Close Encounters of the Third Kind, by Dana Polan

In three decades, the BFI Film Classics book series has devoted almost two hundred monographs to the analysis and discussion of cult films, art films, and international films contributing significantly to the flourishing and renewal of cinephilia in successive generations. These short but intensive monographs, normally about a hundred pages in length, provide rigorous and focused scrutiny of a single film including production, reception, and critique, which could well be obscured in a larger book-length study of a particular auteur, their oeuvre, and their cultural milieu. Many well-established and up and coming film scholars have written about specific films for the BFI Film Classics book series; including Dana Polan who has already contributed marvellous analyses of Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950) in 1994 and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) in 2000. However, it is surprising to see Polan writing on Steven Spielberg’s three different versions of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, 1980, 1998).