead center. Notice R2 faces a half dome inset mirror as he activates the pod. The ejection continues number symmetries, the ports even resemble R2's eyes in multiple. |




Above, reverses of view and motion, circular departs arrow in circular motion, circular aims at spherical, still.
|
Despite their exotic locales, Star Wars adheres to cinema verite lighting (by using the same DP as Strangelove, Lucas goes for a hybrid between documentary and epic), a film that seems to be shot with available light, even its special effects scenery seems documentary-like at times (he saves his one dramatic lighting reveal for the end: the sun-haloed Falcon). The casual observer will mistake the nuances, to contrast Star Wars's shooting style consider the dramatic blues of the cave on Dagobah. There the lighting itself is an effect. In a pair of shots we see the docking area and the Destroyer gunners (door/window forms mirrored and inverted) and then the pod's window. This pod's window form continues in R2's Sandcrawler vacuum. The sphere departs the arrow-shaped Destroyer (vortex) as a reverse cutting occurs: from in-motion to still above the sphere of Tatooine, the pod rotating as it descends. We cut from this still to Leia in reverse tracking of the pod's motion, confronting us, under guard. She takes over from the pod and her form confronts Vader and shows little fear. Notice how the corridor meets the Troopers' body forms. |


Escape pod is reversed with Leia and her guards, dark space to white corridor.



















|
The droids land on a planet that refers to their color patterns: yellow/blue-sand/sky-3PO/R2, depart a door (the hatch seen in the distance), separate again as on the ship previously, and reunite through a single object, the massive Sandcrawler, seen first as a tiny speck that reflects light. Lucas even satirically shows a skeleton of an animal that refers to Kubrick's Discovery, a sphere/head with massive vertebrae. This mechanical to bioform transition is a key undertow to the Star Wars myth. R2 descends into a valley and is met by yellow eyes in the darkness. The Jawas explosively shock R2 (the signals depart the droid in a pair of charges), appearing like the Stormtroopers, out of a cloud of smoke. Lucas has them speak a language that he declines to subtitle, and R2 is brought to a massive mechanical Jawa-like form, he even continues the creatures' lit-eye pattern in shots of the Sandcrawler's underbelly (they also mimic the blue stun charge's final moments). Notice the star filter Lucas and Gil Taylor employ on the underbelly shots. An unexplained object that looks exactly like the escape pod unminiaturized is affixed to the droid with brilliant light, then he is suctioned into the circular portal. Lucas is carefully moving everyone through portals, passages, some that are mirrored, many that are inverted. He then blends forms, the Jawa's eyes and C-3PO are both yellow lit, so the appearance of the Jawas (emerging from the canyon like 3PO walking out of the desert) is somewhat like shrinking 3PO and putting a brown hood over him. This progression continues: the Jawas enter a massive mechanical structure that resembles them, and later a howling brown hood arrives scaring away Tusken Raiders, it turns out to be Ben. As a creature of plot you are merely aware of these objects as distinctive; based on your labelled, organized structures of memory, but on an ulterior level, your mind is conducting its own, bio-structural organization: lit-eyes, hooded, brown. And this is why Lucas introduces them missing a name or with the Jawas and Ben: with complete mystery. He increases our desire to define the meaning of things without being told how to think. By exhibiting Uncle filling Luke with false memories "I told you to forget it" the audience is at least unconsciously aware that what Luke is viewing for the first time is what we are, and suggesting that we too have been told falsities about what our world actually looks and acts like, this is Lucas's masterstroke in storytelling. He has a brilliant manner in introductions, allowing imagery to take superiority over verbal decription. He is conjuring minds that subtly interpret nuances in the story by their allegiances to forms (Vader has his fans). Luke is here to master these forms but also look around them and see what inherent patterns have emerged that others cannot recognize, what 'they have taken for granted' is our bland western epitaph- in effect Luke is the first moviegoer to this cosmology, built completely inside a film, but the nuances are different now: we see his reactions with a gamer's POV, the first level, mastering the sphere is easy, mastering the self, different. |