Here you go:
Picture perfectionist
Graham Daseler on fifty years since 2001: A Space Odyssey
GRAHAM DASELER
Pretend that you’ve never heard this exchange before, and try to work out which of these two characters is the human, which the robot:
H: Forgive me for being so inquisitive, but during the past few weeks I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.
D: How do you mean?
H: Well, it’s rather difficult to define. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own concern about it. 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.
D: Well, I don’t know. That’s a rather difficult question to answer.
H: You don’t mind talking about it, do you, Dave?
D: No, not at all.
The scene, of course, comes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which HAL (H), a very humanlike computer, chats with Dave (D), a very robotic-sounding astronaut. It is not – contrary to what Michael Benson suggests in his book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the making of a masterpiece – a great movie, as the excerpt above should indicate. The dialogue is flat, the pacing monotonous; the humans all talk (and behave) like automatons, while the most compelling character in the movie is a disembodied robot. At the film’s New York premiere, audience members, including many MGM executives, walked out in droves before the film was over. Peter Davis Dribble, of Women’s Wear Daily, spoke for many when he wrote, “2001 is not the worst film I’ve ever seen. It’s simply the dullest”.
Skip ahead fifty years and the highbrow consensus could not be more different. When the British Film Institute last asked critics and filmmakers from around the world to vote on the greatest movies of all time, 2001 came in sixth place, twenty spots above Rashomon (1950), and forty-two ahead of The Battle of Algiers (1966). What happened?
The 1960s, for one thing. Hippies flocked to it. Michael Herr, later to write Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), remembered seeing the film in a cinema “pungent with pot smoke – some of it my own”. Some viewers tried to synchronize their acid trips with the film’s Star Gate sequence, in which the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) flies his craft through a multicoloured wormhole in space-time. During a screening in Los Angeles, a young man reportedly raced down the aisle and lunged through the screen, yelling, “It’s God!” The youth made the film a hit, and the critics, not wanting to seem out of step, were forced to alter their opinions.
And this is to say nothing of the technical ingenuity of the movie. Not only was 2001 the first film to make space travel look credible, with all the inherent challenges of getting actors (filmed on earth) to appear weightless; it was also the first film to make it look beautiful. The shot in which Kubrick juxtaposes a bone, hurled end-over-end by a proto-human ape, with a shot of an atomic missile launcher falling through outer space is one of the most brilliant in all of cinema: the evolution of man (along with his capacity to kill) captured in a single cut. 2001 is thene plus ultra of Kubrick’s style, showing both his best and worst sides as a director – displaying his preternatural gift for image-making while revealing him at his most grandiose and misanthropic.
Two new books look back at 2001’s production, which, fittingly, was nearly as epic as the movie itself. In addition to Space Odyssey, we have Christopher Frayling’s The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the design of the landmark science fiction film. Frayling takes the somewhat unusual tack of examining the film from the perspective of its production designer, Harry Lange. Lange, a German émigré who worked as an illustrator for NASA after the Second World War, was hired by Kubrick for his technical know-how. It was vital to Kubrick that the spaceships in the film be realistic as well as remarkable. Though he discusses Lange’s background working on missile design for Wernher von Braun, Frayling fails to mention that, during the film’s production, Lange triggered a walk-out by his British subordinates after he proudly displayed a Nazi V-2 rocket on his desk. Stranger still for a book about 2001’s production design, the volume keeps mum about some of the movie’s most imaginative design elements, presumably because they were not developed by Lange. Lacking any computer graphics, Kubrick created his zero-gravity world entirely in-camera and on-set. In one stunning shot, Bowman climbs down a ladder into the ship’s ring-shaped cabin, then walks around the circumference of the room until he appears to be standing upside down beside his partner, Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood). It’s like watching someone stroll through the middle of an M. C. Escher print.
The shot, which today would undoubtedly be rendered in a computer lab, was an old-fashioned feat of engineering and perspective. The cabin was actually a 38-foot centrifuge that weighed 30 tons and spun up to 3 miles an hour, allowing the actors to walk 360 degrees around it. All the effects in the film were done through double and triple exposures. Not wanting to reduce the quality of his pristine 65-millimetre images, Kubrick chose to print starscapes directly on the negative, using – in an irony lost on no one – the oldest of photographic techniques to create the most fantastic of future worlds. “If you can describe it, I can film it”, Kubrick told Arthur C. Clarke, his co-writer on the film.
The problem, as Michael Benson makes clear in Space Odyssey, is that neither Kubrick nor Clarke knew what exactly Clarke should describe. One of the paradoxes of Kubrick’s character was that, while he obsessed endlessly over costumes, camera angles and historical accuracy, he could be oddly complacent when it came to the writing of his movies. “I’ve never been able to decide whether the plot [in any film] is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else”, he admitted to the critic Michel Ciment. When Anthony Burgess visited the set of A Clockwork Orange (1971), he was startled to see that the screenplay was being written while the cameras turned. On 2001, Kubrick decided that, rather than simply composing a script, Clarke should first write the film as a novel, which would then serve as a template for the screenplay. Yet even as shooting began, many crucial details in the story had not been resolved. It was the actor Gary Lockwood who figured out how to develop the HAL subplot; it ended up being the most gripping part of the movie.
Kubrick’s genius was visual. He had an innate eye for the iconic image. Think of Slim Pickens riding a warhead to earth in Dr Strangelove (1964), the black obelisk in 2001, the elevator of blood in The Shining (1980), Sue Lyon peering over the top of her sunglasses in Lolita (1962), or Malcolm McDowell, his eyelids pried apart, undergoing the Ludovico technique in A Clockwork Orange. It was a skill that Kubrick honed early in life. Born in New York in 1928, he was given a Graflex camera by his father for his thirteenth birthday. He soon began contributing photos to his high school newspaper. When he was sixteen, he sold a photograph to Look magazine – an image of a woebegone newsvendor, taken on the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Kubrick claimed that it was just a lucky shot. In fact, the picture, like many of his later photographs, was staged. He had coached the vendor to express just the right amount of sadness for the camera.
Kubrick’s photographs for Look, where he worked from 1946 to 1950, can now be seen in Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick photographs. For fans of Kubrick’s films, the photos should come as a revelation. Unlike his movies, which tend to be wry and aloof, his photographs are light and whimsical, closer in tone to Fellini’s 8½ thanPaths of Glory or Barry Lyndon. In one, a shoeshine boy cocks his head at a potential client, his forefinger stuck out with streetwise panache. In another, a blonde model stands atop a sign painters’ platform, thrusting her ample bosom out at the city below. Flickers of future Kubrick films, however, can already be seen. An empty escalator at Grand Central Terminal, as Luc Sante notes in the book’s introduction, has a striking resemblance to 2001’s Star Gate, while a scientist holding a cathode ray tube before his face – his eyes hidden behind a pair of circular frame sunglasses – can’t help but remind one of Dr Strangelove as played by Peter Sellers. Kubrick’s large exposure ratios suggest that he was already yearning to break free from still photography and tell stories in multiple frames. And yet, as a director, his first instinct was to grab hold of the camera. During the making of Spartacus (1960), he actually benched the director of photography, Russell Metty, and took charge of the cinematography himself. Metty ended up winning an Academy Award for the film.
A poor student who barely graduated from high school, Kubrick was nonetheless an avid autodidact. Collaborators often marvelled at the breadth of his erudition. “Kubrick grasps new ideas, however complex, almost instantly”, said Clarke. “He also appears to be interested in practically everything.” A person picking up Nathan Abrams’s new book, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, could thus be forgiven for supposing that it explores the inner workings of one of cinema’s most complex minds. Not so: the crucial word in the subtitle is the third one. Abrams is out to identify each and every Jewish allusion in Kubrick’s oeuvre that he can find. “A ‘hidden Jewish substratum’ can be detected in Kubrick’s films despite the absence of any such explicit ‘ethnic’ designation”, Abrams explains in the introduction.
For someone seeking to establish the centrality of Judaism in Kubrick’s work, that’s a somewhat defensive way to begin. Yet Abrams – apparently trying to dispense with all counterevidence upfront – continues to admit more than he should. “Kubrick was ‘known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents.’” One usually has to beware of authors who claim to see signs of Jewish influence hidden everywhere: it has been a mainstay of anti-Semitic conspiracies since at least The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Abrams, a film scholar who frequently writes about Jewish cinema for Haaretz, can probably be absolved of any ill intent. However, there’s something distinctly conspiratorial about his desire to reveal secret Jewish symbols strewn throughout Kubrick’s work. Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio), the big-bellied, dim-witted recruit in Full Metal Jacket, is described as a “conceptually Jewish character” because he’s clumsy and not liked by the other troops, as is Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) because he’s “visually associated with money”. It hardly seems flattering to Kubrick that he would signal his characters’ Jewishness by giving them the attributes most often ascribed to Jews by anti-Semites.
In fact, Kubrick was generally inclined to distance himself from his Jewish heritage. He frequently removed Jewish characters from his films, including The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket. If Kubrick had an abiding interest that surpassed all others, it was with war. Of his thirteen films, six deal directly or indirectly with military combat. He even sneaks some shots of a biblical battle into A Clockwork Orange, though the film’s story is set in Britain in the near future. On the set, too, Kubrick himself often resembled a general. He was not what you would call an actors’ director. His habit of shooting dozens and dozens of takes, in search of the perfect shot, had a relentlessness that wore many actors down. During the filming of The Shining, Scatman Crothers collapsed in tears after Kubrick had him repeat a single shot eighty-five times. “If Kubrick hadn’t been a film director, he’d have been a General Chief of Staff of the U.S. forces”, Malcolm McDowell suggested.
Napoleon was a special interest of his. “He fascinates me”, Kubrick explained. “He was one of those rare men who move history and mold the destiny of their own times and of generations to come.” The great disappointment of Kubrick’s career was that he never got to make a movie about the French Emperor. He came close in the late 1960s and early 70s, following the success of 2001. He amassed a vast library of books (over 500) and images (over 17,000) on the period, tape-recorded detailed question-and-answer sessions with the historian Felix Markham, and sent assistants out across Europe to collect all manner of materials for the movie, including soil samples from Waterloo, so that he could match the look of the dirt at the site of the battle. In the end, MGM backed out, frightened by the box office failure of Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) and the thought of sending a notoriously detail-oriented director out on location with an army of 30,000 extras.
Interest in the film, though, has never abated. Recently, Steven Spielberg expressed a desire to turn the project into a mini-series. Now, in a volume nearly thick enough to stop grapeshot, Taschen has published Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon”, which pulls together much of the director’s pre-production material, including letters, costume designs, location photographs, and the film’s treatment and screenplay, both written by Kubrick. The subtitle to the book is The greatest movie never made. Even taking into account how much Kubrick rescripted his films during production, this feels like a stretch. The best biopics –Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Raging Bull (1980), The Social Network(2010) – don’t try to show a life in full, from earliest childhood onward, but instead restrict themselves to brief windows of time, thus avoiding superfluous details. And when they do go the distance, as in Citizen Kane (1941), they tend to be highly fictionalized, thus keeping their plots streamlined. Kubrick, though, tries to pack everything in, from Corsica to St Helena. Plot is again, one feels, not his forte.
There are potentially thrilling scenes. In one, the young Napoleon, outnumbered, calmly executes a rabble-rouser who is stirring up a crowd of angry revolutionaries. In another, set in Egypt, the hero, protected by a phalanx of French troops, chats amiably with the artists and scientists whom he has brought along for the campaign while, only yards away, Mameluke cavalry swarm all around them. But Kubrick is forced to connect these segments with large chunks of omniscient narration, making the screenplay read like a long episode of the History Channel. Kubrick’s notion of casting Jack Nicholson in the lead role is intriguing to imagine. The actor, in his youth, certainly had the magnetism for it. But, like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the idea is more daring than inspired. As anyone who has seen The Terror (1963) knows, Nicholson – one of the most decidedly American actors ever to have appeared on screen – doesn’t fit comfortably into French cuffs and epaulettes.
Alhough Kubrick never managed to get Napoleon made, we do have some idea of what the film would have looked like, for we have Barry Lyndon (1975), his adaptation of Thackeray’s novel. Much of the research and planning that had gone into conceptualizing the earlier film was folded into the making of the latter. Among other things, Kubrick chose to shoot Barry Lyndon – as he’d originally planned to shoot Napoleon – almost entirely without the aid of modern electrical lights. This necessitated the use of special f/0.7 Zeiss lenses, designed by NASA for lunar photography, and made continuity a nightmare for the crew, who were forced to monitor the size and position of hundreds of burning candles. The images that resulted, though, are stunningly lovely. Nearly every frame looks as if it was composed by John Constable, George Romney, or Joshua Reynolds. This isn’t always to the film’s benefit. As the critic James Naremore points out, “The film’s painterly feel is intensified by its exceptionally slow, stately pace”. But, by limiting the scope of his story, Kubrick was able to give the film a sense of intimacy that would have been nigh impossible on Napoleon. The scene in which Barry’s son succumbs to injuries from a riding accident is perhaps the most poignant in Kubrick’s oeuvre. It is one of the rare occasions – along with the bar scene at the end of Paths of Glory – when he fully drops his mask of misanthropy.
It is easy to see why Kubrick was drawn to the Napoleonic era. His films, unlike his photographs, love to juxtapose order with chaos: the pristine chateau where the generals plan the battle in Paths of Glory versus the cratered wasteland where the infantrymen carry it out; the spotless spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey versus the bone yard where the apes brawl at the dawn of man; the tidy boot camp barracks in Full Metal Jacket versus the charred rubble of Hué City. Napoleonic battles, for this reason, enchanted Kubrick, with their neat rows of troops coming together to blow each other to smithereens. “There’s a weird disparity between the sheer visual and organizational beauty of the historical battles sufficiently far in the past, and their human consequences”, he explained. “It’s rather like watching two golden eagles soaring through the sky from a distance; they may be tearing a dove to pieces, but if you are far enough away the scene is still beautiful.”
― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, 16 August 2018 04:41 (five years ago) link
Oh and some context for the chess game link above -
Did you know that the chess game between HAL and Poole came from a real game played in 1910 (Hamburg, Roesch vs Schlage).
Moreover, here or there on the Internet you will see some claim that HAL makes a mistake when it says "Queen in f3", which is not relevant because in this notation the important thing is that there is no ambiguity (which is the case here). Others claim that HAL influences and manipulates Poole into giving up too soon, as Poole could have delayed the mate by a few moves. Thus, HAL would show the first signs of malfunction here.
It is true that when a player announces a mate in x moves, then one can say that he makes a mistake if the mate cannot be made strictly in x moves. Yes, in this sense, HAL would have made an erroneous announcement.
But HAL does not announce "mate in two moves". He announces an inescapable mast, which is right as any answer from Poole will only prolong the game unnecessarily. In chess there is no point in prolonging a game that is hopeless. It is a question of politeness between players, and by knowing how to admit defeat, the player shows both intelligence and education.
We don't know why Kubrick chose this game. I personally think he wanted to show that the computer is capable of making a sacrifice of the queen, the strongest piece of the chessboard, which in 1968 can be perceived as a beautiful proof of artificial intelligence.
In my opinion, this is what is to be understand in this scene: to achieve its ends, HAL is able to sacrifice what is necessary. He will later sacrifice other "things", using the same logical reasoning. That, I think, is what we should understand in this scene, rather than some malfunction from HAL at this time in the movie .
― MaresNest, Monday, 3 September 2018 18:03 (five years ago) link