A specialist in documentaries about movies, the director Alexandre O. Philippe gave himself a tough act to follow: His 2017 film “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene” applied a variety of approaches — historical, theoretical, technical — to deconstructing a single sequence in “Psycho.”

Few moments in cinema have been as impactful as the death of Janet Leigh’s character in that film. The closest equivalent to that kind of shock in “Alien” is the demise of John Hurt’s character by chest-burster — a coup of suspense and puppetry that receives its due analytically in Philippe’s “Memory: The Origins of Alien,” a deep dive into Ridley Scott’s 1979 science-fiction blockbuster.