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Third
Keswick Film Festival
15-17 February 2002 |
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"Rhapsodic wonder at heaven and earth and the
infinite beyond" - EMPIRE
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Directed by Stanley Kubrick Written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur
C. Clarke
A small tribe of cavemen live on a rocky hillside, in terror of neighbouring
carnivores and quarrelling with a rival tribe for possession of a waterhole.
One of them gazes up wonderingly at the moon. Next day, they awake to find a
monolithic black slab has appeared. After their initial terror, the slab seems
to inspire one of the apemen to use bone clubs in the hunt for food.
Four million years later, space scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester)
arrives on the moon to investigate a similar black slab which has been found
buried deep below the surface and is now emitting powerful signals in the direction
of Jupiter. The spaceship "Discovery" sets out on a nine-month voyage
to Jupiter, manned by astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood)
with three colleagues kept in a state of hibernation and infallible computer
Hal in overall control. In deep space, Hal deliberately causes a minor failure;
and when Poole ventures outside the ship in his space pod to repair the fault,
Hal terminates maroons him in space and terminates the life functions of the
hibernating crew. Bowman has to disconnect Hal's memory banks in order to control
him, and so is left continuing the mission alone. Approaching Jupiter, he sees
a strange black slab in orbit among the planet's moons, following which he is
sucked into a new dimension, where our physical laws of time and space no longer
apply, an infinity of whirling, dreamlike landscapes, worlds in creation and
exploding galaxies. Finally he finds himself in an elegant apartment, as his
aged and dying self is confronted by one of the black monoliths. He reaches
out towards it, to be born again, the foetus of a new, transcended humanity,
a Star Child.
The 1960s was the decade that gave us some of our most memorable (and continuing)
science-fiction tropes and images. On television we saw the start of the Dr.
Who and Star Trek sagas, not to mention Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds, while
films ranged from the camp excesses of Barbarella (1966) to the simian dystopia
of Planet of the Apes (1968). Far and away the most stunning and the most serious
contender, however, was Kubrick's 2001: A space Odyssey. This came with the
credentials of a heavyweight director (Kubrick had already made Dr. Strangelove,
Spartacus and Lolita, all much-discussed movies) and a established science-fiction
writer (Clarke not only collaborated on the script, but had written the short
story, The Sentinel, on which it was based.) It even had one of the royal family's
preferred designers, Hardy Amies, designing the costumes. What it eschewed was
a starry cast of big name actors. This would be a film about ideas, and about
visual effects. As was usual for Kubrick, he also eschewed a newly-composed
score, preferring to utilise classical themes by Khachaturyan, Ligeti, Johann
Strauss and Richard Strauss, and incidentally forever linking The Blue Danube
Waltz and Also Sprach Zarathustra with images of space in the minds of his viewers.
While an original audience may have risked disappointment at the lack of a snappy
story-line, characters we are invited to get to know or anything in the way
of humour, what they got in compensation was a level of thought-provoking content
which, in the absence of much explicatory dialogue, they had to negotiate for
themselves, plus a sense of visual wonder conveyed through both detailed design
and the manipulation of scale. While opinions a have varied, critical comment
tends to focus either on the visual experience of the film, or its capacity
to convey ideas. The contemporary write-up in Sight and Sound considered the
film's "message" and found it lacking:
"More sinister still, Kubrick also extends the theory retrospectively by
showing mankind in its simian infancy being indoctrinated by possibly the identical
omniscient slab that is later to confront and confound us on the enigmatic surface
of Jupiter. This imputation that Man could not have invented even as pedestrian
a robot as, say, a traffic light without he aid of a hefty nudge from superior
beings has not surprisingly been the source of considerable pleasure as much
to the UFO-spotters as to the Bible-readers in Kubrick's audiences. Whatever
one's theory of evolution, however, the Kubrick-Clarke screenplay doesn't really
bear analysis too well.
The film begins unexpectedly with the title 'The Dawn of Man', and ends equally
unexpectedly with a sequence which implies that the opening label was an ironic
one. As an interplanetary dawn breaks somewhere over Jupiter, contemplated by
the staring eyes of a foetus travelling in its own fixed orbit, we are supposedly
now present at the real birth of human knowledge. The trouble with this line
of thought (assuming it's the right one) is that if man was so dim initially
that it would take a few million years of prompting to make him realise merely
that he is an unborn child before the mysteries of the universe, one can't help
wondering why any outside force, however benevolent, would have bothered to
take on his schooling in the first place. Boredom, perhaps. Or the need for
an appreciative audience? Worse, if it's man's natural progress which is being
accelerated by carefully timed appearances of the singing monoliths, the haste
of this spoon-fed rush to maturity is scarcely justified by the film's conclusion
that we've not yet begun. If, on the other hand, the suggestion is that man
would never have developed at al without outside help, the film is reducing
us to mutant freaks, purposelessly nurtured and cultivated.
(Philip Strick, Sight and Sound, Summer 1968)
Stanley Kubrick (1928 -
1999) was born in New York, and went into filmmaking after an early career as
a photographer, contributing to the magazine Look. In 1950 he raised the money
(partly by hustling chess games in Central park - he was an excellent player)
for his first independent feature, a documentary called The Day of the Fight
(1951). After some short, commissioned documentaries, Kubrick started making
feature films in 1953, and by 1957 he was in Hollywood directing Kirk Douglas
in Paths of Glory. Douglas was responsible for involving Kubrick in the massive
production of Spartacus (1960), but the director did not thrive in the Hollywood
ambiance, and his next proposed project, One-Eyed Jacks, was finally directed
by its star, Marlon Brando.
Following this, Kubrick re-located to England where he made all his subsequent
films. He was not a particularly prolific director, and might spend years working
towards a project, so the number of movies from his English period is, given
the considerable impact they have had, surprisingly small: Lolita (1962), Dr.
Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971),
Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Eyes Wide
Shut (1999). At the time of his death in 1999 he was working with Brian Aldiss
on ideas for A.I., a film subsequently directed by Steven Spielberg.
"Awesome, influential, mind-blowing, cool, obsessional, pretentious -
2001 is all of these. That it is both great and gobbledygook is still fascinating.
Certainly it deviates from Kubrick's claimed intention to make a 'proverbial
good science-fiction movie', as it defies genre and is unlike any science-fiction
film before it, good or gawd-awful…Whether you read this film as a mysterious
adventure, a symbolic sermon or a mystic vision, one haunting conclusion is
inescapable: how disappointing that it is 2001 and we're still tribal apes enthralled
by technology, a very long way from becoming children of the stars."
Angie Errigo, EMPIRE (2001)
"A major achievement in cinematography and special effects, 2001 lacks
dramatic appeal and only conveys suspense after the halfway mark; Kubrick must
receive all the praise - and take all the blame. The plot, so-called, uses up
almost two hours in exposition of scientific advances in space travel and communications,
before anything happens. The little humour is provided by introducing well-known
commercial names which are presumably still operating during the space age -
the Orbiter Hilton hotel and Pan Am space ships. Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood,
as the two principal astronauts, are not introduced until well along in the
film. Their complete lack of emotion becomes rather implausible during scenes
where they discuss the villainy of Hal, the talking computer. Kubrick and Clarke
have kept dialog to a minimum, frequently inserting lengthy passages where everything
is told visually. The tremendous centrifuge which makes up the principal set
(in which the two astronauts live and travel) reportedly cost $750,000 and looks
every bit of it."
Variety, (1968)
Compiled by Tyneside Cinema
10 Pilgrim Street Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6QG
With the assistance of Northern Arts.
©
Keswick Film Club 2002
Keswick Film Club is a voluntarily-run, not-for-profit organisation.
Registered Charity Number 1083395