During a recent viewing of this Spielberg speilfest, I noticed a scene involving a conference speech, given by Truffaut's character, in which he demonstrates the symbolic gestural equivalents relating to each note of the famous five-note musical sequence of the aliens' greeting message. This system of gestural symbols is said to derive from a pedagogical method for teaching musical notation authored by the (Czech?) composer Zoltan Kodaly. What I missed in this expositional scene, was, why was Kodaly's system especially relevant to communication with the aliens? ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite