2001: A Space Odyssey

breathless, and no longer boneless

in NY: Benson, Bowman, Moonwatcher

http://movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2018/10/13/detail/2001-a-space-odyssey-70mm-with-keir-dullea-and-special-guests

Now in the book I'm into "The Dawn of Man" shoot and postproduction, and things are crazy. Daniel Richter (Moonwatcher, and choreographer of all the man-ape action) was a registered addict with the UK and was getting speedball shots from a government doctor for the entirety of production. Kubrick eventually found out but recognized Richter was the best for what he needed and kept him on. For the sequence of the leopard attack, Kubrick was ensconced in a personal cage -- the only person on the set with such protection.

The permutations of the ape makeup/suits is really astonishing; SK kept pushing Stuart Freeborn to invent more stuff, and he did.

The Discovery model was 55 feet long; too bulky to move, so the camera did all the gliding.

reading this at the moment too, it’s exactly the kind of obsessive deep-dive into minutiae i hoped it would be

fave detail not yet mentioned by morbs itt (iirc) was that the space suits were designed by harry lange, a former nazi who’d moved to the states with wernher von braun and who upset the british crew by displaying a model of the v2 rocket in his office and walking around in what looked suspiciously like jackboots - and the space suits were constructed by a company called frankenstein and son

yeah, that's a partic wow anecdote given a filmmaker just coming off Strangelove

then again, it was just 20 years after the war

yeah you can see why the cockney crew might have been a little upset to find themselves working alongside one of the people who helped orchestrate the blitz

Listen to Stan and Carry On

I did go see that screening two weekends ago and it was phenomenal. This must be different from that Nolan "unmastered" thing that's going around, but it just looked and sounded terrific. A lot of audience laughter at some of HAL's lines. "I don't think there's any question. It can only be attributable to human error."

The portrait of Kubrick by Benson is very evenhanded -- he obviously got incredible commitment from his collaborators, and often engaged them in unexpected, generous ways, but he also tended to look out for #1 even more than you might expect -- purposefully derailing Clarke's book deal, putting stuntmen in others in what could be fairly described as unacceptable danger, taking the lead special effects credit (and Oscar) quite selfishly.

i definitely get more sense of him as a person away from the set - lots of stories about how warm and funny he could be, and how guilty he could feel when he realised he had hurt someone’s feelings - but yeah he seems pretty ruthless as a businessman, and utterly laser-focused when directing, to the exclusion of anything else

the story about him reducing william sylvester to a shaking wreck by insisting on a single-shot delivery of sylvester’s speech in the moonbase meeting room even though he was struggling with his lines is kinda quietly devastating

well, Benson leaves the actor who was almost fired for being a junkie (presumably unregistered) nameless.

also a LOL that an hours-long lensing of an effects shot was ruined by the Borehamwood crew jumping up and down when England won the '66 World Cup.

well - it ain't his people skills that keep us talking about him, fifty years on

maybe the most surprising insight the book has had to offer so far is how insightful a performer gary lockwood was, which (quite deliberately) isn’t immediately apparent from his extremely detached performance as frank poole

...just in the Star Trek pilot. (and Demy's Model Shop?)

btw Keir Dullea came up with breaking the wine glass!

Lockwood was in 2(!) Elvis movie​s: Wild In The Country and It Happened At The World's Fair.

the latter is kurt russell's screen debut - surely this opens up important kevin bacon game connections.

Lockwood was also in Splendor in the Grass... Warren Beatty's screen debut

Annette Michelson, a critic whose work I don't believe I've encountered before, has died. Here's her 1969 Artforum piece on 2001:

Kubrick’s transformation of bone into space-craft through the movement of redescent (through that single cut which concludes the Prologue and initiates the Odyssey) inscribes, within the most spectacular ellipsis in cinematic history, nothing less than the entire trajectory of human history, the birth and evolution of Intelligence. Seizing, appropriating the theme of spatial exploration as narrative metaphor and formal principle, he has projected intellectual adventure as spectacle, converting, through still another leap of the imagination, Méliès’ pristine fantasy to the form and uses of a complex and supremely sophisticated structure.

Moving, falling toward us with the steady and purposive elegance of an incomparably powerful “vehicle,” Kubrick’s masterwork is designed, in turn, as an instrument of exploration and discovery. A Space Odyssey is, in fact, in the sustained concreteness and formal refinement which render that design, precisely that which Ortega believed modern poetry to have become: a “higher algebra of metaphors.”

https://kubricks2001.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/bodies-in-space-film-as-carnal-knowledge-annette-michelson/

you can probably guess whose breathing was recorded for Bowman and Poole in their space helmets (no Bronx accent detectable)

I saw this in the theatre again last night. the unrestored version which i mistakenly thought was not the Nolan version. regardless, it was terrific to watch. amongst the many moments of beauty, the one that stands out to me is the flight attendant pinching Floyd's pen as it floats in the cabin and putting it back in his top pocket. it's such a glorious, prefectly realised split second as she catches it.

also funny about that scene is for all the ridiculous lengths that Kubrick went to it's enough to explain the movement through the cabin simply by having "GRIP SHOES" written on her shoes (they look like ladies gymnastics shoes).

xp Allow me to ruin that moment for you. That was a goof. They filmed that scene with the pen (transparently) taped to a pane of glass in front of the camera and when the stewardess tries to lift it off the glass, you can see it sticks when she "catches" it.

that actually doesn't ruin it! but thanks :)

MOMI postscreening panel with Dullea, Richter, Michael benson, and neuroscientist Heather Berlin (74 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_fxroII9GI&feature=youtu.be

I finally found a copy of the Soderbergh cut! Need to watch though.

just finished the Benson book — really great stuff. there should be a similar book for every Kubrick film. Or at least Barry Lyndon.

Thank god - the new 4K UHD is NOT the Christopher Nolan urine print:

It’s very important to note here that this is most assuredly not the Christopher Nolan “unrestored” presentation of the film. It has, in fact, been properly restored using state-of-the-art digital tools and properly color-timed as well, a process supervised by Vitali. While I certainly admire Nolan’s reverence for the all-analog photochemical process, his recent IMAX reissue of the unrestored version of 2001 in no way represented the film as Kubrick would have wanted it to look. While the clarity was impressive, the image was rife with unwanted analog flaws and the coloring was yellowed and unpleasant. I didn’t see this version, and I’m glad of it because every film-knowledgeable person I know who did was put off by its unrestored appearance.

not sure how much to rely on that guy's POV, as the Nolan print I saw was in no way IMAX.

I didn't see this version

oh

If you read the review it includes technical details at the end, but it's moderately confusing:

The new 2018 video masters were achieved by scanning the 65mm original negative in 8K-resolution and utilizing top-of-the-line color correction software, allowing technicians to follow natural color and luminance curves (characteristics) of film print stock. Color reference in the DI suite was provided by the 1999 70mm answer print from the original camera negative and a 70mm check print from a new dupe negative. Vince Roth (now the Lab Technical director at Fotokem) completed the dupe and check print for the 2018 color grade.

Christopher Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema (who both worked extensively with large film formats) oversaw the new 70mm film prints and were brought in to consult on the creation of new video masters to match the 70mm reference prints. These 2018 video masters were completed under the direction of Leon Vitali and Ned Price. Color grading of the master was completed by Janet Wilson of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging – who previously worked with Leon on HD mastering of Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket and Lolita.

the 2018 release contains correct picture aspect ratio as it was scanned directly from the 65mm original negative which is spherical (flat) versus anamorphic (scope). The 35mm anamorphic (scope) reduction that was scanned for the 2000 and 2007 releases contained a little more information on the left and right of the frame then (sic) was intended for 2.2 70mm projection aspect ratio. Also, the optical scope reduction added a slight amount of linear image distortion, which is not present in the 65mm spherical camera negative.

This is why a number of Internet comments have complained that the new release is 'cropped' (and why it's not, cropped.)

It's from the included booklet but I copied it from this review - https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/2001-A-Space-Odyssey-Blu-ray/208266/#Review

Also I think Kubrick would have been delighted with the post-credits easter egg of Starchild doing the Ally McBeal baby dance!

i didn't think anyone besides Jeffrey Wells called additional image "information"

God save us

The quote is from the studio's technical notes which are reproduced at the end of the Digital Bits review as well.

Appreciate this film more and more as I get older. Could watch the Blue Danube sequence pretty much forever ...

Oh man, farewell Douglas Rain.

https://consequenceofsound.net/2018/11/r-i-p-douglas-rain-2001-a-space-odyssey/

anyone try this in SF?

If I were in town this weekend I’d make time to try the @Castro_Theatre’s head-to-head competition between 4K digital and 70mm showings of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s a movie I can easily imagine watching twice in a row. https://t.co/GbeobNQh6w

— Brian Darr (@HellOnFriscoBay) December 28, 2018

missed this blog series

https://dcairns.wordpress.com/tag/2001-an-odyssey-in-bits/

If you want reasonably compelling proof that Kubrick didn’t fake the moon landings — and I’m only speaking to those of you who want it, I can’t be bothered with anyone who NEEDS it — consider how everyone on the moon walks about as if the gravity were earth-normal. No galumphing sideways meerkat loping for Heywood R. Floyd, thank you very much. And nobody’s wearing grip shoes. We might guess that Kubrick is supposing some kind of goofy artificial gravity in the Clavius briefing room, but Arthur Clarke would surely have nixed such unscientific nonsense. And when we see the astronauts outside at the excavation site, they’re STILL walking perfectly normally, as if strolling around Borehamwood on a May morning. It seems nobody concerned with the production predicted the effects of the low lunar gravity, or else they dismissed it as too finicky to deal with (subtle slow motion might have been an option, reverting to normal speed when Floyd and his colleagues talk, keeping them stationary for dialogue or looping in normal-speed lines…)

i used to read a lot about how keir dullea was some unknown that kubrick plucked from obscurity to star in his gazillion dollar movie, but he starred in one of the most talked-about and widely-seen American indie films of the 1960s, david and lisa. that film seems mostly forgotten now (in part b/c i think some rights issues kept it from widely circulating on home video until recently), which is probably how the myth of dullea's obscurity took hold. i finally watched it a few years ago and it is incredibly dated. there are certain scenes where dullea's character looks almost catatonic and i wonder if that's what stuck in kubrick's mind. (aside from his striking features.)

Are these idiots worth addressing?

Love it when directors use "non-actors", acting is for theatre, if you must

kubrick sometimes used professional actors as if they were non-actors.

Yeah iq was generalising around that and I agree

like in a purely kuleshovian (sp?) way.

Pro/non-pro is kind of nonsense anyway

A director is looking for a particular effect, usually, which is as much about choice of take/performance as it is about the training or ability of the performer

well, whether or not an actor has experience on a film set or in front of a camera is important. or can be important. i don't think it's "nonsense." but one can make too much of the distinction, certainly. isabelle huppert has talked about this a lot, and willem dafoe.

yeah again i'm still generalising. i enjoy the illusion of not feeling that i'm watching somebody act.

for most actors that illusion is the point of all their training and experience!

i disagree, seriously. and i think even if you reduced acting to The Method and adjacent ideas it has very few good exemplars. i'm not actually saying i hate acting, of course it has a place and it has its own pleasures, i just find it peripheral or distracting to a lot of film that i love.