A Thousand Stars: Episode IV, Part 35

[matril]

Film is, inherently, trickery. We're watching a bunch of rapid flashing still images or pixels and fooling ourselves into thinking it's three-dimensional motion. So whether it's computer generated or otherwise (I could rant about the misleading nature of the term 'practical' effects, but that's for another time) there's always a bit of sleight-of-hand.

For example, this final scene in the throne room, where our heroes are rewarded and celebrated. Lucas needed to evoke a large crowd of soldiers. He didn't have enough actual people to work with, so some of the crowd are actually cardboard cutouts. The fake ones and real people are blended together so well that it works.

Also notable about this moment is how there's no dialogue. We see the scene unfold wordlessly, so that anyone, from little children to non-English speakers, can tell exactly what's happening. Our heroes enter, they march down the hall to the stage, the princess gives them their medals, and everyone cheers for them. Simple, but very effective, particularly with the triumphant processional music by John Williams. Like Pomp and Circumstance for a galaxy far, far away. And this scene set the precedent for Star Wars to always finish with a dialogue-free scene, something with sweeping music and purely cinematic storytelling.

So that's Episode IV! Next time, we start V...

Comments

[krpalmer]

Every time I've managed to comment here of late I have to apologize for not commenting more often, but I have been looking forward to seeing your posts appear each Thursday. With that said to lead off, I now have to admit to impressions from my own previous reading that the establishing shot of the throne room used a matte painting (replaced with a different one in the Special Edition) rather than "cutouts," and other shots were a matter of shuffling the extras around (and probably changing their costumes) depending on where the camera was looking. I do associate "cutouts" with the Rebel hangar, understanding there was one three-dimensional X-wing mockup and one three-dimensional Y-wing mockup, with fighters further from the camera being cutouts...

Anyway, even with the thought that we're two-thirds of the way through this analysis to chew on, I can bring up the recurring thought that while I would try to insist that "fall and redemption" make Star Wars more resonant for me than "just another military SF story" (while managing to detach me from around ninety-nine percent of the spinoffs in other media), my impression of "Star Wars in the 1970s" was that it was a phenomenon bigger than anything it's been in the years I'm old enough to remember, and then it really was just "a movie where the good guys won and the bad guys lost."

[matril]

Yes, I was trying to find more information about the setup of the throne room scene, and I couldn't find anything that exactly matched my memory -- which was admittedly not quite accurate. I knew there was some form of "real people mixed with facsimiles," but the details were elusive.