Watch It for the Dents

Everything in it is dirty

The first fact about this film is not a story. It is a texture.

Surfaces here are scratched, sun-bleached, oil-stained, dented at the corners where something has been knocked against a doorframe too many times. Panels do not fit flush. Paint has come off along the edges that hands touch. The interior of the smuggler's ship is greasy in the way a working kitchen is greasy — not decorated to look used, but built so that use is the only thing you can read off it.

This is the whole achievement, and it is a material one. Science fiction on screen before 1977 was mostly clean: white, seamless, pressurised, hostile to fingerprints. Lucas has his production designers scuff everything. The result is not realism. It is something stranger and more useful — the sensation of having arrived somewhere late, after the interesting events, into a world already worn down by ordinary work. You are not shown a future. You are shown a place with a maintenance history.

Gilbert Taylor lights it flatly and hot in the desert exteriors, shot in Tunisia, where the sand goes almost white and the shadows are short and hard. Then the film descends into interiors lit like submarines. The two palettes never blend. Heat and then metal. Glare and then gloom.

The sound arrived before the images did

Close your eyes in the first ten minutes and the film still works. That is not a compliment paid to many pictures.

Ben Burtt built these noises out of the physical world rather than an oscillator, and the material origins stay audible. The dark figure's breathing is a scuba regulator, and it retains the wetness of a real apparatus around a real mouth — a rasp with moisture in it, which is why it registers in the body rather than the ear. The energy blades hum with the sound of an idling projector motor crossed with the interference of a television tube. Machines here sound like machines that were once something else. There is grit in the signal.

The small droid does not speak and is the most legible character in the film, because Burtt gave it a vocabulary of pitch and tempo instead of words. Rising and fast is alarm. Descending and slow is refusal. An audience decodes it in under a minute without instruction, which tells you how much of screen character is carried by rhythm alone.

Against all of this: John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra, playing late-Romantic brass with absolute conviction. The juxtaposition is the film's boldest gesture. Grimy surfaces, junk-built sound effects, and then a full orchestra treating it with the seriousness of Wagner. Nothing about that should hold together. It holds together because neither element apologises.

Faces, and one voice

Alec Guinness speaks slowly in a film that is otherwise in a hurry, and the tempo change is the most sensuous thing in it. His voice has a dry papery quality — no vibrato, very little volume, consonants placed exactly. He delivers absurd propositions in the register of a man discussing crop rotation. The film's strangeness becomes admissible because one voice in it refuses to be excited.