National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Universal Pictures released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in June 1982, with Steven Spielberg directing at the height of his creative powers. The film became the highest-grossing release of its time and remains a defining work of American cinema, blending science fiction with an intimate story of childhood, loneliness, and connection. Its influence on the blockbuster era and on popular culture broadly has only grown in the decades since.

This cell, titled E.T. and Elliott, presents three sequential 35mm frames from a floor-level interior shot, the warm natural light characteristic of Spielberg and cinematographer Allen Daviau's approach to the film. The strip is inverted, placing both E.T. and Elliott upside-down within the frame, a detail that gives the cell a quiet, contemplative quality. The minor positional variation across the three frames preserves a genuine sense of motion from the original photography.