Cinematography technique · used in 3 films
Setting scenes among pipes, machinery and grimy concrete, including spaceships that look like working factories. The functional, worn look feels far from sleek sci-fi and makes the world cold and lonely.
Examples
David Lynch · 1977
Lynch shot in the AFI's disused stables and on other AFI-owned locations. He built a world where the machinery of industry is also the landscape people live their home lives in. The film treats the factory and the apartment as the same kind of machine, and both strip away what is human.
Where to see it: Henry's apartment building. From outside, you can't tell it apart from the factories around it. Home sits right inside the landscape of production.
Ridley Scott · 1979
The inside of the Nostromo is all low ceilings, dripping condensation, hanging cables and flickering monitors. Production designer Michael Seymour built a workplace for working people. They are truck drivers in space. Because the ship is so ordinary, the horror that enters it hits harder.
Where to see it: The crew's first walk through the Nostromo's cargo levels. The ship is shown as a place of work, with nothing adventurous about it.
David Fincher · 1992
Fiorina 161 is a working foundry, with furnaces, molten lead and dull metal corridors. Exteriors were shot at an English power station and a coastal beach, with most interiors at Pinewood Studios. Nothing looks sleek or hopeful, so the place feels abandoned.
Where to see it: The molding room trap. The prisoners lure the Alien into the foundry's molding room and pour molten lead over it, but it escapes the mold until Ripley sets off the fire sprinklers and it breaks apart from thermal shock.
Questions