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The ambitious TV series Andor brings new maturity to the STAR WARS saga. Not a space romp, nor a video game or memory lane, but a devastating war allegory told more intensely and honestly than before. It reveals the secret past of Cassian Andor, a mercenary who will come to be an important rebel in the film ROGUE ONE (2016).
Andor, a prequel which is set just before the original 1977 film, not only mines all of the edge and craft embedded in the Original Trilogy, but reflects the deeper sources for its cinematography, political themes, and ambitions.
With the extensive photos that follow, rediscover the roots of the STAR WARS creative style in a new light, and how Andor stems them audaciously forward.
C H A P T E R L I N K S :
• 1- The Roots
• 2- Cinematography
• 3- Sociopolitical
• 4- Dichotomy
• 5- Rebel
“One choice. We win, or everybody dies. Starts now.”
- Vel Sartha
S C I - F I __________
• FLASH GORDON (1936)
• 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
STAR WARS (1977) reconciled an evolutionary span in Sci-Fi, wedding the zappy space opera of FLASH GORDON (1936) and the Pulp mags to the mature art of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and New Wave Science Fiction literature.
P U L P +
G O L D E N E R A S __________
• "A Princess Of Mars" (1917)
• The debut of both Buck Rogers, and Space Opera
(cover story), in Amazing Stories (Aug, 1928)
“A Princess Of Mars” (1912) blueprinted modern Science Fiction.
First printed as episodes in a pulp mag, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ serial chapters about the first outer-space adventurer, John Carter of Mars, were later compiled into a 1917 book. While Verne and Wells had prospected the general concepts of the genre, ERB’s dashing hero polished them up for the new century: a displaced adventurer with extraordinary physical abilities on a desert world, caught up in alien culture clashes. Burroughs rethought this into the smash success of Tarzan, while the John Carter concept inspired everything that followed, including Superman, “Stranger In A Strange Land”, “Dune”, STAR WARS, and AVATAR.
• BUCK ROGERS (1939)
• Buck Rogers #1 comic (1940)
The Pulp Era (1920s-‘30s) cloned John Carter into Buck Rogers, a spaceship traveler fighting cosmic wars, jumping from pulp story to comic strips to radio shows. His superior rethink, Flash Gordon, helped turn comic strips into fine art while conquering the movie screen.*
* (The space hero clone chain continued on with Martian Manhunter, Duck Dodgers, Adam Strange, Green Lantern, Perry Rodan, Captain Kirk, Den, Nova, Han Solo, Galatia 9,> Buzz Lightyear, Jonni Future, Mal Reynolds, Captain Marvel, Poe Dameron…)
In the Golden Age (1936-1946) the newly-named genre of Science Fiction came of age, advancing across Pulp mags, Sunday comics pages, radio waves, silver screens, and comic books, while inspiring the very first ‘fandom’, the first convention, and the first costume-play. This was the era of Space Opera, with robust heroes in rocketships hopping planets in laser battles.
Across that span, there were other visionary movements in motion. Political concerns about the new century galvanized dystopian literature like Zamyatin’s “We” (Russia, 1924), Huxley’s “Brave New World” (England, 1932), and Orwell’s “1984” (England, 1949). These allegories reflecting the grave issues of the real world gave literary credibility and social relevance to the speculative fiction field.
• "Childhood's End", Arthur C. Clarke (1953)
• "Fahrenheit 451", Ray Bradbury (1953)
• ANIMAL FARM film (1954)
• INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956)
• FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
Some writers argue that the actual Golden Age is the 1950s, when the medium became sophisticated, mature, and mainstream, leaving the pulps behind for lit mags and technicolor flicks, hardbacks and paperbacks. The post-War stories grew sober with social issues, expansive with world-building epics, literate with the poetic or the hardboiled. The medium was becoming a literature of ideas, fluid with the times.
N E W
W A V E __________
• ALPHAVILLE (France, 1965)
New Wave Science Fiction> (1960s-‘70s) is where the medium went postmodern.
Any cutting-edge movement in the ’60s was called a New Wave because of the impact of the Nouvelle Vague,> where French filmmakers were deconstructing the rules of making cinema; Godard’s handheld movies were loose, improvised, absurdist, sardonic, alienated, impressionistic. In the wider view, Counterculture films, books, plays, albums, comix, and art decoded all social mores with the hopeful fervor of radicals and fearless glee of kids.
• "Dangerous Visions" anthology (1967)
• "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep",
Philip K. Dick (1968)
• "Nova", Samuel R. Delaney (1968)
• "The Left Hand Of Darkness",
Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)
While the world marveled at the Space Race, literary New Wave Science Fiction books, stories, and films were replacing Science boosterism with humanist existentialism, adventuring with inner exploration, and rational laws with enigma. They were both experimental and experiential, fluxing by turns sensual, hallucinatory, environmental, alienated, and conspiratorial.
This was also true of Fantasy. The immense intricacy and scholarship of Tolkien's "The Lord of The Rings" trilogy (1953) had redefined High Fantasy, and New Wave authors like Zelazney, Moorcock, Le Guin, and McCaffrey began blending Science Fiction, social commentary, world mythology, and the experimental into their Fantasy works.
Precisely as New Wave paperbacks infiltrated drugstore spinners and campus bookstores, the tsunami hit. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) turned Science Fiction into cinema art. It was the dividing line between Before and After for all speculative fiction in every medium.
➤ 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY - Its Transcendent Influence on all Pop Culture, with Music Player!
➤ LORD OF THE RINGS: The Rings Of Power ⬤ The One Rules All
• 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY -
The tribal 'Dawn Of Man' and...
• ...the future tech...
• ...are combined on Andor in this moment.
2001 is told with the clinical distance of a space launch, even as it hums with a surrealism which unnerves. It is a science psalm whose cathedral is the universe, building into an hallucinatory orgasm that opens the beyond.
• 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
• STAR WARS (1977)
• Andor (2022)
Also in 1968, Samuel R. Delaney wrote “Nova”, a seeming dichotomy of Space Opera spliced with New Wave, a duality mistaken then as a fluke which actually templated the future.
M E T A L
H U R L A N T __________
• "The Long Tomorrow", Moebius (1975)
• "Nikopol", Inki Bilal (1980)
Underground Comix transcended with “Metal Hurlant” magazine.
In Paris, artists Jean Giraud ('Moebius') and Philippe Druillet realized that trippy head comix by Crumb could dream higher into boundless vision epics on par with Kubrick, Tolkien, and Castañeda. Launched in 1974, the adult fantasy anthology mag was the New Wave as hallucinogenic travelogues improvised freestyle, a skewed dream of Punk futurism, wanton eroticism, desert vision quests, and illustrative genius. (It was later repackaged in the United States as “Heavy Metal”.)
The work of Moebius and Druillet was often a hybrid of Science Fiction and Fantasy and dreams (and trips). In the egalitarian ethos of the counterculture, all borders were dissolved between nations, people, genres, and styles. Every hybrid bred new possibilities.
'Used Universe' -
• STAR WARS (1977)
• BLADE RUNNER (1982)
• • Andor (2022)
The Russian auteur Tarkovsky hated Kubrick's clean vison of the future, and his film SOLARIS (Russia, 1972) emphasized the gritty, the ruined, and the unknowable. The corroded dystopias and film noir fatalism of Moebius and Inki Bilal’s illustrated stories reflect this with their decrepit prefab cities, greasy and flaking and hostile, and their international serfs trudging through funky squalor.
Their 'used universe' aesthetic would become manifested everywhere in STAR WARS, from Tattooine to Coruscant’s underground. It directly influenced all SF films after Punk Rock, from ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER, and MAD MAX, to THE FIFTH ELEMENT, GHOST IN THE SHELL, and FURY ROAD. (It also bridged Delaney's "Nova" to the rise of CyberPunk.)
S T A R
W A R S __________
Some Roots of STAR WARS -
• METROPOLIS (Germany, 1927)
• THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938)
• Planet Stories, ft. Leigh Brackett (1951)
• HIGH NOON (1952)
• THE DAM BUSTERS (1955)
• Incredible Science Fiction comics (1955)
• THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958)
• LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, w/ Alec Guinness (1962)
• DR. WHO film, w/ Peter Cushing (1967)
• Metal Hurlant (1977)
• Monark Starstalker (1976)
STAR WARS (1977) is a prism of everything that came before it.
Thesis and Antithesis are always superseded by Synthesis. George Lucas grew up through all of modern pop culture: Golden Age kid, late-’50s teen, late-‘60s film grad, New Hollywood director. He was Saturday serials, all-day movie bills, Screwball romances, rowdy Westerns, cartoon slapstick, War sieges, Golden Age TV, Silver Age comics, Rock’n’Soul platters, drag racing, civil rights marches, Arthouse cinema, New Wave SF books, campus demonstrations, Message pictures.
Initially, he was supposed to debut directing John Milius’ 1969 script for APOCALYPSE NOW, an apostasy calling out the latest holy war as a black comedy while it was happening and on location(!). But this was beyond their clout and funds, and it went to glory later with Coppola. The horror of war always sparks the creative backlashes against it: Modernist literature, which sought to sever the rote past by embracing complexity and change, ran parallel to World War I; modern cinema reached bracing maturity in the bitter aftermath of World War II; and all the worldwide film New Waves, and their heir the New Hollywood, raced concurrent with Vietnam. >
“Oppression breeds rebellion.”
- Luthen Rael
• THX-1138 (1971)
• THE EMPIRES STRIKES BACK (1980)
• The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992)
Lucas was concerned with the antidote to war and the solution for prosperity. It’s in the anti-technocracy of his debut, THX-1138 (1971); the rebellion against the Empire in STAR WARS; and the global humanity caught in the crossfire of WWI in the visionary “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” TV series (1992).
STAR WARS synthesized all of his cultural roots and spiritual concerns together. And it was the precisely timely hybrid that the public needed, fusing the swashbuckling fun of Golden Age serials with the mature craft of post-Kubrick Sci-Fi statement films. It was great art and you could dance to it.
With the passage of time, new fans of the branching STAR WARS franchise may lose touch with all these roots. The films are literally about cultural handoff by generations, so an understanding of its origins are the keys to appreciating its real worth and future potential.
Without cultural context, new STAR WARS media is in danger of becoming a shooter game or a nostalgic möbius strip. The films and shows since 2015 know this, and their success comes from reconsidering what’s come before to open up what hasn’t been done yet. Inherent in this is how they have reassessed the roots and techniques that it all came from.
• ROGUE ONE (2016)
• Andor (2022)
The prequel film ROGUE ONE, and its own prequel TV series Andor, are a new maturity in the saga, stripping out redundance and honing the cinematography, relevancy, and innovation inherent in the original film for new possibilities in the present.
• Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola,
and George Lucas
“You just walk in like you belong.”
— Cassian Andor
N E W
H O L L Y W O O D __________
The ‘70s New Hollywood > filmmakers were ’60s film students who had absorbed all of the movements of film: ’10s Silent slapstick; ‘20s German expressionism and Russian montage; ‘30s and ‘40s Golden Age Hollywood, and post-War Neorealism; the cinemascope spectacles and the mature global films of the ‘50s; and the cinéma vérité and experimental international (and sociopolitical) New Waves of the ’60s.> The Counterculture auteurs saved Hollywood exactly as it was falling apart in the early-'70s, making commercial films that were also fine art.
The cinematography for STAR WARS (1977) by Gilbert Taylor blended the bright adventure of Classic Hollywood flicks, the widescreen spectacle of ‘50s period epics, the cavalier deconstruction of New Wave films, the impressionism of Arthouse, and the studied symmetry of Kubrick.
Andor has specifically routed these sources to amplify and expand on them. Now, to be clear, other STAR WARS new media -whether in films, shows, animateds, books, or comics- have done fine work in reflecting the fundamentals of the saga, while bringing fresh inspiration to it. Where is Andor different? In focus, tone, and outlook.
The original STAR WARS is not actually Science Fiction, but more accurately a Space Fantasy. It combines classic SF adventurism and postmodern edge with major tenants of Fantasy, with sorcerors, knights, a princess, a fellowship on a quest, swordfights, mysticism, and more. It is as much "The Fellowhip Of The Ring" (1953) as it is FLASH GORDON SAVES THE UNIVERSE (1940) or THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (Japan, 1958). The three Trilogies and their spin-off media consistently reflect those Fantasy elements with their lens on the Jedi versus the Sith.
• • • ROGUE ONE (2016)
ROGUE ONE changed this. It stripped the Fantasy out, dropped from the stars to the streets, put the background dregs into the foreground leads, running breakneck cinéma vérité style behind normal masses battling tyranny and hopelessness. It was the war heists of THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) if they'd collided with the political chaos of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966) and THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (1982).
The best way to understand George Lucas' politics clearly is to watch “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” TV series (1992-'96): it denudes STAR WARS to its true inspirations from history, using World War I to clarify his rejection of oppression and bigotry, and championing of inclusion and pacifism. The episode "Verdun" was the most intensely anti-war statement shown on television at that point, analogous to Remarque's "All Quiet On The Western Front" (1930). ROGUE ONE and Andor are the scion of this, confronting the harsh reality of the war through the lives of the ordinary and forlorn. It reframed the revolution as coming from the common first, no longer in the abstract but as the story itself. No longer a grand fable about knights (Jedi) and ronin (Mandalorians), but a candid novel about the serfs. The betweens who are actually everyone. Focus, tone, outlook.
While other STAR WARS media reference the fantastical trunk of itself, the realist perspective of the Andor series reviews the history of the origins to bring an original new view.
C E N T E R
R A T I O __________
• • • 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
With 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Kubrick became a graphic formalist. He (and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth) used centered medium shots with dynamic symmetry to arrest the eye. By holding the shots for long periods, he created tension and uncertainty that engaged the viewer more intently. He made each composition an experience.
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s film established both the new look and the tone for 1970s speculative fiction films: cool to the touch, startling to the eye, unsettling to the mind. Lucas’ THX-1138 (1971) was one of the first, and the influence cascaded through classic films like Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (1972), Trumbull's SILENT RUNNING (1972), Scott’s ALIEN (1979), and Hyams’ OUTLAND (1981).
• • • STAR WARS (1977)
• THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)
STAR WARS reflects Kubrick often by using center ratio balance, such as within the clinical geometries of the Empire to emphasize its despotic austerity and constriction.
(The film also homages the panoramic vistas of Freddie Young’s shots for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA [1962].)
• • • • Andor
Most STAR WARS productions repeat this composition technique generally, but Andor remembers where it comes from, exercising it in the service of distinct feels as much as sharp visuals, like Kubrick would have done. The series vibrates more with the cascading moodiness of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) than with the clean remove of 2001.
“Tyranny requires effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.”
-Karis Nemik
A R C H I T E C T U R E __________
• THX-1138 (1971)
• CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971)
• ROLLERBALL (1975)
• THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)
• Andor
Counterculture directors of the New Hollywood films (mid’ 60s-early ‘80s) used architecture to describe oppressive modernity. Conspiracy thrillers and dystopia films particularly used contemporary buildings as sculptures of cold power.
The Empire is all chilly geometry, devoid spaces whose only design and function is for domination, populated by abject staff. A prison pretending to be a temple. Contrast this with the funky factory town on Ferrix where Cassian grew up, a gritty bazaar of brick and stucco teeming with bustling workers, snaking pipes, clutter and clatter, and food steam. A serfdom which is actually a community.
• Moebius
• Andor
• Moebius
• Andor
Moebius and Bilal drew decaying cities of rough tenements, sterile housing blocks, and stacked apartment crypts for the working class, versus the decadent penthouses and retreats for the rich.
This ran parallel to the acidic New Wave-era writings of William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard.
Dan O'Bannon and Moebius’ influential 1975 story, “The Long Tomorrow” (shown above), had direct stylistic influence on designs and concepts in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, BLADE RUNNER, and PROMETHEUS.
• THX-1138 (1971)
• SOLARIS (Russia, 1972)
• LOGAN'S RUN (1976)
• Andor
Pleasantly shaped spaces can take on a cold practicality with those who are using them. Open becomes empty, elegant featureless, clean dead.
• METROPOLIS (1927)
• "The Long Tomorrow", O'Bannon + Moebius (1975)
• "The Incal", Jodorowsky + Moebius (1981)
• Andor
Like the skyscrapers of Lang’s METROPOLIS, Moebius’ modular stacks are laced by a labyrinth of bridges and tunnel halls. Andor connects the flanks of its heptagon prisons with similar corridor arms.
(see also: the underground world of Coruscant)
I N T E R I O R S __________
• DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)
• 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
• STAR WARS (1977)
• Andor
A practical geometry in a conference space paces out equal seating, yet is loaded with the ambitious tensions between the seated. It feigns equality while masking hierarchy.
• THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)
• MARATHON MAN (1976)
• Andor
Modern architecture is meant to be a clear diagram of mutual ascent. Viewed in conspiracy thrillers, the basilicas of bureaucracy are a vast emptiness fueled by servitude.
• 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
• STAR WARS (1977)
• ALIEN concept art by Ron Cobb (1979)
• OUTLAND (1981)
•
