SOURCE: Engel, Charlene. “Language and the Music of the Spheres: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” In The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, edited by Charles L. P. Silet, pp. 47-56. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Engel asserts that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is primarily concerned with language in a variety of forms—“verbal, visual, electronic, and musical.”

From its multilingual opening to its multilingual finale, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about language: verbal, visual, electronic, and musical—communication and its limitations, language and its possibilities; and it is about the ineffable things which are beyond speech or imaging—things having to do with emotion and yearning, things touching upon the spiritual and the supernatural.

In his article “Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind” Robert Torry called Steven Spielberg's classic science fiction film of...