Unlocking the origin & design of the Space Jockey !

Unlocking the origin & design of the Space Jockey ! PART 1: [b]The Space Jockey design as it is in Alien.[/b] In the derelict vessel in the movie Alien, the remains of a huge alien pilot are found fossilised into it's chair. It was designed by Giger and sculpted by him with the help of assistants, and finally painted as well. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1979_alien_006-1.jpg[/img] HR Giger : "The creature we finally ended up building is biomechanical to the extent that he has physically grown into, or maybe even out of, his seat, - he's integrated totally into the function he performs." "The pilot is conceived as one of my biomechanoids, attached to the seat so as to form a single unit" "In his seat in the centre of the turntable is the pilot, eight metres (26 feet) tall." Brian Muir: "I have fond memories of working with Giger. He explained to me and my colleague Peter Voysey that the pilot and cockpit were to be as one, as if merged together. The jockey was modelled in clay, and then cast in clear resin. The remainder of the structure and telescope were carved in polystyrene and applied to a wooden armature. When finished it stood a remarkable 28 feet tall. Although Giger struggled with some of the more frustrating-elements of the film making process, he was pleased with our work and I found him to be a very pleasant man" Here is Giger's final painting for the alien pilot's remains in the movie Alien which soon came to be known as the Space Jockey as featured in Giger's book "Giger's Alien" (Giger's Alien, p39, work 380 "Pilot in Cockpit") [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/A1AGIGERA1.jpg[/img] PART 2: [b]The Evolution of the Space Jockey via Giger's Necronomicon[/b] The figure sticking out of the back of the rider in "Necronom V" became the starting point for the pilot of the derelict vessel, that came to be known as the Space Jockey. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1giger1.jpg[/img] H R Giger: "Ridley suggested another one of my Necronom creatures as a guide. They don't look much alike now, but it was a starting point: and the space jockey kind of grew up from there in bits and pieces." What was the inspiration for the Space Jockey? H R Giger: "Ridley Scott pointed to a part on the top of my painting Necronom V and asked me to do something like it". [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1giger2.jpg[/img] At the beginning of Ridley's work on the storyboards, he took the whole torsoe and head of the "motorbike" riding figure in Necronom V as the seat for the "space jockey". Ridley Scott: "As they enter the derelict, I wanted them to come up over the edge of something and into this vast chamber that's dominated by a huge chair. In preparing this frame of the storyboard, I went through Giger's Necronomicon and took this character, whom we call the "space jockey", because I wanted a fossil, almost, one which you'd have a hard time deciding where he leaves off and the chair, on which he died, begins. So here they are with this dead space jockey frozen in death to the weapon he was firing when he died. And he's kind of gargoyle-like and spooky. Sometimes we got very close to the films visuals in the storyboard" [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1giger3.jpg[/img] PART 3: [b]Evolution of Space Jockey from the Egyptian Book of the Dead[/b] After this Giger appears to have decided to take the design of the Space Jockey in another direction far beyond Ridley's initial concept, by as we can assume, going back to the source of the entity's inspiration which appears to be from image representations of Ancient Egyptian sacred barges dedicated to the funerary god Sokar found in works such as Ani's papyrus of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This was found in the tomb of an Egyptian man who was a scribe named Ani, there is a small illustration in plate 18 of the papyrus of a man kneeling down by what is understood to be the sacred bark/barge of the funerary god Seker/Sokar with the characteristic averted antelope head at the prow. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC1.jpg[/img] Despite all we have discovered about the evolution of the space jockey's seat from the Necronom V painting through Ridley Scott's storyboard, we can take a step back and examine Giger's final Space Jockey design and note the strange bulbous structure projecting from it's back and the three pillars that make the support frame connected to the runners of a sledge, have become the support frame for the space jockey's telescope, The presence of the horizontal structures such as the curving pipe as seen in the fourth image down on the right or if not, the sledge runners are likely to have inspired the horizontal pipes at the base of the Space Jockey's seat. Giger may have been familiar with more than one version of the sokar boat if horizontal pipe at the bottom was based on the pipe. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC2.jpg[/img] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC3-1.png[/img] Someone might say that if the boat images contained a telescope, it might seal the whole statement that this was the inspiration. However I can only turn it around and look at Giger's earlier sketch for a space jockey chair design where there is a telescope that might be considered roughly like a giant stylised falcon head shape ending with a sharp beak tip where the Space Jockey's telescope eyepiece would be, and on the barge itself, this is where a small falcon head would be found. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC4.jpg[/img] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC5.jpg[/img] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC6.jpg[/img] On the final painting, the space jockey's visor in conjunction with the shape of his helmet provides a stylised falcon like representation. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC7.jpg[/img] Other versions of the image of this type of Egyptian Sokar funeral barque/barge found around the internet show a much larger precise image of the barge but with four pillars, but the writer here would perhaps find it less easy to recognise it as something transformable into a space jockey along with its seat. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC8.jpg[/img] This matter about the Sokar funerary bark had not been mentioned at all in any of the known books or interviews with Giger but we know that he does draw ideas from Ancient Egyptian Culture from looking at his paintings, we have seen his obvious use of the sky goddess Nut in the Life Cycle hieroglyphics tableau, and we can see enough from the image from Ani's version of the Book of the Dead to how this is a key structure that served as a basis for the Space Jockey and its chair. Maybe Giger's painting Necronom IV featuring the creature that inspired the main structure of the final alien life form design in the movie was also loosely inspired by the same images of the funerary bark. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC9.jpg[/img] Barque of Sokar in the Ptolemaic Temple [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1A1NEC10.jpg[/img] PART 4: [b]The Evolution of the Space Jockey via Stanley Kubrick's 2001[/b] Giger gives the concept of the black monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Oddyssey as a source of inspiration for the space jockey's seat. H R Giger: "As for the chair in which he sits, I thought it had to be mechanical but not with normal arms and legs that could be moved with the feet or the hands. I liked very much the stone tablet in 2001 Space Odyssey, because it seemed to have some interior-like computer. So I thought that the outside could be very normal-looking and the whole machinery could go inside." [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/a1aspace1.jpg[/img] PART 5: [b]The Evolution via Giger's Necronomicon part 2[/b] Once Giger had decided to use the Sokar barge for the basis of his Space Jockey chair, one can go back to look at the Necronomicon to see possible further ideas for the development of the space jockey in its chair, deliberately or non-deliberately because the contents of Giger's Necronomicon show ideas already infused with Giger's mind so to find him gravitating towards patterns and structures that he would have been previously familiar with unconsciously would only be normal. However here we go back and look for similarities that might show the further development. In these images I will refer to the figures who are almost there riding motobikes as "Easy Riders" after the Dennis Hopper movie. Look at the comparison between Giger's final Space Jockey painting and the head of the creature in Necronom IV turned almost upside down. Highlighted in green is what I would imagine to be a false eye in the back of the creature's head, and highlighted in magenta is a false arm of an unseen rider. Maybe this was a remnant of an earlier idea that Giger had for one of his Easy Riders before he inverted the picture and changed the changed the whole sense of the painting to make it a humanoid. We also see the back extremity with a tip that curves inwards to support the phallic end of the creature's head could very well have served as inspiration for the curved viewing device that extends from the telescope like object towards the pilot. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/a1abger1.jpg[/img] Here is an detail of an head from Giger's painting Biomechanoid III (work 255) done in 1974 . It looks vaguely like the skull of an elephant transformed into a biomechanic entity. It is said that Giger was given a rhinoceros skull to use when making Alien but I suspect that he had an elephant' skull to use instead or as well. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/a1abger2.jpg[/img] We also find the character also as a corpse in a hollow found in the painting "Chiquita" from 1972, it basically gives us the complete body of a Space Jockey with the ribcage and head composed from unspecific details. And going further back in time, at the bottom of this black and white drawing titled "Astreunuchen" from 1967 you can see another EasyRider lying on it's back embedded into some sort of a sheathe like object and he is holding a pair of handlebars with an enlarged cranium and a pipe running down along it's face leading down to it's belly button, and there is another entity embedded in the opposite end holding a syringe. There are other examples of a humanoid entity with such a face from this time in his work, including in his ink drawing Atom Kinder. The Easy Rider in the "astreunuchen" is connected to a structure curved like a boat. Maybe this image came out of familiarity with the funerary barge dedicated to Soka. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/a1abger3.jpg[/img] PART 6: [b]The Evolution of Space Jockey from nature[/b] A photo of an almost humanoid looking Indian elephant skull from the DK Images website. It resembles the space jockey type skull to some degree, and in the past, people have dug up elephant skulls and have mistaken them for the skulls of humanoid giants. (The site doesn't give people permission to download the image unless one is a subscriber to their site) [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/a1abger4.jpg[/img]