2001: A Space Odyssey

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.

but he was wary of mining that vein for exactly that reason, it seems.

Anyone else ever spot that the bone, before it moves out of frame briefly, is rotating anti clockwise, only to descend once back in the frame clockwise? Not an accident by all accounts; makes the match-cut appear even more awesome. Somehow.

I agree with all of it, I think its true

piscesx, there's a cut while the bone is in flight, right?

Yeah it spins upwards anti-clockwise, goes out of frame then there’s a cut, then it comes back in shot spinning clockwise.

that set was so expensive, they really ought to have loaned it out to Dr. Who or whomever.

More chess:

https://scontent.fman1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/37900930_10155580010586787_2623881910098591744_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=d4df2b9f645d878e39d83f573d5e596e&oe=5C081197

Stan beat George repeatedly, sez the legend

then he tells an outright lie for the first time in his life... And immediately after that he predicts the fault in the AE35 unit.

...just a moment...
just a moment...

Some utopia, eh?

the original Utopia was only possible through slaves mining gold in order to run everything. the ideal has never been real. tho they do have robots doing their work for them here (until they rebel & kill their masters).

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

― glumdalclitch, Friday, July 27, 2018 12:36 PM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 27, 2018 12:37 PM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can see him not wanting to make it a nuclear thing just to avoid tempting critics into accusing him of having this grand statement when he is just exploring these things. tho i def think there is a "technology changing man" theme in much of his work.

it doesnt matter at any rate. whether it is military or not, it is still a symbol of the Cold War. at the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the US brought over 1,600 German engineers, scientists, and technicians, many of them Nazis, and given dual citizenship to be employed in the struggle against the USSR in the Cold War. famous rocket scientist Werhner Von Braun had worked for the Nazis and took his experience with the V-2 to Alabama in order to help JFK's dream of getting us to the moon become a reality. the man who developed the life support systems for the Apollo missions, Hubertus Strughold, had previously done human experimentation for the Axis powers, including inducing epilepsy in children and inhuman pressure chamber experiments. awards were given in his name in the US space community until 2013.

not to mention it was not even needed for him to make it explicit, people were bombarded daily with nuclear propaganda, he had just made a movie all about it, etc.

but earlier scripts HAD made it explicit.

2010 hasn't aged well, precisely because it made it explicit.

2010 is such a depressingly literal-minded movie

It's telling that the plot hinges on the recording of Bowman saying "My god, it's full of stars" which was only in Clarke's book, not in Kubrick's film.

Many many xp to all the chess talk, but when the Kubricks first came back to the US after "Paths of Glory" and he was between jobs, he paid their bills by winning at poker against their showbiz friends. Apparently he could have been a pro at that, too.

Pink all along, nerds across the world wipe their brows and pick another argument.

https://filmandfurniture.com/2018/08/exclusive-original-2001-djinn-chair-from-kubricks-film-set-has-emerged-and-settles-a-debate/

I think '2010' is a good sequel because it doesn't try to be like '2001'. It fits 1984 the same way the original fits 1968.

I’ve literally never heard anyone suggest those magenta chairs were red xp

v important thread

How children reacted to "2001: A Space Odyssey," according to a 1968 Howard Johnson's menu. https://t.co/NtYCUYfSFk pic.twitter.com/KCnmzAtV4r

— Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) October 23, 2017

now i'm wondering how many of those giant cereal boxes in The Shining were product placement

the shining was conceived solely as a means to showcase the big wheel tricycle iirc

Where can buy that cute bear costume?