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Spielberg’s Extraterrestrials and Other Strangers Day School
Sat 4 Jul, 10.30- 5.30pm (with a lunch break 13.00-14.00)
£45 or £40 for Members and concessions
Tutor: Peter Kramer
Steven Spielberg is arguably the most important filmmaker of the last six decades, combining huge commercial success with enormous critical acclaim. Almost 80 years old, he presents his latest blockbuster in June 2026: Disclosure Day. It is another tale about humanity’s encounter with extraterrestrials, a theme absolutely central to Spielberg’s work – from his 1963 amateur feature film Firelight onwards, including two of his most influential movies: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Importantly, while Spielberg rarely comes up with the stories for his films, he did do so for Firelight, Close Encounters and Disclosure Day, and also, without being credited for it, for E.T.
Spielberg’s films about extraterrestrials (as well as some of the television series about this topic that he produced) also tend to be about more or less dysfunctional families. They therefore can combine a realistic exploration of how people relate to those closest and most familiar to them with a speculative account of how they relate to what is strangest, most alien to them.
In fact, something similar can be said about Spielberg’s films (and TV series) about supernatural entities, animals, robots and artificial intelligences, and indeed about people who are treated as if they were somehow less than fully human. There are many commonalities between E.T., Poltergeist (1982), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler’s List (1994) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). In very different ways these films address some of the same questions: How do we perceive beings that are (initially) completely alien to us? How do we interact with them? How can such interaction change us and our relationships with those we are closest to?
With reference to our past (and also perhaps very recent) experiences with Spielberg’s work, a range of film clips and perhaps some reading, this day school explores what some of the world’s most popular movies (can) mean to us.
About the tutor:
Peter Krämer is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Media, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic, has written or edited twelve academic books and has also co-authored an illustrated volume about American film for children. He has been involved in adult education for more than thirty-five years.
Programmed in partnership with the Sir John Hurt Film Trust.
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Event Venue
Cinema City, St Andrews St, NR24AD Norwich, United Kingdom, Norwich, United Kingdom
Tickets
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