Memory: The Origins of Alien | Little White Lies

Mem­o­ry: The Ori­gins of Alien

20 Aug 2019 / Released: 30 Aug 2019

Green-toned interior of an industrial or commercial space with cylindrical pipes and curved structures.
Green-toned interior of an industrial or commercial space with cylindrical pipes and curved structures.
4

Anticipation.

Loved 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene.

3

Enjoyment.

Less tightly focused than Philippe’s previous documentary.

4

In Retrospect.

Boldly explores Alien’s place in the Creation.

This doc­u­men­tary reveals how HP Love­craft, Fran­cis Bacon and Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky inspired Rid­ley Scott’s sci-fi opus.

Not every doc­u­men­tary on a sci-fi hor­ror hybrid made in 1979 opens with a mod­ern stag­ing of Aeschy­lus’ play Eumenides’ on the numi­nous open-air the­atre’ of ancient Del­phi. But then Alexan­dre O Philippe’s Mem­o­ry: The Ori­gins of Alien is engaged, as its title sug­gests, in a search for sources.

One might quib­ble over just how much the aggres­sive­ly adapt­able xenomorph from Rid­ley Scott’s Alien real­ly was influ­enced by the (sim­i­lar­ly relent­less, but oth­er­wise very dif­fer­ent) Furies of clas­si­cal mythol­o­gy, but the point is well tak­en that what made Alien chime so per­fect­ly with the anx­i­eties of its own time, and what makes it still res­onate today, is some­thing deep-seat­ed in the pop­u­lar uncon­scious – a long dor­mant set of men­tal asso­ci­a­tions, cul­tur­al mem­o­ries, genet­ic pro­gram­mings and col­lec­tive trau­mas just wait­ing for the right moment to hatch.

From Earth­lings: Ugly Bags of Most­ly Water to The Peo­ple vs George Lucas to Doc of the Dead to 7852: Hitchcock’s Show Scene, Philippe has made a career of explor­ing our social psy­che through the prism of care­ful­ly select­ed tele­vi­sion shows or films that some­how tap deep into the well of pop­u­lar cul­ture. In his pre­vi­ous doc­u­men­tary 7852, he worked painstak­ing­ly out­ward from a sin­gle if often imi­tat­ed sequence in Psy­cho to gauge the shift­ing of late-’50s Amer­i­can mores, of genre’s bound­aries, of film­mak­ing tech­niques, of atti­tudes towards sex and gender.

Though not quite as tight­ly focused on just the one sequence, Mem­o­ry: The Ori­gins of Alien does keep cir­cling back to the noto­ri­ous break­fast scene in Scott’s film, where­in John Hurt’s Kane, seem­ing­ly recov­ered from a close encounter with a face-hug­ging alien and enjoy­ing a meal with the rest of the spaceship’s crew, gives sud­den, vio­lent, bloody birth to anoth­er form of alien which bursts through his chest.

Philippe has cho­sen this sequence not just because of its game-chang­ing nature, its icon­ic sta­tus, and its great influ­ence on sub­se­quent art, but also because the scene encap­su­lates the documentary’s prin­ci­pal pre­oc­cu­pa­tion: the messy mir­a­cle of birth. For, sin­gu­lar­ly obsessed with the gen­e­sis of ideas, Philippe goes back not only to the lives and per­son­al­i­ties of the cre­ative team (chiefly Scott, screen­writer Dan O’Bannon and crea­ture design­er HR Giger) respon­si­ble for deliv­er­ing this psy­cho­sex­u­al space spec­ta­cle, but also to what inspired their vision.

This includes an evolv­ing mis­cege­ny of a glob­al set of myths’, Fran­cis Bacon’s 1944 trip­tych of paint­ings Three Stud­ies for Fig­ures at the Base of a Cru­ci­fix’, sci-fi and mon­ster movies from the 50s and 60s, EC Comics, HP Love­craft, Joseph Con­rad, David Cronenberg’s body hor­ror, Robert Altman’s inno­va­tions in nat­u­ral­is­tic dia­logue, Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune, the par­a­sitism of wasps, and O’Bannon’s own intesti­nal illness.

A swarm of talk­ing heads – film­mak­ers, actors, aca­d­e­mics and crit­ics – pro­vide infec­tious con­text and insight, talk­ing us through how the seed of an idea can, in the right hands, awak­en and take form and change and devel­op into some­thing that pen­e­trates the human mind, in turn engen­der­ing oth­er ideas. Ulti­mate­ly, we no more under­stand the alchem­i­cal mag­ic that gave rise to Alien than we know where the xenomorph in the film came from (Scott would return to this elu­sive ques­tion of ori­gins in the post-mil­len­ni­al pre­quels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant).

But what Philippe’s doc­u­men­tary traces is the way in which Alien trans­forms the per­vert­ed (pro)creative process at the heart of its own mak­ing into the main theme and cen­tral mys­tery of its ongo­ing story.

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