2001: A Space Odyssey

this film really gives you a lot of space to wonder about basically everything that happens in it. this time around, i found myself wondering how long dave is in the room at the end. i suppose i always assumed it was a dreamlike scenario where his transformation happened fairly quickly -- and kubrick seems to back that up by calling it "a timeless state" -- but i think you could also read it as happening to dave in real time, so he experiences it as growing old year after year in this isolated environment. an eerie thought. it's been too long since i read the clarke novel, so i can't remember if that's how it's portrayed there -- i recall that the novel spent a lot of time on the post-HAL journey to jupiter.

It's effective in being temporally disorientating, even today when a lot of it looks a bit like the old Winamp 'Milkdrop' visual generator, I can never quite work out how long I've been watching it for.

i really love that "Space to wonder" take, J.D.! the deliberate pacing of everything is perfect for inducing a particular mindset.

last night i was thinking of the famous jump cut from the bone to the spaceship: there is a humor and a humility to it, the way we've been following this pretty linear storyline with the apes, then suddenly fast-forward thousands of years, only to stop pause and wonder at the ballet of spaceships drifting to the Blue Danube. it's funny cos in any other movie a jump cut will dive right back into the story.

yet here it's another 5-10 minutes before you even hear a human speak. it almost seems to suggest "Yeah nothing much has changed for the humans except the formal trappings so let's glory in those". it's a movie about Dave and Hal and their mission all that but that isn't the whole enchilada.

too many space threads

the space ballet always strikes me as kind of humorous and i'm never sure if that's the intention. is it because of the Blue Danube being played? would it seem different with different music?

seems to suggest "Yeah nothing much has changed..."

An additional element is that the satellite is supposedly a weapon. Someone, perhaps Clarke says this is the making of documentary. Maybe everyone knows this now but it put a different spin on it for me when I heard that.

So to speak.

That sequence (Floyd's journey and the moon monolith) is still part of THE DAWN OF MAN after all.

Certainly it would be different with the Alex North score that Kubrick ditched.

Or the explanatory voiceover that Kubrick ditched at the last minute.

Know I've mentioned it before, on this thread or elsewhere, but the BFI Film Classics on 2001 by Peter Kramer is very good, especially on the film's 'nuclear threat' subtext (again, present much more strongly in early drafts of the screenplay, and more prominent in the Clarke novel version).

The passive-aggressive chat with the Russians in the Earthlight lounge is a companion to the rivalry of the man-ape tribes.

yeah, morbs otm - the only difference between human and ape is the sophistication of human tools

An additional element is that the satellite is supposedly a weapon

Yeah, several are shown, including the US Air Force, China, Germany and Egypt(!). The USAF one is the first one visible.

http://impiousdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/sfff1.jpg

im sure the weapons connection was more apparent when the movie came out at the height of the space race.

i've always assumed that Kubrick is alluding to the match cut from the hunting hawk to the Spitfire at the beginning of A Canterbury Tale so the status of both as weapons wd be entirely in keeping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rFWlT5gdgw

start around 3'07 there

the only difference between human and ape is the sophistication of human tools

just ordered da book

That Canterbury Tale cut is great! I didn’t know about this, is it common knowledge that he’s alluding to it?

Interesting just how much Bowie (and others obvs) were influenced by this and A Clockwork Orange in the early 70s. According to Mick Rick’s book Moonage Daydream anyway, which is pretty much a mini-autobiog by Bowie as he wrote the accompanying text. I think my generation tends to forget just how much of a total out-of-the-blue headfuck Kubrick’s peak period was to the switched-on kids back then.

The 'human zoo' run by trans-temporal beings is also a theme in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five which came out about the same time

The shooting started less than two years after Strangelove's release, and I think he was working with Clarke by late '63. The actor playing the male Russian official (Leonard Rossiter) even has a Peter Sellers vibe.

If you're interested in even more nuts and bolts then you should check out the Cinefex issue from 2001 that had a huge retrospective making-of article.

I'm never sure about how comedic that bit's supposed to be because for UK audiences Rossiter's best known for his later appearances in sitcoms like Rising Damp and Reginald Perrin and I can't really extract it from that part.

whenever i've seen the film in the last few decades US audiences always laugh at the right spots

(and while some of us have seen Reginald Perrin, we mostly know Rossiter from this and his more grotesque role in Barry Lyndon)

I don't know if Kubrick ever acknowledged the Canterbury Tale bit or not pisces but i assume P&P were auteur's darlings by the time he made 2001 and I'd be surprised if Kubrick wasn't at least aware of that cut

Rossiter was probably as good a comic actor as Sellers imo, just less exposed. I've always thought his role in 2001 was straight tho

xpost great point w the Bowie connection, piscesx! it seems like space and the possibilities it provided went hand-in-hand with sexual/gender/identity exploration. ACO and 2001 both being largely about human transformation certainly hit a nerve in the zeitgeist. morality tales contemplating a post-earth/post-human existence.

This is a good round-up of the films and filmmakers that Kubrick was known to admire. No mention of Canterbury Tales, or anything by Powell and Pressburger, though of course that's not to say there wasn't an unacknowledged influence. The article does mention the Czech SF film Ikarie XB-1, which Kubrick did look at prior to filming 2001 and which definitely has a few visual similarities w/ 2001.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/stanley-kubrick-cinephile

The passive-aggressive chat with the Russians in the Earthlight lounge is a companion to the rivalry of the man-ape tribes.

― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, July 18, 2018 12:01 PM (eight hours ago)

something else that occurred to me this time around: when the apes get their spark of intelligence from the monolith, the first thing they do is start killing each other. HAL's first independent action -- something he wasn't programmed to do -- is to commit murder. presumably we can hope for better from star-child dave.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE OR I'LL MURDER YOU

I first saw the film in a theatrical re-release when I was 12. I was half-convinced that HAL's mania was programmed by the mission planners. Never considered the monolith's role.

I saw it last night on the big screen for the second time. each time I see it, a little bit more of it clicks into place but I never understand the ending. I'd love to read this book

You should also watch this little video interview from 1980, which MaresNest posted to the general Kubrick thread, in which he elaborates a little on 1969 comments. I love how gentle and softly-spoken the whole thing is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEt5uv7weXU&feature=youtu.be&t=4m46s

Here's the transcript of the bit when he's asked about the ending:

“I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I’ll try.

The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.

They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what they think is their natural environment.

Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some kind of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.”

HAL's first independent action -- something he wasn't programmed to do -- is to commit murder. presumably we can hope for better from star-child dave.

And HAL suffers his paranoid psychological break after first desperately looking for an excuse to unload to Dave the secret he's been charged with keeping:

I know I've never completely freed myself of the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission. I'm sure you'll agree there's some truth in what I say. Well, certainly no one could have been unaware of the very strange stories floating around before we left. Rumours of something being dug up on the moon. I never gave these stories much credence. But particularly in view of some of the other things that have happened I find them difficult to put out of my mind. For instance, the way all our preparations were kept under such tight security. And the melodramatic touch of putting doctors Hunter, Kimball and Kaminski aboard already in hibernation after four months of separate training on their own.

then he tells an outright lie for the first time in his life:

BOWMAN: You're working up your crew psychology report.
HAL: Of course I am. Sorry about this. I know it's a bit silly.

And immediately after that he predicts the fault in the AE35 unit. So that psychological break, in a sense, makes him "human," and that in turn makes him a killer.

i love the cadence and rhythm of HAL's speech there.

Operation avalanches spliced footage of Kubrick at nasa was a joy. Recommended to any 2001 fan

incredible post, Eliza D.

when he says "melodramatic touch" it is so spooky. to me it seems like a very non-computer thing to say, an unnecessary detail.

that is a great scene. with some unnerving emotional investment he is questioning his own input. hearing un-vetted information (possibly for the first time?), the act of piecing it together is causing him to form his own narrative. this in turn is making him question his main purpose. he is so conspiratorial here! god it's incredible.

has anybody written on a monolith-as-movie-screen theory? i know that the dimensions of the monolith are the same as one of the old film screens, this being a symbol for self awareness or godlike meta perception. we already know it can create sound and light shows :)

i was always a little confused by the "you're working up your crew psychology report" bit and assumed that dave was right and HAL was saying something he'd been programmed to say, but the reading here makes more sense to me. this movie really does get better and more fascinating the more you see it and think about it.

http://www.teladoiofirenze.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Odissea-nello-spazio-a-colori.jpg

that image has probably been posted multiple times but i do love it.

Clarke:

The skull-smashing sequence was the only scene not filmed in the studio; it was shot in a field a couple of hundred yards away, the only time Stanley went on location. A small platform had been set up, and Moonwatcher (Dan Richter) was sitting on this, surrounded by bones. Cars and buses were going by at the end of the field, but as this was a low-angle shot against the sky, they didn’t get in the way, though Stanley did have to pause for an occasional airplane.

The shot was repeated so many times, and Dan smashed so many bones, that I was afraid we were going to run out of warthog (or tapir) skulls. But eventually Stanley was satisfied, and as we walked back to the studio he began to throw bones up in the air. At first I thought this was sheer joi de vivre, but then he started to film them with a handheld camera—no easy task. Once or twice, one of the large, swiftly descending bones nearly landed on Stanley as he peered through the viewfinder; if luck had been against us the whole project might have ended then. To misquote Ardrey, “That intelligence would have perished on some forgotten Elstree field.”

When he had finished filming the bones whirling against the sky, Stanley resumed the walk back to the studio; but now he had got hold of a broom, and started tossing that up into the air. Once again, I assumed this exercise was pure fun; and perhaps it was. But that was the genesis of the longest flash forward in the history of movies: three million years, from bone club to artificial satellite, in a twenty-fourth of a second.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0099.html

This 1966 New Yorker profile, which i've cross-posted, has an amazing amount of info about the production of 2001, as the author visited SK twice during production. Kubrick became a lot more secretive later, it seems to me.

The light was fixed, and Kubrick went back to work behind the camera. Keir Dullea was reinstalled in his hibernaculum and the cover rolled shut. “You better take your hands from under the blanket,” Kubrick said. Kelvin Pike, the camera operator, took Kubrick’s place behind the camera, and Cracknell called for quiet. The camera began to turn, and Kubrick said, “Open the hatch.” The top of the hibernaculum slid back with a whirring sound, and Keir Dullea woke up, without any stirring, yawning, or rubbing. Kubrick, playing the part of the solicitous computer, started feeding him lines.

“Good morning,” said Kubrick. “What do you want for breakfast?”

“Some bacon and eggs would be fine,” Dullea answered simply.

Later, Kubrick told me that he had engaged an English actor to read the computer’s lines in the serious dramatic scenes, in order to give Dullea and Lockwood something more professional to play against, and that in the finished film he would dub in an American-accented voice. He and Dullea went through the sequence four or five times, and finally Kubrick was satisfied with what he had. Dullea bounced out of his hibernaculum, and I asked him whether he was having a good time. He said he was getting a great kick out of all the tricks and gadgets, and added, “This is a happy set, and that’s something.”

When Kubrick emerged from the centrifuge, he was immediately surrounded by people. “Stanley, there’s a black pig outside for you to look at,” Victor Lyndon was saying. He led the way outside, and, sure enough, in a large truck belonging to an animal trainer was an enormous jet-black pig. Kubrick poked it, and it gave a suspicious grunt.

“The pig looks good,” Kubrick said to the trainer.

“I can knock it out with a tranquillizer for the scenes when it’s supposed to be dead,” the trainer said.

“Can you get any tapirs or anteaters?” Kubrick asked.

The trainer said that this would not be an insuperable problem, and Kubrick explained to me, “We’re going to use them in some scenes about prehistoric man.”

At this point, a man carrying a stuffed lion’s head approached and asked Kubrick whether it would be all right to use.

“The tongue looks phony, and the eyes are only marginal,” Kubrick said, heading for the set. “Can somebody fix the tongue?”

Back on the set, he climbed into his blue trailer. “Maybe the company can get back some of its investment selling guided tours of the centrifuge,” he said. “They might even feature a ride on it.” He added that the work in the machine was incredibly slow, because it took hours to rearrange all the lights and cameras for each new sequence. Originally, he said, he had planned on a hundred and thirty days of shooting for the main scenes, but the centrifuge sequences had slowed them down by perhaps a week. “I take advantage of every delay and breakdown to go off by myself and think,” he said. “Something like playing chess when your opponent takes a long time over his next move.

At one o’clock, just before lunch, many of the crew went with Kubrick to a small projection room near the set to see the results of the previous day’s shooting. The most prominent scene was a brief one that showed Gary Lockwood exercising in the centrifuge, jogging around its interior and shadowboxing to the accompaniment of a Chopin waltz—picked by Kubrick because he felt that an intelligent man in 2001 might choose Chopin for doing exercise to music. As the film appeared on the screen, Lockwood was shown jogging around the complete interior circumference of the centrifuge, which appeared to me to defy logic as well as physics, since when he was at the top he would have needed suction cups on his feet to stay glued to the floor. I asked Kubrick how he had achieved this effect, and he said he was definitely, absolutely not going to tell me....

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/11/12/how-about-a-little-game

But his recollection of Kubrick is nonetheless quite distinct, reaching back to the early nineteen-fifties, when Kubrick, then in his early twenties (he was born in New York City on July 26, 1928), was also squeezing out a small living (he estimates about three dollars a day, “which goes a long way if all you are buying with it is food”) by playing chess for cash in Washington Square.

surprised this never occurred to me before, but i'm pretty sure kubrick would've been playing chess in washington square park at the exact same time as the young bobby fischer. eerie, somehow, to think of the two of them sitting across the board from each other.

There's a great thread running through the profile of Kubrick beating the author at chess.

a dumb plotty question: what was HAL's plan if Bowman hadn't forgotten his helmet? and since he used the emergency airlock anyway, it made no difference. poor planning, evil HAL!

btw the jargon and empty pleasantries of Floyd and the other bureaucrats are sooooo unmistakably satire, and Leonard Rossiter is absurd.

Mark Crispin Miller's 1994 piece is quite good (tho I'd rather ignore the venom directed at MST3K at the end):

"I'm sure you're all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation," he tells the staff at Clavius, "if the facts were suddenly made public without adequate preparation and conditioning." That last proviso makes it clear that Doctor Floyd is, in fact, ideologically a close relation to those other, creepier doctors at the Ludovico Institute; the whole euphemistic warning of "potential cultural shock' betrays his full membership of that cold, invisible elite who run the show in nearly all Kubrick's films, concerned with nothing but the preservation of their won power. Surely, what Doctor Floyd imagines happening "if the facts were suddenly made public" would be uncannily like what we've seen already; everybody terrified at first, and then, perhaps, the smart ones putting two and two together and moving, quickly, to knock off those bullying others who have monopolized what everybody needs -- "the facts" having instantly subverted those others' ancient claims to an absolute supremacy....

In 1968 the 'futuristic' world Kubrick satirized so thoroughly was not, despite the title, some 30 years away. The changes the film foretold were imminent. Within a decade 2001 was already getting hard to see -- and not just because ever fewer theatre managers would book it, but because its vision was starting to seem ever less fanciful and ever more naturalistic. In other words, the world that Kubrick could confidently satirize in 1968, looking at it -- as an artist must -- from a standpoint well outside it, would soon begin to look so much like the world, that the delighted mass response of the late 60s would soon give way to reactions cooler and less comprehending. Now viewers were less likely to feel 'so impressed', so 'awed", and more likely to reply, "So what?" an indication not of the film's datedness, but of its prescience.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0011.html

also totally forgot Floyd's remark that the Clavius personnel will have to "sign security oaths." Some utopia, eh?

I think the nuclear weaponry orbiting at the start of the 2001 section indicates, subtly, that its not a utopia.

Except almost no one recognizes that as such, including me until I read about it. Looked for the Air Force logo last night, didn't see it.

Really, it's not clear at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_2001:_A_Space_Odyssey#Military_nature_of_orbiting_satellites

Well, fair enough. It's Kubrick, who just did the world's most famous nuclear war film, where he focused on bomb
shapes, so I feel it is strongly implied. Maybe just me then.