Looking into Alien Concept Work

 Whilst researching Alien I also looked into who did the concept art work as it was mentioned several times as being the driving force behind the project. 
The main bulk of concept work was done by H.R Giger, a swiss surealist painter. 

As you can tell from these images, they are extremely phallic and invasive. The Alien itself is sexless (until Aliens where there is a mention of a mother alien) but Giger interpreted fears into drawings. Rape for women has always been a fear, but for men when Aid's was still a largely unknown and uncontrollable condition at the time of Alien (1979)'s creation, there was undoubted fear among men about contracting the condition. 

 Giger adapted his work to this fear, he was quoted saying that his work came from real life 

“Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality.”

L I N K  - - https://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/original-alien-concept-art-h-r-giger?utm_term=.cyxyRN7w41#.iqNBkZxDL0

Watching the film Alien; My review and Notes

1979 Theatrical Release Alien, 
Directed By Ridley Scott 

Alien is a pivotal film in the horror genre, it was one of the last films made before the 80's boom of slasher horror so it feels more genuine and scary in it's attempts to captivate the audience. Sigourney Weaver plays Ellen Ripley, A warrant officer aboard the commercial ship Nostromo, She is joined by 6 other crew aboard the space ship. 

Ripley starts displaying "Final Girl" (clover) elements 10 minutes into Alien. "Its not our solar system" she claims as the crew is woken from their space sleep. She realises something is wrong from the outset (as do we) and her view is close to our own. This identifies her as our final girl. Other signifiers of her being our final girl is her name throughout the film, although formally she is Ellen Ripley, she is referred to as 'Ripley' throughout which has masculine undertones. Ripley is not the only female however, Lambert the navigator is also a key female in the film, however the camera view points throughout the film focus mostly on Ripley and as an audience we are given the impression that she is the Final Girl from the get go.  The space ship receives a distress signal from a nearby planet, here Ripley insists that they go back to their sleep but she is over ruled by her fellow crew to land the ship and investigate the planet, as instructed by the science ship officer (Ash). 
Aboard the ship Nostromo, the majority of the crew are males and although Ripley has a reasonable position of power, she is out numbered by males. The male audience viewing this film might have been identifying with other male crew mates at the start, but their roles are fleeting and as Carol Clover discusses "they tend to die early in the film". The crew discovers Alien eggs and one attatches itself to Kane. The two other crew mates Lambert and Dallas beg Ripley to let Kane onto the ship, Ripley insists that letting him on would be a breach of quarantine, however Ash overrules Ripley and opens the vent. 
Kane is the first to die, seemingly fine after the alien egg attack, they are all seated for a meal when his chest bursts open much to the disgust and horror of his crew mates. This is high quality horror as it is very unexpected in the calm scene (although foreshadowed at the start). The red blood against the ships metal and white background is a dramatic colour contrast and could be seen as a signifier of death for the seemingly innocent crew (white). 

As the film progresses the crew get smaller and smaller, this is where we can see Ripley kicking into action, her thought process is very rational and calm in comparison to the others who are in more of a flame thrower frenzy. Ripley tries to take her rightful command over Ash, much to his reluctance, and goes to 'mother' a supercomputer aboard the ship that has the mission and all the data inside it. Ripley then discovers that Ash has been lying to crew, and was instructed to bring the Alien back to earth to weaponise for their employers. Furthermore that he is an Artificial Intelligence. For many audience members this is just an added thrill to the horror film, the horror that one of your own see's you as expendable to the mission as well as the threat of A.I. This threat was felt very strongly in the early 80s as more and more factories set up and robots could replace human job roles. Although not a massive fear it was still a fear of the time. 
Ash upon learning Ripley knows, then moves to attacks Ripley with a newspaper, although not an outwardly phallic weapon he rolls it into a cylindrical shape and attempts to suffocate her with it with strong sexual connotations. This could be seen as an act of sexual violence of a man vs a woman in the horror film, but Ash is a robot so perhaps we could argue that is less so? 

Ripley defeats Ash with assistance from her crew mates and they learn more about the Alien. At this point you could argue that Lambert could have been a final girl, her innocence throughout the film is obvious and she becomes more unstable as the film goes on, hysterically suggesting they abandon the plan to kill the Alien and flee on the pod. Despite her character flaws, Lambert makes it into the final three. There is a certain hopefulness that the three of them might make it out alive, Lambert and Parker are not seen as dumb characters by the audience and we feel some empathy for them both, Lambert because of her frantic emotions and Parker because he has lost his best friend. They are sent to collect life supplies for the shuttle but are cornered by the Alien. Parker represents the last male character to identify with, he makes an attempt to save Lambert as she is paralyzed by fear "Indulging his vanity as protector of the helpless female" (2) however the Killer in this situation (Alien) eliminates his role as protector and pursues Lambert. Lambert's death is the final we are given, slow and suspenseful and hinted strongly that the Alien rape-killed Lambert although much of her death is off screen. It's tail creeping up her leg is the most we are given but it was enough to assume. Although an alien, we can still use this as an example of sexualised violence towards a female. It is a a hotly debated subject among critics but was confirmed when the game version of Alien was created and that scene was recreated. Director Ridley Scott then confirmed "was that some dreadful ending? Was that some terrible invasion of her body, a rape?"(1). Lambert's death was changed a significant amount of times during the filming, her nervous disposition and emotional fragility lead to one of the proposed deaths being that she climbed inside a cupboard and died of fright but it was decided in the end to leave her death as ambiguous as possible to allow the audience to let their imagination run wild. 
Ripley (and her beloved cat Jonesy) make it to the shuttle and the Nostromo is blown wide open. The audience feels a sense of relief, and Ripley is sexualised for the audience (for the first time) perhaps to give them the sense that it is safe. She strips down to a thin white tank and pants, covered in sweat. It's quite a powerful sexual image, that could be seen as fetishism for the male audience parts or a feminist victory for the females of the audience. Whilst all audience members are gaining something, we are suddenly guided by the camera angle to the danger that still lurks, the Alien has curled up into the shuttle. A quick minded Ripley gets into a space suit (a camera view point that certainly highlights her assets undoubtedly) and defeats the alien by releasing it into space. We watch with her as the Alien's corpse drifts away and we then know that the immediate horror is over. 








(1)  https://www.videogamer.com/features/lamberts-death-not-ripleys-survival-was-the-biggest-challenge-in-alien-isolations-dlc 

(2) Carol Clover, Her Body, Himself.

Gender In The Slasher Film - Carol Clover

L I N K :
  http://www.blue-sunshine.com/tl_files/images/Week4-Clover-HerBodyHimself.pdf

During my research I stumbled across Carol Clover's name numerous times, She is a feminist theorist who specialises in talking about Women's Representation in Horror Films - specifically Slasher Films. 

This article is important to what I'm writing about because it tackles Horror Film Directors attitudes to women as well as 

Q U O T E S from this article (unsorted) 

Where pornography (the argument goes) resolves that lack through a process of fetishization that allows a breast or leg or whole body to stand in for the missing member, the slasher film resolves it either through eliminating the woman (earlier victims) or reconstituting her as masculine (Final Girl)

Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female

 "If the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla, birds, and slime, the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel"

As slasher director Dario Argento puts it, “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man.”  - -         2 As quoted in William Schoell, Stay Out of the Shower (New York, 1985), 56.

 Q u o t e s   r e l e v a n t  t o   t e x t s 

 To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking.18 She is simply an agreed upon fiction, and the male viewer’s use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty

Q u o t e s  a b o u t  F e m a l e  S t r e n g t h  i n  h o r r o r  f i l m s (within the article) 

 At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own savior, she becomes a hero; and the moment that she becomes a hero is the moment that the male viewer gives up the last pretense of male identification


indeed, would-be rescuers are not infrequently blown away for their efforts, leaving the girl to fight her own fight. Policemen, fathers, and sheriffs appear only long enough to demonstrate risible incomprehension and incompetence

(about The Final Girl) We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation

 It is the male killer’s tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl’s victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization).

The gender of the Final Girl is likewise compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance (penetration, it seems, constructs the female), her apartness from other girls, sometimes her name. At the level of the cinematic apparatus, her unfemininity is signaled clearly by her exercise of the “active investigating gaze” normally reserved for males and hideously punished in females when they assume it themselves; tentatively at first and then aggressively; the Final Girl looks for the killer, even tracking him to his forest hut or his underground labyrinth, and then at him, therewith bringing him, often for the first time, into our vision as well.14 When, in the final scene, she stops screaming, looks at the killer, and reaches for the knife (sledge hammer, scalpel, gun, machete, hanger, knitting needle, chainsaw), she addresses the killer on his own terms. To the critics’ objection that Halloween in effect punished female sexuality, director John Carpenter responded: They [the critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. Because if you turn it around, the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She’s the most sexually frustrated. She’s the one that killed him. Not because she’s a virgin, but because all that repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy. . . . She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression.

-- 14 “The woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization. The place of her specularization is transformed into the locus of a process of seeing designed to unveil an aggression against itself”; Mary Ann Doane, “The ‘Woman’s Film,’” in Re-Vision, 72.

-- 15 John Carpenter interviewed by Todd McCarthy, “Trick and Treat,” Film Comment 16 (1980): 23–24



Q u o t e s   a b o u t   c a m e r a p o i n t s  w i t h i n  t h e  a r t i c l e 

E. Ann Kaplan sums it up: “Within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen; and the camera’s original ‘gaze’ comes into play in the very act of filming
-- 6 E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London, 1983), 15. The discussion of the gendered “gaze” is lively and extensive. See above all Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18; reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd edn. (New York, 1985), 803–16; also Christine Gledhill, “Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (1978); reprinted in Mast and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism, 817–45.

Thus some critics have wondered whether the female viewer, faced with the screen image of a masochistic/narcissistic female, might not rather elect to “betray her sex and identify with the masculine point of view.”5
 -- 5 Silvia Bovenschen, “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” New German Critique 10 (1977): 114. See also Mary Ann Doane, “Misrecognition and Identity,” Cine-Tracts 11 (1980): 25–32.)

An analysis of the camerawork bears this out. Much is made of the use of the I-camera to represent the killer’s point of view.

let us for the moment accept the equation point of view = identification

 if, during the film’s course, we shifted our sympathies back and forth, and dealt them out to other characters along the way, we belong in the end to the Final Girl; there is no alternative