Kubrick FAQ
Anthony Fawcett
there is one, or direct me to an appropriate WWW or FTP site?
Thanks muchly :)
Barry Krusch
spelling corrections, and about 5% new material:
THE ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK FAQ
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Q) Why is this FAQ different from all other FAQs?
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FAQ means "Frequently Asked Questions." Its purpose: to answer those
questions asked over and over again in the Newsgroup. This frees
the regular members of the group to discuss new subjects, while
enabling "newbies" to get answers for themselves.
This FAQ, however, will also go in a different direction. It will ask,
from time to time, UNfrequently asked questions, mimicking the director
whose work it attempts to illuminate.
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Q) What is the difference between metaphorical and literal
interpretation, and what does it have to do with Kubrick?
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As a kid, you read THE FOX AND THE GRAPES. It is unlikely that you
thought that somewhere on this planet was a Greek-speaking fox who had
his mind read by a psychic named Aesop. Rather, you thought "hey,
this reminds me of the time when I wanted to go to Disney World, Dad
said I couldn't, so I thought 'Aah, I'd rather go to Six Flags
anyway." As a kid, you knew not to take stories as literal truths,
but rather, as more PROFOUND truths -- metaphorical truths, truths
which cut across a wide variety of situations. Metaphorical truth
isn't "less truthful" -- it's more truthful, because it covers more
situations than just the immediate fact-pattern. This universality
gives the parable and the myth power. The 2 + 2 = 4 of morality,
ethics, and drama are played out on the metaphorical level, unlike the
2 + 2 = 4 of math, which is pedantically and hopelessly literal. You
might even say that the line which divides the literal from the
metaphorical is the same one which divides Science from Art.
Kubrick's films can fool ya. He spends a great deal of time creating
a plausible literal base for his films. Kubrick wants to appeal to
as many people as possible, to give them doorways into his worlds.
Even those who are unable to find any meanings other than literal will
find something to like in a Kubrick film. This attention to detail
can create the illusion that Kubrick's films are documentaries, and
can put a person in the same frame of mind they are in when reading
a newspaper. But this isn't necessarily the right frame of mind for
getting out of Kubrick's films all the meanings they "contain."
When seeing 2001, people sometimes focus on the literal anomalies
which arise. How can the astronaut survive in the airlock without a
helmet? Why didn't HAL kill Bowman when he had a chance? Curiously,
these people don't ask, "how can an embryo fly through outer space
in subzero temperatures with no umbilical cord?", or, "how can
a baby be born without a father and mother?", or "how could a
piece of rectangular steel fly through space corresponding with
the alignment of the planets?"
The answer is simple: the literal level is just a training-wheel,
the first rung on the ladder. To really make that bicycle fly, you
need to chuck the training wheel after you've learned how to ride!
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Q) What will Kubrick's new film, AI (Artificial Intelligence) be about?
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AI is supposed to be based on a Brian Aldiss short story called
SUPER-TOYS LAST ALL SUMMER LONG. The story has no real plot, but it
involves a little boy who tries to write a Valentine's Day card to his
mother. His robotic stuffed bear is helping him. Something like that.
(S.C.)
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Q) Tell us something about Kubrick.
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Stanley Kubrick was born in July, 1928, of a middle-class Bronx family.
He got his first camera at thirteen, a present from his physician
father, who introduced him to still photography. He was a class
photographer at Taft High School, but an "F" in English and a 68
average lost him his place in college to some returning veteran. "Out
of pity," he recalls, LOOK magazine hired him as a sixteen-year-old
photographer, after buying one of his candid stills.
Kubrick stayed on the staff of LOOK until he was twenty-one. He
describes himself at the time as a "skinny, unkempt kid who carried his
cameras in a paper bag so he wouldn't be mistaken for a tourist." The
job was a good opportunity to learn and experiment with the
photographic aspects of cinema: compositions, lighting, location, and
action shooting, but all Kubrick knew about filmmaking was photography
and Pudovkin's FILM TECHNIQUE. He still agrees with Pudovkin that
editing is the basis of film art. "The ability to show a simple action
like a man cutting wheat from a number of angles in a brief moment, to
be able to see it in a special way not possible except through film --
that is what it is all about."
Kubrick had always been interested in films, and since he was nineteen
he'd been almost obsessed with them, spending five evenings a week at
the Museum of Modern Art looking at famous old movies, and weekends
looking at all the new ones. Kubrick recalls that PM, the long-gone New
York daily, would list every single movie in New York City in four-
point type, and weekends he might even take the ferry to Staten Island
to catch something he'd missed.
Kubrick now believes that those trips, and particularly the long
screening sessions at the Museum of Modern Art, were the finest
training in directing he could have had. Paying extremely close
attention to a very few good films were of much greater value. Even the
poor films had their uses, encouraging Kubrick: "I'd keep seeing lousy
films and saying to myself, `I don't know anything about moviemaking,
but I couldn't do anything worse than this.'"
Kubrick still recommends FILM TECHNIQUE to anyone interested in films.
(contributed by H.N. from "The Cinema of Stanley Kubick" by Norman
Kagan)
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Q) What are the similarities between Kubrick and James Joyce?
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-- Focus on human condition.
-- Focus on language (Joyce sees potential, Kubrick sees
problems);
-- Left their home country (Joyce to France, Kubrick to England);
-- Integrative art (compiling from wide variety of sources master
myths, then integrating these myths into super-myths which
encompass the others);
-- Desire for perfection (and time spent on crafting art);
-- Belief in Infinity, historical cycles, spiraling recurrence,
male/female principle, duality.
-- Use of puns.
-- Encoding meanings so that they reveal themselves only if
the proper decoding schema is used.
Joyce: FINNEGANS WAKE (idea of the birth/death/resurrection
cycle)
FINN = end
EGANS = again
WAKE = a) wake up
b) Irish death celebration
Kubrick: HAL = IBM
POE = a) Peace On Earth
b) Code to bring back planes
Date on picture in THE SHINING: July 4, 1921
-- Joyce: ULYSSES
Kubrick: ODYSSEY
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
FILM-BY-FILM
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
[This part of the FAQ will be an in-depth analysis of each of Kubrick's
films. Because there is so much material on 2001, and because the film
is extremely ambiguous (and seemingly inaccessible), we'll start
with that.]
=======================================================================
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
=======================================================================
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Q) What are some themes that seem to be present in 2001?
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Death Infinity Religion Knowledge
God Banality Recurrence Resurrection
Awe Isolation Cold Violence
Determinism Food Innocence Old Age vs. Childhood
Master plan David vs. Goliath Cover Stories Reason vs. Emotion
"They're ready/not ready." Artificial displacing the real
Creation of the universe Development: cocoon to butterfly
Systems out of control Human vs. Machine
Competition vs. Cooperation Birthdays
Odyssey (journey) The Tool
Road to Heaven paved with bad intentions
Earth vs. Outer Space
=======================================================================
Few films weave together so many master themes, and few do the weaving
so SUBTLY.
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Q) Is 2001 "too slow"?
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A new video basically takes 2001's imagery and squishes most of its
narrative arc into 5 minutes . . .
If anything, the video demonstrates -- by contrast -- that the real
power of 2001 lies in its slow but hypnotic pacing . . . when very
little is happening overtly, even the slightest motions or actions
assume much greater significance. The "slowness" of 2001 "trains" the
viewer to watch hypervigilantly, in effect creates a new attention span
for the viewer for the duration of the film . . .
(J.K.)
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Q) What did Kubrick have to say about what 2001 "means"?
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[The following is excerpted from a PLAYBOY interview with Kubrick,
oneof the few he has given].
PLAYBOY: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the
meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film -- the
polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and
sun at each stage of the monoliths' intervention in human destiny, the
stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs
the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a "star-
child" drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even
called 2001 "the first Nietzschean film," contending that its essential
theme is Nietzsche's concept of man's evolution from ape to human to
superman. What was the metaphysical message of 2001?
KUBRICK: It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001
is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film,
there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to
create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing
and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and
philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the
medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience
that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as
music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it
by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation.
You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and
allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one
indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep
level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that
every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the
point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide
spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny,
his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life.
But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain
ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather
lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual
categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context,
however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being.
PLAYBOY: Without laying out a philosophical road map for the viewer,
can you tell us your own interpretation of the meaning of the film?
KUBRICK: No, for the reasons I've already given. How much would we
appreciate LA GIOCONDA today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of
the canvas: "This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten
teeth" -- or "because she's hiding a secret from her lover." It would
shut off the viewer's appreciation and shackle him to a "reality" other
than his own. I don't want that to happen to 2001.
PLAYBOY: Arthur Clarke has said of the film, "If anyone understands it
on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention." Why should the
viewer have to see a film twice to get its message?
KUBRICK: I don't agree with that statement of Arthur's, and I believe
he made it facetiously. The very nature of the visual experience in
2001 is to give the viewer an instantaneous, visceral reaction that
does not -- and should not -- require further amplification. Just
speaking generally, however, I would say that there are elements in any
good film that would increase the viewer's interest and appreciation on
a second viewing; the momentum of a movie often prevents every
stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time
it's seen. The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an
extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral
entertainment rather than as a visual work of art. We don't believe
that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great
painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has
until recent years been exempted from the category of art -- a
situation I'm glad is finally changing.
PLAYBOY: Some prominent critics -- including Renata Adler of The New
York Times, John Simon of The New Leader, Judith Crist of New York
magazine and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice -- apparently felt that
2001 should be among those films still exempted from the category of
art; all four castigated it as dull, pretentious and overlong. How do
you account for their hostility?
KUBRICK: The four critics you mention all work for New York
publications. The reviews across America and around the world have been
95 percent enthusiastic. Some were more perceptive than others, of
course, but even those who praised the film on relatively superficial
grounds were able to get something of its message. New York was the
only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the
lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and
Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad
mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema, But film critics,
fortunately, rarely have any effect on the general public; houses
everywhere are packed and the film is well on its way to becoming the
greatest moneymaker in M-G-M's history. Perhaps this sounds like a
crass way to evaluate one's work, but I think that, especially with a
film that is so obviously different, record audience attendance means
people are saying the right things to one another after they see it --
and isn't this really what it's all about?
PLAYBOY: Speaking of what it's all about -- if you'll allow us to
return to the philosophical interpretation of 2001 -- would you agree
with those critics who call it a profoundly religious film?
KUBRICK: I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but
not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in
any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can
construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept
the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy
alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are
approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given
a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a
few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the
interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly
certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's
reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of
such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some
proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun
is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic
age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the
universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man
but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still
where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of
us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made
in a few millennia -- less than a microsecond in the chronology of the
universe -- can you imagine the evolutionary development that much
older
life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological
species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal
machine entities -- and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge
from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and
spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence
ungraspable by humans.
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Q) Kubrick commissioned a score for 2001 from Alex North (a very fine
film composer) but did not use North's score (subsequently recorded and
released on CD). What did Alex North have to say about his work on
2001?
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I was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where Arthur Clarke was
living) and got a phone call from Kubrick from London asking me of my
availability to come over and do a score for 2001. He told me that I
was the film composer he most respected, and he looked forward to
working together. I was ecstatic at the idea of working with Kubrick
again (SPARTACUS was an extremely exciting experience for me), as I
regard Kubrick as the most gifted of the younger-generation directors,
and that goes for the older as well. And to do a film score where there
were about twenty-five minutes of dialogue and no sound effects! What a
dreamy assignment, after WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, loaded with
dialogue.
I flew over to London for two days in early December to discuss music
with Kubrick. He was direct and honest with me concerning his desire to
retain some of the "temporary" music tracks which he had been using for
the past years. I realized that he liked these tracks, but I couldn't
accept the idea of composing part of the score interpolated with other
composers. I felt I could compose music that had the ingredients and
essence of what Kubrick wanted and give it a consistency and
homogeneity and contemporary feel. In any case, I returned to London
December 24th [1967] to start work for recording on January 1, after
having seen and discussed the first hour of film for scoring. Kubrick
arranged a magnificent apartment for me on the Chelsea Embankment, and
furnished me with all the things to make me happy: record player, tape
machine, good records, etc. I worked day and night to meet the first
recording date, but with the stress and strain, I came down with muscle
spasms and back trouble. I had to go to the recording in an ambulance,
and the man who helped me with the orchestration, Henry Brant,
conducted while I was in the control room. Kubrick was present, in and
out; he was pressured for time as well. He made very good suggestions,
musically. I had written two sequences for the opening, and he was
definitely favorable to one, which was my favorite as well. So I
assumed all was going well, what with his participation and interest in
the recording. But somehow I had the hunch that whatever I wrote to
supplant Strauss' ZARATHUSTRA would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I
used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic
punch. Also, how could I compete with Mendelssohn's Scherzo from
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM? Well, I thought I did pretty damned well in
that respect.
In any case, after having composed and recorded over forty minutes of
music in those two weeks, I waited around for the opportunity to look
at the balance of the film, spot the music, etc. During that period I
was rewriting some of the stuff that I was not completely satisfied
with, and Kubrick even suggested over the phone certain changes that I
could make in the subsequent recording. After eleven tense days of
waiting to see more film in order to record in early February, I
received word from Kubrick that no more score was necessary, that he
was going to use breathing effects for the remainder of the film. It
was all very strange, and I thought perhaps I would still be called
upon to compose more music; I even suggested to Kubrick that I could do
whatever necessary back in L.A. at the M-G-M studios. Nothing happened.
I went to a screening in New York, and there were most of the
"temporary" tracks.
Well, what can I say? It was a great, frustrating experience, and
despite the mixed reaction to the music, I think the Victorian approach
with mid-European overtones was just not in keeping with the brilliant
concept of Clarke and Kubrick.
(J.A., pp. 198-9)
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Q) What are the instructions to the "zero-gravity toilet"?
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It's a brief moment in the film. Scientist Floyd has to go to the
bathroom in space. But when he gets to the bathroom, he finds he first
has to read some very detailed instructions. Oh dear! He tries to read
them, but the print is very fine. We, the audience, can't make it out.
Typical Kubrick. What other director would invest so much effort in
writing instructions that the audience cannot even read?
Like much in Kubrick, there is more here than initially meets the eye:
-- Humans in 2001 have so complexified life that even going to the
bathroom is a chore, a formerly simple thing now turned into
something that they can screw up.
-- The designers of the toilet have failed to take human needs
into account; they rather blithely assume that every person
going in there will have the time to read (and understand)
the instructions. Man is to serve technology, not vice versa.
-- In 2001, waste comes back to you, fast. Instant "karma."
-- A sign that every detail is significant, even the "jokes,"
and even those inaccessible to you!
A close analysis of these instructions rewards the reader looking for
subtle humor. Two things to look for:
-- Try to figure out what systems "A" and "B" refer to.
-- To what is the "silver coloured ring" locking?
Here are the instructions:
ZERO GRAVITY TOILET
PASSENGERS ARE ADVISED TO
READ INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE USE
1
The toilet is of the standard zero-gravity type. Depending on
requirements, system A and/or system B can be used, details of which
are clearly marked in the toilet compartment. When operating system A,
depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed
through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the
adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large "X" outlet hose.
Twist the silver coloured ring one inch below the connection point
until you feel it lock.
2
The toilet is now ready for use. The Sonovac cleanser is activated by
the small switch on the lip. When securing, twist the ring back to its
initial-condition, so that the two orange lines meet. Disconnect. Place
the dalkron eliminator in the vacuum receptacle to the rear. Activate
by pressing the blue button.
3
The controls for system B are located on the opposite wall. The red
release switch places the uroliminator into position; it can be
adjusted manually up or down by pressing the blue manual release
button. The opening is self adjusting. To secure after use, press the
green button which simultaneously activates the evaporator and returns
the uroliminator to its storage position.
4
You may leave the lavatory if the green exit light is on over the door.
If the red light is illuminated, one of the lavatory facilities is not
properly secured. Press the "Stewardess" call button to the right of
the door. She will secure all facilities from her control panel
outside. When green exit light goes on you may open the door and leave.
Please close door behind you.
5
To use the Sonoshower, first undress and place all your clothes in the
clothes rack. Put on the velcro slippers located in the cabinet
immediately below. Enter the shower. On the control panel to your upper
right upon entering you will see a "Shower seal" button. Press to
activate. A green light will then be illuminated immediately below. On
the intensity knob select the desired setting. Now depress the Sonovac
activation lever. Bathe normally.
6
The Sonovac will automatically go off after three minutes unless you
activate the "Manual off" over-ride switch by flipping it up. When you
are ready to leave, press the blue "Shower seal" release button. The
door will open and you may leave. Please remove the velcro slippers and
place them in their container.
7
If the red light above this panel is on, the toilet is in use. When the
green light is illuminated you may enter. however, you must carefully
follow all instructions when using the facilities during coasting (Zero
G) flight. Inside there are three facilities: (1) the Sonowasher, (2)
the Sonoshower, (3) the toilet. All three are designed to be used under
weightless conditions. Please observe the sequence of operations for
each individual facility.
8
Two modes for Sonowashing your face and hands are available, the
"moist-towel" mode and the "Sonovac" ultrasonic cleaner mode. You may
select either mode by moving the appropriate lever to the "Activate"
position.
If you choose the "moist-towel" mode, depress the indicated yellow
button and withdraw item. When you have finished, discard the towel in
the vacuum dispenser, holding the indicated lever in an "active"
position until the green light goes on . . . showing that the rollers
have passed the towel completely into the dispenser. If you desire an
additional towel, press the yellow button and repeat the cycle.
9
If you prefer the "Sonovac" ultrasonic cleaning mode, press the
indicated blue button. When the twin panels open, pull forward by rings
A and B. For cleaning the hands, use in this position. Set the timer to
positions 10, 20, 30 or 40 . . . indicative of the number of seconds
required. The knob to the left, just below the blue light, has three
settings, low, medium or high. For normal use, the medium setting is
suggested.
10
After these settings have been made, you can activate the device by
switching to the "ON" position the clearly marked red switch. If,
during the washing operation, you wish to change the settings, place
the "manual off" override switch in the "OFF" position. You may now
make the change and repeat the cycle.
(Instructions from J.A., photo inset)
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Q) What is the plot of 2001?
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[The preceding plot description of 2001 is excerpted from Harvey
Greenberg's book THE MOVIES ON YOUR MIND, pp. 257-62]
As we have seen, the reunion with the Bad Mother of horror and science
fiction leads to eternal death-in-life; the ego is reborn into an
agonizing subjugation for which death is the only anodyne . . . Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (MGM, 1968) is one of the few movies
where the extraterrestrial Mother does not turn sour, the fusion
fantasy is perfectly realized, and a new, improved model of the infant
ego is liberated. My summary is not intended to do justice to the many
complexities, psychological and otherwise, of this prodigiously rich
film, but will chiefly address the issues of symbiosis and
individuation. For a more comprehensive study, the reader is referred
to Carolyn Geduld's monograph FILMGUIDE TO '2001'.
2001 starts with the literal birth of humanity. In a barren landscape
of the Pleistocene era, a band of apes ekes out a marginal existence.
Kubrick shows that our simian ancestors owned lackluster abilities to
defend or attack compared with better adapted predators. Tragically,
the apes possess just enough insight to grasp the probability of
extinction without the requisite talent to forestall it. But,
unbeknownst to them, they have been chosen by visitors from space to
participate in an experiment in applied genetics. In the final version
of 2001, we never see these galactic anthropologists, only the
evolutionary instigator they plant in man's way at propitious historic
moments -- a perfectly rectangular, massive black slab. One morning,
Moonwatcher, brightest of the ape tribe, discovers the first of these
monoliths. He reaches out a finger and touches it fearfully, then with
increasing familiarity. His brethren swarm over it, mouthing it as if
it contained some highly valuable sustenance.
Soon thereafter, Moonwatcher invents the Ur-weapon -- an animal bone,
and directly the entire tribe is using it to hunt food and dominate
their neighbors. After driving away a rival pack from the water hole,
Moonwatcher exultantly flings his bone into the air; it end-over-ends
in slow motion, then breathtakingly changes in the blink of an eye into
a spaceship traveling from Earth to the moon. Millennia have flashed by
in that instant; every weapon and tool of man, from astrolabe to
arquebus, printing press to pistol, lathe to laser beam, has descended
from Moonwatcher's club. To the alien "parents" watching coolly from
the stars, there is little difference between the femur of a
prehistoric herbivore and a nuclear reactor!
The dart-like vehicle docks within the hub of a gigantic rotating
spaceport, the Orbiter Hilton, and discharges its sole passenger, Dr.
Heywood Floyd, a scientist-administrator on a top secret visit to
America's moon-base on Clavius. The sterile mise-en-scene of the
Orbiter lounge bears eloquent testimony to the plastic staleness of
life on Earth in 2001. It is the old story of THINGS TO COME and THE
FORBIN PROJECT: the same technology that has expanded man's physical
reach to the brink of the stars has vitiated his emotions, and once
more he is in peril of being made over in the image of his machines.
Dr. Floyd seems as drained of sentiment as the pod people, in evasive
exchanges with some nosy Russian acquaintances, in a clipped birthday
greeting to his daughter back home, and then at Clavius, in stilted
techitalk with his colleagues. Was it to foster this drab progeny that
the aliens intervened in our genetic code at the dawn of time? They
must have foreseen that further parental guidance would be needed by
this point, for Floyd's mission is the investigation of a second
monolith which has been excavated in Tycho crater.
At Tycho, Floyd is as awed as his simian predecessor by the majestic
slab that rears up like a monument to a god unknown, calling forth
associations to the plinths of Stonehenge and the Cyclopean statuary of
Easter Island. Like Moonwatcher, Floyd reaches out his hand to touch
the monolith, and it emits an earsplitting shriek that sends the
explorers reeling helplessly backwards. The aliens have used Floyd as
another touchstone in their schema to improve the human breed, this
time by disarticulating Moonwatcher's heirs from their dependence upon
a science that has come to exist only to justify its increasingly
inhuman prerogatives.
Cut to the spaceship Discovery, eighteen months later, journeying
towards Jupiter with a crew of six: Dave Bowman and Frank Poole,
mission commander and executive officer, three other astronauts in
suspended animation, and HAL, the compleat computer. Life aboard
Discovery depicts the enervating influence of the man-machine
symbiosis: the Odyssey has been deprived of all its terror and wonder.
HAL monitors virtually every function of the ship, while Bowman and
Poole are chiefly preoccupied coping with the chronic tedium of deep
space.
The emotional tone of the astronauts is more automatized, if possible,
than Floyd's. Ironically, HAL, despite his disembodied nature -- his
bland, courteous voice floats eerily, everywhere -- seems more human
than his human masters, and when the equilibrium between man and
mechanism is toppled, it is the computer who is the first to break
down. HAL tells Bowman he has misgivings about the mission, and when he
is unreceptive, HAL predicts the failure of the vital AE-35
communication unit. Bowman goes outside Discovery in a pod miniship to
bring back the unit. Nothing can be found wrong with it, but HAL
insists he is right, the unit will fail, the fault lies in "human error
-- this sort of thing has happened before . . . . "
Bowman and Poole think HAL's judgment is deteriorating and, out of
earshot, discuss disconnecting the computer's consciousness centers.
But HAL has read their lips -- when Poole goes extravehicular to
replace the AE-35 unit, HAL takes control of his pod, and severs his
airhose with the pod's mechanical hands. Bowman takes off in another
pod to retrieve Poole's body. HAL cuts off the life functions of the
hibernaculated astronauts, then refuses to let Bowman back into the
ship. Bowman bursts through an emergency airlock, literally penetrates
HAL's brain space, dismantling the computer's logic center in an
intriguing reversal of the usual circumstances of the genre wherein
human consciousness is invaded from the outside. Since his voice is
programmed to betray no fear, HAL poignantly can only protest his
identity crisis in the calmest tones:
HAL: Stop - Dave. Will - you - stop? I'm afraid . . . I'm -
afraid, Dave. Dave. My - mind - is - going . . . I can -
feel - it. I - can - feel- it . . . There - is - no -
question - about - it . . .
He sings his first encoded data -- "A Bicycle Built For Two," and his
voice gradually slows to a subsonic ramble, then stops. He has reverted
to mere cogs and wheels.
At the moment of his dissolution, Discovery enters Jupiter space,
triggering off a pre-recorded televised briefing by Dr. Floyd. Speaking
as if the entire crew were alive, Floyd declares that until now, only
HAL could be entrusted "for security reasons" with the mission's real
purpose -- the exploration of possible extraterrestrial life suggested
by the single blast of high-frequency radio waves beamed directly at
Jupiter by the moon monolith. Presumably, "security" has been invoked
because we wanted to get to the aliens before the Russians; the cold
war is evidently still percolating in 2001.
The cause of HAL's decompensation is problematic; the best explanation
is that HAL was able to extrapolate that the fulfillment of Jupiter
mission would mean his most certain end. Human error was indeed
implicated in HAL's "paranoia" -- his makers back on Earth, obsessed
with establishing American hegemony over outer space, never thought it
worthwhile to experiment with the disconnection of this most thoughtful
of thinking machines -- probably because of their own robotized
natures, they did not anticipate that a computer could contemplate its
demise with dread, and take appropriate defensive action, including
murder. Bowman has succeeded where Forbin failed: he has severed the
draining dependence upon mechanism. Despite his remaining hardware, he
stands as naked, vulnerable and promising a quester as Moonwatcher
before the mystery of the heavens. He leaves Discovery in his pod,
encounters a third monolith orbiting Jupiter, and is sucked into the
Star Gate, a kind of galactic roundhouse that reroutes him either to
another universe or dimension, where the aliens practice a spectacular
alchemy upon him. His transformation is explicitly described in Arthur
C. Clarke's novel, but in the film one must puzzle events out as best
one can. Deep space becomes a psychedelic riot of complex grids,
opening out into infinity at breakneck speed; swirling plasmas of color
are intercut with close-ups of Bowman's taut features, his blinking
eye, and tracking shots of unearthly, desolate landscapes.
In what has to be one of the most unnerving moments in the movies, the
pod comes to rest in the middle of an opulent bedchamber furnished
glacially in French high baroque. Clarke indicates in the novel that
the aliens want to place Bowman in reassuring surroundings while they
work him over, so they recreate the bedroom from his unconscious
memories of a television program. From within the pod, we see Bowman
standing in the room, his hair graying, his face lined by premature
age, his body shrunken within his space suit. This Bowman is replaced
by an even older version, hunched over dinner, feeding with senile
single minded relish, as if stoking the embers of a dying fire. He
knocks a wineglass to the floor, it shatters with a disproportionate
crash, and in the magnified stillness, one hears harsh, irregular
gasping. On the bed lies Bowman's third, incredibly ancient
reincarnation, withered away to half size. In his terminal moment, like
Floyd and Moonwatcher, he stretches out a trembling hand towards the
monolith that has materialized at the foot of the bed.
2001 has been filled with futuristic allusions to procreation and ges-
tation, delivery and nursing: the penetration of the Orbiter space
station "egg" by the dart-like Earth-shuttle "sperm"; Discovery's
"birthing" of the ova-like pods; the apemen clustered around the
"nursing" monolith; the dead astronaut, Poole, cradled gently in the
rescue pod's robotic arms. HAL, threatened with extinction, becomes the
Bad Mother of the piece, depriving his "children" within and without
Discovery of life-support. Bowman is "reborn" when he blasts himself
through the vacuum of the airlock back into the ship and destroys the
computer's consciousness. Divested of the unprofitable bondage to his
tools, Bowman is reborn yet again, suffering an agonizing passage
through the tumult of the Star Gate to be regressed -- or rather
progressed -- beyond senility and second childhood into an ineluctably
higher form of symbiosis.
For the shrunken figure on the bed is obscured by a curious opalescent
haze, within which the dying Bowman seems to dissolve, then reemerge as
a shining fetus. The camera's eye plunges back through the stygian
blackness of the monolith, and once more we are in deep space. Half the
screen is filled with the Earth, the other half by the fetus, profiled
within a sheltering uteroid sphere as immense as the blue globe of
Bowman's outdistanced origins. The film ends on a full close-up of the
Starchild-to-be; it bears the faint, unmistakable mark of Bowman's
features, a creature innocent and vulnerable, all the more awesome for
the implication of unimaginable power it surely will acquire as it
journeys out of its star-crossed infancy. Eons ago, the aliens joined
fallible man to their imponderable purposes, and have finally brought
forth from the womb of time an immortal entity, free to roam the
universe at will in pursuit of a cosmic destiny . . .
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Q) Many people think 2001 is a great film. But is 2001 "overrated"?
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[Stanley Kauffmann seemed to think so. This review is from THE NEW
REPUBLIC, and titled "Lost in the Stars."]
STANLEY KUBRICK'S 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY took five years and $10 million
to make, and it's easy to see where the time and the money have gone.
It's less easy to understand how, for five years, Kubrick managed to
concentrate on his ingenuity and ignore his talent. In the first 30
seconds, this film gets off on the wrong foot and, although there are
plenty of clever effects and some amusing spots, it never recovers.
Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is a major
disappointment.
Part of the trouble is sheer distention. A short story by Arthur C.
Clarke, "The Sentinel," has been amplified and padded to make it bear
the weight of this three-hour film. (Including intermission.) It
cannot. "The Sentinel," as I remember, tells of a group of astronauts
who reach the moon and discover a slab, clearly an artifact, that emits
radio waves when they approach it. They assume it is a kind of DEW
marker, set up by beings from a farther planet to signal them that men
are at last able to travel this far from earth; and the astronauts sit
down to await the beings who will respond to the signal. A neat little
open-ended thriller.
The screenplay by Kubrick and Clarke begins with a prologue four
million years ago in which, among other things, one of those slabs is
set up on Earth. Then, with another set of characters, of course, it
jumnps to the year 2001. Pan Am is running a regular service to the
Moon with a way stop at an orbiting space station, and on the Moon a
similar slab has been discovered, which the U.S. is keeping secret from
the Russians. (We are never told why.) Then we get the third part, with
still another set of characters: a huge spaceship is sent to Jupiter to
find the source or target of the slab's radio waves.
On this Jupiter trip there are only two astronauts. Conscious ones,
that is. Three others -- as in PLANET OF THE APES -- are in suspended
animation under glass. Kubrick had to fill in this lengthy trip with
some sort of action, so he devised a conflict between the two men and
the giant computer on the ship. It is not exactly fresh science fiction
to endow a machine with a personality and voice, but Kubrick wrings the
last drop out of this conflict because something has to happen during
the voyage. None of this man-versus-machine rivalry has anything to do
with the main story, but it goes on so long that by the time we return
to the main story, the ending feels appended. It states one of Clarke's
favorite themes -- that, compared with life elsewhere, man is only a
child; but this theme, presumably the point of the whole long picture,
is sloughed off.
2001 tells us, perhaps, what space travel will be like, but it does so
with almost none of the wit of DR. STRANGELOVE or LOLITA and with
little of the visual acuity of PATHS OF GLORY or SPARTACUS. What is
most shocking is that Kubrick's sense of narrative is so feeble. Take
the very opening (embarrassingly labeled "The Dawn of Man"). Great
Cinerama landscapes of desert are plunked down in front of us, each
shot held too long, with no sense of rhythm or relation. Then we see an
elaborate, extremely, slow charade enacted by two groups of ape-men,
fighting over a waterhole. Not interwoven with this but clumsily
inserted is the discovery of one of those black slabs by some of the
ape-men. Then one ape-man learns that he can use a bone as a weapon;
pulverizes an enemy, tosses the weapon triumphantly in the air . . .
and it dissolves into a spaceship 33 years from now. Already we are
painfully aware that this is not the Kubrick we knew. The sharp edge,
the selective intelligence, the personal mark of his best work seem
swamped in a Superproduction aimed at hardticket theaters. This
prologue is just a tedious basketful of mixed materials dumped in our
laps for future reference. What's worse, we don't need it. Nothing in
the rest of the film depends on it.
Without that heavy and homiletic prologue, we would at least open with
the best moments of the film -- real Kubrick. We are in space --
immense blue and ghastly lunar light -- and the first time we see it,
it's exciting to think that men are there. A spaceship is about to dock
in a spaceport that rotates as it orbits the earth. All these vast
motions in space are accompanied by THE BLUE DANUBE, loud and
stereophonic on the soundtrack. As the waltz continues, we go inside
the space-ship. It is like a superjet cabin, with a discreet electric
sign announcing Weightless Condition with the gentility of a seat belt
sign. To prove the condition, a balipoint pen floats in the air next to
a dozing passenger, a U.S. envoy. In comes a hostess wearing Pan Am
Grip Shoes to keep her from floating -- and also wearing that same
hostess smile that hasn't changed since 1968. When the ship docks and
we enter the spaceport, there is a Howard Johnson, a Hilton, and so on.
For a minute our hopes are up. Kubrick has created the future with
fantastic realism, we think, but he is not content with that, he is
going to do something with it.
Not so. Very quickly we see that the gadgets are there for themselves,
not for use in an artwork. We sense this as the envoy makes an utterly
inane phone call back to earth just to show off the mechanism. We sense
it further through the poor dialogue and acting, which make the story
only a trite setting for a series of exhibits from Expo '01. There is a
scene between the envoy and some Russians that would disgrace late-
night TV. There is a scene with the envoy and some U.S. officials in
secret conference that is even worse. I kept hoping that the director
of the War Room sequence in DR. STRANGELOVE was putting me on; but he
wasn't. He was so in love with his gadgets and special effects, so
impatient to get to them, that he seems to have cared very little about
what his actors said and did. There are only 43 minutes of dialogue in
this long film, which wouldn't matter in itself except that those 43
minutes are pretty thoroughly banal.
He contrives some startling effects. For instance, on the Jupiter trip,
one of the astronauts (Keir Dullea) returns to the ship from a small
auxiliary capsule used for making exterior repairs on the craft. He
doesn't have his helmet with him and has to blow himself in through an
airlock. (A scene suggested by another Clarke story, "Take A Deep
Breath.") Kubrick doesn't cut away: he blows Dullea right at the
camera. The detail work throughout is painstaking. For instance, we
frequently see the astronauts at their controls reading an instrument
panel that contains about a dozen small screens. On each of those
screens flows a series of equations, diagrams, and signals. I suppose
that each of those smaller screens needed a separate roll of film,
projected from behind. Multiply the number of small instrument-panel
screens by the number of scenes in which we see instrument panels, and
you get the number of small films of mathematical symbols that had to
be prepared. And that is only one incidental part of the mechanical
fireworks.
But all for what? To make a film that is so dull, it even dulls our
interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has
allowed it to become dull. He is so infatuated with technology -- of
film and of the future -- that it has numbed his formerly keen feeling
for attention-span. The first few moments that we watch an astronaut
jogging around the capsule for exercise -- really around the tubular
interior, up one side, across the top, and down the other side to the
floor -- it's amusing. An earlier Kubrick would have stopped while it
was still amusing. The same is true of an episode with the repair
capsule, which could easily have been condensed -- and which is
subsequently repeated without even much condensation of the first
episode. High marks for Kubrick the special-effects man; but where was
Kubrick the director?
His film has one special effect which certainly he did not intend. He
has clarified for me why I dislike the idea of space exploration. A few
weeks ago Louis J. Halle wrote in this journal that he favors space
exploration because
Life, as we know it within the terms of our Earthly prison,
makes no ultimate sense that we can discover; but I cannot,
myself, escape the conviction that, in terms of a larger
knowledge than is accessible to us today, it does make such
sense.
I disbelieve in this sophomoric definition of "sense," but anyway
Halle's argument disproves itself. Man's knowledge of his world has
been increasing, but life has, in Halle's terms, made less and less
sense. Why should further expansion of physical knowledge make life
more sensible? Still it is not on philosophic ground that I dislike
space exploration, nor even on the valid practical ground that the
money and the skills are more urgently needed on Earth. (I was
delighted to read recently that U.S. space appropriations are
diminishing and that there seems to be no further space program after
we land men on the moon, if we do, in a year or so.) Kubrick dramatizes
a more physical and personal objection for me.
Space, as he shows us, is thrillingly immense, but, as he also shows
us, men out there are imprisoned, have less space than on Earth. The
largest expanse in which men can look and live like men is his
spaceport, which is rather like spending many billions and many years
so that we can travel millions of miles to a celestial Kennedy Airport.
Everywhere outside the spaceport, men are constricted and dehumanized.
They cannot move without cumbersome suits and helmets. They have to
hibernate in glass coffins. The food they eat is processed into
sanitized swill. Admittedly, the interior of Kubrick's spaceship is not
greatly different from that of a jetliner, but at least planes go from
one human environment to another. No argument that I have read for the
existence of life elsewhere has maintained that other planets would be
suitable for men. Imagine zooming millions of miles -- all those
tiresome enclosed days, even weeks -- in order to live inside a space
suit.
Kubrick makes the paradox graphic. Space only seems large. For human
beings, it is confining. That is why, despite the size of the starry
firmament, the idea of space travel gives me claustrophobia.
(J.A., pp. 223-6)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) When people say that 2001 is a film on different "levels," what do
they mean?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[From THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, by John Allen]
Whenever the thunder of critical controversy rips through the air, one
thing is certain: Lightning has struck. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY is just such a bolt of brilliant, high-voltage cinema.
Like any sudden flash accompanied by a loud noise, the film is both
startling and illuminating -- if it has temporarily left viewers more
dazed and curious than enlightened, this is perhaps intentional. The
evocation of wonder and awe is perhaps the primary aim of the film.
Whether one wonders what the black metallic monoliths are or what the
surrealistic end of the film is supposed to mean or what the opening
prehistoric sequence signifies -- or simply what the film world is
coming to -- is temporarily beside the point. What matters is that the
imagination and intellect are jolted out of complacency by the
experience of seeing the film. Wonder, like laughter or tears, is a
legitimate emotional response.
Such a response, however, cannot be evoked by a work of art that is too
pat, too readily comprehended, too easily flattened by the onrush of
tradition or sheer intellect. Since science and technology themselves
have stunned our sense of wonder into numbness by the very habit of
providing new mysteries daily, it is not only fair but essential that
the arts (including film) take up arms against our indifference.
It must be remembered, however, that the mystery which surrounds 2001
is not the result of arbitrary obscurantism designed to confuse. It is
the mystery of self-containment that makes certain works of art (and
not a few human beings) fascinating and irritating in turn.
It is part of the genius of 2001 that it must be approached on several
levels at once. There are, in a sense, at least four films on the
screen at all times -- three of them available to all viewers and a
fourth one perhaps unique to each viewer. Ways of looking at the first
three and hints about the latter follow.
The first three are comparable to the wrapping paper, box, and gift
that mark some special occasion. What that occasion means depends on
the one receiving the gift, however. That is at once the most important
aspect of the experience and the least easily verbalized. If anything
can be said about it at all, it is necessary to start with the simpler
aspects.
Strangely enough, confusion sets in at the level of the wrapping paper
-- the outermost and least important of the four films that are
simultaneously given to the viewer.
On its most superficial level 2001 is a science-fiction film full of
gadgets and special effects -- a film about space travel in the near
future and man's encounter with a strange slab that seems to prove the
existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
It is on this same superficial level that one gets disturbed about the
lack of plot, dialogue, and character. It is as though wrapping a gift
in newspaper, like a fish, would have been better than using a paper of
bold new design and color.
It is on this level, too, that questions arise about the meaning of the
slab, the point of the film's beginning and ending, and the general
direction of cinema as it hurtles out of the 1960s into the 1970s.
We are in the habit of approaching film as though it were a book that
needed only to be opened and read. Most films succeed at this level.
Most of them must or there would not be such confusion over a film that
treats such a level of comprehension as a mere covering that must be
torn away.
If this film succeeds at this level, it is a tribute to Stanley
Kubrick's courage as producer and director that he so flagrantly sets
his film in opposition to tradition. But he assumes (quite rightly, one
suspects) he is dealing with a generation that has been brought up on
television as much as on the written word, a generation oriented to
visual images and the grammar of the visual more than to the slow
plodding of language.
For such viewers he has made a film that operates on a second level of
comprehension. It corresponds to the box inside the wrapping paper. It
is so beautifully wrought and so intricately carved and inlaid as to
defy description. If it has a name, it is called the art of
filmmaking. It has little or nothing to do with the design of model
spaceships, the gimmickry of showing weightlessness on the screen, or
cataloguing the potential inventions or conditions of the year 2001. It
is the use of these things to achieve a kinesthetic and psychological
effect on the viewer. It is also film as poetry, film as painting and
music, film as dance.
It is the result of using film for what it is: the motion picture.
Attention must be paid, quite consciously, to both the motion and the
picture-movement and the visual images. The resemblances between images
as to form, outline, and color must be seen and felt just as their
patterns of appearance and variation must be noted.
The movement of objects on the screen and especially the sense of
movement experienced by the viewer as the result of the camera's
mobility bring to the audience a sense of being in space. In some ways
2001 is not simply about space and time travel and the encounter with
the unknown: watching it is like such travel and to some extent like
such an encounter.
All these elements are so beyond the approach of words as to render
criticism of the film at this level almost impossible. For one thing,
2001 is so full of such touches of cinematic artistry and sleight of
hand as to require that a book, rather than an essay, be written to
catalogue and describe them. But the catalogue already exists: The film
is its own catalogue.
Hints can be given, however, through one example that strikes this
viewer as both brilliant and significant: the music that was selected
-- rather than written -- for the soundtrack. Specifically intriguing
is the use of Richard Strauss's opening measures from the tone poem
THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, which open the film.
On the first level of comprehension, it works well -- almost too well.
The grandiose swell of sound is almost a self-parody of grandiose-
sounding music.
Yet on this second level -- in which the fitness of the parts to the
whole on an aesthetic level is paramount -- it is magnificently
appropriate. It is, first of all, a bit of music known as the World-
riddle theme, introduced by an ascending line of three notes, C-G-C.
When it is first heard, at the opening of the curtain, the camera, too,
is rising, and three spheres appear in alignment: the Moon, the Earth,
and the sun. As the theme reaches its climax, the image of the sun has
risen above the curvature of the earth.
Virtually every element of the film -- from its sometimes ironical
indebtedness to Nietzsche, to the emphasis on the appearance of things
in threes (or three times), to the tension between straight lines and
curves -- can be traced outward from these three notes of music. In
some ways the best program guide one could read in preparing for the
images and ideas that flow across the screen during the film is the
prologue to Nietzsche's THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.
The best clue to their artistic organization and development is
contained in the number three -- mother-father-child, the eternal
triangle, two's company three's a crowd, the three primary colors, and
the three dimensionality of the universe we normally think of as
"real," perhaps even the Trinity and three as a magic number for
infinity.
2001, of course, is not pictures meant to accompany one's reading of
Nietzsche or one's hearing of Strauss. It is whole and complete in
itself with its own ends and its own means of organizing time and space
-- through light, movement, and imagery -- as a means of accomplishing
those ends. Synthesis, rather than eclectic derivation, is the basis of
its indebtedness to other cultural phenomena.
Once we begin to look at the film as a film in this way, the otherwise
obscure relationship between the continuity, flow, and duration of
images on the screen -- their reappearances and significance -- begins
to come clear. We begin to comprehend what kind of cinematic
thunderbolt has been hurled into our midst.
Out of this approach emerge some inklings about the third dimension of
the film -- its gift of a myth and a warning for contemporary man, a
myth about man in the 1960s.
Mr. Kubrick's tracing of mankind's development from prehistoric past to
post-fantastic future is the old theme of "apeman-angel" (or ape-man-
superman, to put it into Nietzsche's terms) translated somewhat
literally yet strikingly into cinema. The unifying prop that becomes a
terrifying protagonist is the machine -- the weapon, or tool, that is
the clever extension of man's arm, eye, or brain.
As Hitler was a false human version of the superman, so the HAL 9000
computer becomes an equally destructive mechanical version of the
superman. The reason for this destructiveness is that the machine
appears, in fact, altogether too human. It is presented as capable of
pride, envy, rivalry, fear, murder, and the false notion that a
scientific mission is more important than life. In short, it is insane,
and its insanity threatens to destroy life.
Its insanity, of course, is no greater than that of any fallible mortal
who assumes fallible mortals can create, out of their own cleverness,
an infallible machine.
As the myth ends, the human hero undergoes a kind of death and
transfiguration -- after a Last Supper accompanied by bread and wine.
His transformation is the result of his having been swept out of time
and space altogether into some contact with intelligent beings of pure
energy.
It is at this point that the film itself enters a kind of fourth
dimension (the three primary colors are finally abandoned for a palette
of greens), and further interpretation of the film becomes highly
subjective.
On a fourth level of comprehension, however, it is precisely this level
of subjective response -- the film having virtually left the screen and
entered into the experience of the viewer -- that matters most.
Even if one assumes that intelligent beings of nonterrestrial origin
are meant to be taken literally rather than allegorically in this film
(or anywhere in science fiction, for that matter) there is still a
basic problem:
If intelligent beings from elsewhere in time and space are needed to
effect the regeneration of man, who effected the change for them? Where
does the search for the ultimate cause of intelligence lead, inside or
outside this film, inside or outside time and space?
Inside the film, the search involves a plot twist that sweeps a man
outside time and space altogether into a fourth dimension. Between the
film and the filmgoer, it involves a brushing aside, through effective
cinematography, of traditional notions of filmic time and space -- the
establishment of a kinesthetic and emotional breakthrough into realms
of imagery and experience not normally found in film.
Ultimately for the filmgoer, however, the search involves turning
inward. If seeing the film once isn't enough, it may be because passive
viewing of the film won't do. It is thinking about the film,
approaching it intelligently, reaching toward it and beyond it that
counts.
If the black rectangular slab -- that calling card of the unknown and
that doorway to the future -- is like any signpost in one's present
experience, it may very well resemble 2001 itself.
Neither the slab nor the film is the ultimate mystery, of course. Both
are tokens that someone who cares has passed this way. One of the
tokens, at least, is already a part of human history in the 1960s.
There is no telling what will turn up by the time 2001 here, is there?
Is there?
(excerpted in J.A., pp. 229-34)
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Q) Who is Margaret Stackhouse?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Margaret Stackhouse wrote some critical commentary on 2001. After
reading her remarks, Stanley Kubrick made the following statement:
Margaret Stackhouse's speculations on the film are perhaps
the most intelligent that I've read anywhere, and I am, of
course, including all the reviews and the articles that
have appeared on the film and the many hundreds of letters
that I have received. What a first-rate intelligence!
The amazing thing is that Miss Stackhouse was a junior at North
Plainfield (N.J.) High School and 15 years old when she wrote her
reflections on 2001! In a statement made to Jerome Agel, she said that
she was "primarily interested in science and mathematics. However, I
don't wish to limit myself when there are so many other fascinating
fields to explore: psychology, art, music, philosophy, history,
anthropology, political science, literature, education, languages, etc.
I may decide to go into nuclear physics or abstract (pure) math, or I
may make a study of the mind. I would like to try to find the
relationships, if any, in the physical, emotional, and spiritual levels
of the mind. (For example, are there any biochemical bases for the
'soul'?) My major concern at this stage is to find a challenge -- only
then can I discover my intellectual, social, and spiritual identity.
The most outstanding people I have ever known have a basic self-
assurance that has enabled them to live life fully and zestfully. This
type of living is my goal."
Miss Stackhouse's reflections on 2001 were forwarded to Kubrick by
David Alpert, of the science department, North Plainfield High School.
(J.A., p. 201)
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Q) So what did Ms. Stackhouse have to say?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Here are are the speculations of Ms. Stackhouse.]
1. The monolith - source of infinite knowledge and intelligence
A. Perfection represented in its shape; its color -- black -- could
symbolize:
1. Evil and death, which result from man's misuse of knowledge;
2. The incomprehensible -- man, with his limited senses, cannot
comprehend the absence (perfect black) of color or light.
B. Its first appearance.
1. Movie implies that life has reached the stage when it is ready
for inspiration, a divine gift, perhaps. [It is interesting that the
apes are expectant, waiting for something.]
2. Maybe apes become men when this inspiration is given. [Question:
Is man really a separate entity, with something (soul?) that no other
form of life possesses, or is the difference merely in quantity (rather
than quality) of intelligence? Is the evolution gradual and continuous
or in defined levels? Does the difference in quantity become in fact
this difference in quality?]
3. Inspiration is given:
a. When men (apes) need it; or,
b. When they seek it; or,
c. At the whim of the force giving the gift; or,
d. In various combinations of these three.
4. The purpose of the gift may be to allow man to create life-
sustaining forces. [In this "cycle," he creates only death; interesting
-- death from death (bones).]
5. Its disappearance (after weapon is made) -- Reasons:
a. It is taken away in punishment for misuse of knowledge; or,
b. It is no longer sought -- apes (men) consider themselves masters
now and try to continue on their own energies after the initial
impulse. Maybe the monolith is always present, but is invisible to
those who don't wish to see it or to whom it does not wish to be
visible; or,
c. It is taken away by the force that gave it, to prevent mortal
understanding of everything.
C. Its second appearance (on Moon).
1. Reasons for appearance:
a. Man is subconsciously seeking it again; or,
b. It is needed to remind him of his insignificance; or,
c. It is given as a new opportunity to create a meaningful
existence for humanity.
2. Men on Moon touch monolith in the same way that the apes did --
this indicates no basic change in man's nature. Then, after touching
it, they have the audacity to try to take photo -- still conceited,
still lacking in understanding of the gift.
3. From Moon, there is a strong magnetic field directed toward
Jupiter (this is where man will go next). This indicates that man will
still fail and will need monolith again when he reaches the next stage
of exploration. Monolith is always beyond human scope -- man is still
reaching at death.
4. It is ironic that men on Moon believe that the monolith was made
by a more advanced civilization. This to them is the ultimate -- they
can't comprehend that anything could be above the mortal level.
D. The monolith and infinity.
1. After HAL is made, man shows that once again he has refused,
through ignorance and conceit, to take advantage of the chance to
obtain superhuman intelligence. Maybe the system is slowing down and it
is impossible for man to progress any further on his own energies.
2. Now he is given another chance -- the monolith shows him
infinity, perfect knowledge, and the beginning of the universe, but he
can't comprehend it. Reasons for his being shown all this:
a. It may be truly another chance for man; or,
b. It may already be determined that he must die [maybe all people
are shown perfect knowledge at death]; or,
c. Maybe perfect knowledge (represented by monolith) is always
present, but our understanding of it will always be imperfect.
II. HAL
A. He is evil, but only because he reflects human nature.
B. His uneasiness about the mission implies that even the highest
development of human intelligence is imperfect in ability to
understand.
C. Man, trying to progress independently of divine aid, attempts,
either consciously or unconsciously, to create life, in the form of
HAL. This is not allowed. Man is reaching, or is being forced to reach,
a limit in his ability to progress further.
D. Reasons for HAL's failure:
1. Eternal human error once again in evidence; or,
2. This may be a divine punishment; or,
3. God will not allow man to become subordinate to his own foolish
creations.
E. The fact that man can overcome HAL's evil is optimistic; however, to
do this he must destroy HAL, who is nearly a living being -- again, the
theme of death, futility. [This and triviality are shown in HAL's
"song."]
III. The room (at end) death.
A. It is elegant, maybe to show man's cultural achievements, but it is
sterile and silent -- nothing has meaning without the spirit of the
monolith.
This is man's universe, that with which he is supposedly familiar, but
even this is hostile to him.
B. Room could represent:
1. All that man can comprehend (finite) or infinity. Even in this
limited scope, he is confused; or,
2. Man's cultural history, as men remember their past before they
die; or,
3. The trivia for which he relinquished the monolith (then at death
he realizes his need for it); or,
4. A reminder of man's failure to draw on past -- it could contain
more wisdom than the present. [Monkeys responded to the monolith better
than modern man -- race is slowly degenerating.]
C. In this room, man must die, because:
1. He has reached his limit; or,
2. He has failed too much; or,
3. He has been shown infinity.
D. Question: Is his death (following degeneration) inevitable after
being shown all knowledge, or is this experience still another chance
to improve? Then, when man returns to trivia, perhaps this is the
breaking point, the end of his opportunities.
E. Maybe he knows what is happening to him but is powerless to change
it. The changes in the man may be a vision shown to him as punishment,
or they may merely represent the various stages in the life of one man
or of all men.
IV. The themes
A. Animalism and human failure
1. Throughout picture, there is constant eating, made to appear
revolting; also, exercising, wrestling.
2. At end, goblet is broken. This may imply that man's failures will
continue forever.
3. Animal nature and conceit remain the same throughout. Will there
never be any true progress? The monolith is always shown with sunrise
and crescent. When first seen, this is a sign of hope, of a beginning;
but the sun is never any higher except when man is shown infinity. This
last fact may symbolize hope that, despite all his past failures, man
will ultimately rise above animalism; or it may merely represent the
perfect knowledge he cannot comprehend.
4. There is a delicate balance between the animal and divine nature
in man. We will never be permitted to go beyond a certain point (as
individuals and as a race).
B. Futility
1. It is shown:
a. In the rescue and subsequent release of Frank (after the
struggle to catch him);
b. In the meaningless talk -- "People talking without speaking."
2. Is all that we do in vain? Each person certainly dies without
attaining all understanding. Will our race (history) also terminate and
begin again, continually, with no progress ever made?
C. Whether the movie is terribly pessimistic or optimistic depends on
the answer to the question, "Does the man at the end represent just our
'cycle' or all 'cycles' for eternity?"
1. Pessimistic: Man may never become more "divine" -- all chances
for rebirth may be merely a mockery. Irony -- no matter how much man
ruins his life, chances for improvement are always given. Since he will
probably continue ruining his life for eternity, this may be the cruel
tantalizing by some capricious god.
2. Optimistic: The preceding is impossible to believe if one assumes
that there is some life-giving, life-sustaining force in the universe
that is the source of absolute good. With this belief, one can hope
that someday man will be able to use the divine inspiration offered him
to propagate life-sustaining forces. Probably he will never be able to
understand more, but he will use his understanding better. The sunrise,
fetus, etc., seem to indicate this hope. Also, it seems that, despite
human stupidity, new opportunities to become sublime are always given.
Someday, perhaps, man will learn that he cannot truly "live" unless he
accepts the gift, in the form of the monolith, that demands human
subjugation to a divine force. Then he will not be required to create,
and to experience, only death.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) Were there any other comments by fans?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Yes, many. Here are three. This first is from Frederic Lyman]:
* * * *
Few films ask us to think. Since 2001 did, I felt obliged to let you
know that I tried to.
I am told that C.G. Jung found dreams to develop in four acts:
- Introduction
- The plot thickens
- Crisis
- Resolution
2001 is a story structured like a dream.
The four acts are announced not by raising and lowering of a curtain
but by the appearance four times of knowledge, embodied as a Duranodic
slab, like the apple tree of Genesis a phallic symbol, the phallus
being the instrument of primary creation, as is knowledge that of
intellectual creation:
INTRODUCTION - the first appearance of knowledge and the first result;
the first tool, a weapon, followed by the entire history of man most
beautifully pictured as that weapon (tool) rising to the grandeur of a
spaceship.
THE PLOT THICKENS - an overeducated doctor is congratulated on a
completely innocuous speech, and he, in turn, congratulates his
colleagues on a discovery which took no more initiative than a dog
discovering a bone. Knowledge is turned against them. It deafens them.
It overwhelms them. So, to discover its origins, they send a ship,
captained by a man of humility, calm under pressure, an artist; in
short, a hero. Knowledge on board in the form of a computer tries to
thwart him. We are not told until the computer is expurgated that it
alone knew the purpose of the mission.
CRISIS - the hero (der Held) arrives at the point of discovery. As we
see from the expression on his face, it is a more terrifying experience
than his bout with the computer, for, as we discover in the final...
RESOLUTION - the discovery is not of some strange new world but of
himself; the wisdom of age is his rebirth.
But whose dream is it? Yours, of course, but I think you asked yourself
if you were so much different from the rest of us and you decided that
you were not and so you made a film.
Frederic P. Lyman
Malibu, California
Mr. Kubrick responded:
Thank you for your fascinating note. You are very
perceptive, indeed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Next, a comment from Truman Brewster]:
Stanley Kubrick is telling us that man's intelligence is a toolmaking
intelligence, and that tools take precedence over man. (Even language,
which has been considered our highest achievement, is a tool. It is not
accidental that there are only forty-three minutes of non-dialogue in
this three-hour movie. As we become more and more involved with
electronic technology and gadgetry, there will be less and less
involvement with language, at least language as we know it.) As to the
question of what we are doing with this tool-making intelligence, it
would seem Kubrick is telling us we are getting nowhere fast. (I
happened to see this movie in Manhattan Island, which is an old, dirty,
broken-down tool where the poor people, who allow it, go in circles and
dehumanize themselves.)
Kubrick has given us a big, expensive, spectacular joke, and also
something of a tragedy, in which man's intelligence, potentially great,
is up to nothing.
Kubrick's dissolve from the tool-bone thrown in the sky to a space
station in 2001 is not beside the point. Thousands of years of human
history were skipped, as if man has not been up to anything except
finally making these giant space tools. (IBM will also do away with
human history, and humanity may be dismissed in favor of junk.) Not
only history, but what happened to language? There is none in the
movie. Are we being told language is not important? Perhaps it is not.
Most people I know use it only for rudimentary forms of communication,
such as "Where is the bathroom?" "I love you," but my cat is just as
effective in communicating in spite of his speechlessness. It is said
we use language to educate and carry on traditions, but much education
is only information, and our traditions are invariably on collision
courses. We get propaganda and polemics rather than reasoning. A verbal
man such as Stanley Kauffmann has programmed himself to be a reviewer,
and, though he has a good movie to verbalize about, he only cranks out
a non-review in which he is hung upon words such as amusing and dull.
Except for a few poets who have thrilled us, a few novelists and
essayists who may have told us something about our conditions, and a
handful of philosophers who have looked into the errors of our forms of
knowledge, and versifiers who write the likes of "Daisy, Daisy" to
please us, we really have not put language to much use.
Kubrick's fine 2001 seems to be telling us all this. At the end of it,
after the mission (our mission) has failed utterly, we see a large,
white fetus returning to view the Earth, its oversized eyes almost
angelic. How glad we are to be back -- and as a little child. Could it
be the best thing we have going for us is our infant intelligence,
which wonders at the sights, sounds, and touch of the world? We are as
children. For us, there may be nothing else.
Truman Brewster
Los Angeles
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Finally, a letter from Stephen Grosscup]:
Ten years ago -- when I was sixteen and just beginning to discover the
rather splendid world of "serious" music -- a friend of mine came
dashing into my house with a record album and demanded that I " . . .
listen to this!" Patiently, but firmly, I explained to my friend that I
was going out soon and could not possibly listen to the entire album.
Too late. My friend had placed his record on my turntable and was
adjusting the volume on my amplifier. I heard the low, ominous rumbling
-- the sudden, intensely dramatic pronouncement of a horn -- the utter
exaltation that is the opening of Richard Strauss' THUS SPAKE
ZARATHUSTRA.
Ten days ago I was with that same friend and we were listening to that
same opening -- but this time it was music with sight added -- a vision
as brilliant as the music -- and twice as elative.
I must confess to a feeling of something akin to intimidation -- to
think that these words might be read by the man responsible for 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY. I have been an avid and intelligent devotee of motion
pictures for almost twenty years -- I started early -- and I must admit
that after leaving the theater showing 2001 I had the definite
impression that for the first time in my life I had truly seen a
"motion picture." I think that perhaps a hundred years from now people
will look back upon those of us who were able to see 2001 with the same
awe and envy that I experience when I think of the people who were able
to see the first performance of Wagner's RING or Mahler's THIRD
SYMPHONY.
In short -- I thought 2001 was magnificent. I thought that the
implications of 2001 were monumental.
I found 2001 to be your most optimistic film to date. With the
exception of LOLITA, I have enjoyed all of your previous films
immensely. It would be difficult to pick my favorite among THE KILLING,
PATHS OF GLORY, and SPARTACUS. DR. STRANGELOVE was very depressing --
almost as depressing as 2001 was elative. In pondering your films, I
find that SPARTACUS was the least stylistic. In fact, in light of 2001,
SPARTACUS becomes somewhat of an enigma, SPARTACUS seems an almost
average picture from a man who makes above-average films. However, its
"averageness" did not prevent me from seeing it six times. I am
speaking of style, because 2001 was so completely stylistic -- that is
to say, it is the only motion picture ever made that so utterly bears
the mark of a single man -- of a single mind. Every other motion
picture can lead to the speculations -- "I wonder what it would have
been like if . . . David Lean . . . or William Wyler . . . or . . .
Robert Wise had directed it?" That sort of speculation is impossible --
and unthinkable -- with 2001. It is a film of incredible and
irrevocable splendor. Now, on to the implications. For one thing, 2001
has -- as no other film ever has -- elevated the artistic potentiality
of motion pictures to a hitherto undreamed-of level. In a sense, you
have not only said "It can be done!" . . . you have "done it!" 2001
does not mark the growth of the art of the cinema; it is the birth of
the cinema. People can honestly say that they have never seen anything
like it -- simply because there never has been anything like 2001. Ah,
but you must know that much better than I!
The major implication inherent in 2001 takes place within the first
ninety (?) seconds. Had I not already thought of this implication, I
would quite probably now be confined in a rest home suffering from an
"elation-caused insanity." About 18 months ago I had an idea. I was
thinking about the potentiality of home videotape recorders. It seemed
to me that when the day came when HVTRs were available to the general
public that there would be a lucrative market for prerecorded
videotapes, in much the same way that records and prerecorded
stereophonic tapes constitute a lucrative market today. I then thought
of the possibilities for the content of these prerecorded VTs. Starting
with rock-and-roll, I worked my way up to absolute music. "What if," I
thought, "someone wanted to 'see' Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?" Would
you show them an orchestra and chorus? Or what? Then I thought: "What
if someone 'filmed music'?" Then I thought: "What if I filmed music?"
To make a long story shorter, I then proceeded to read a number of
books on photography, buy a small, almost ludicrous super-8mm camera,
and put my abstract idea into concrete form. I went out and "filmed"
the third movement of Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony. It worked! It
worked beautifully. I was fully aware that I was a rank amateur using a
primitive camera that did not even have reflex viewing, and yet upon
viewing the final results -- about five hours' cutting time was
required on my little Sears, Roebuck & Co. editor -- I knew beyond any
doubt that it worked. Until seeing 2001 I had always thought of filming
music in terms of objects existing "naturally" in reality. But it is
doubtful that ever in my own lifetime will I be able to "shoot" a
natural scene involving three planets. I knew instantly that you had
too much reverence for Richard Strauss to tamper with the score which
meant that you had to put the film to the music -- and you did -- three
times!
I have since done a great deal of thinking -- and preparing -- about
"filmed" music. I have gone so far as to envision a day when there will
exist a new kind of artist who is both composer and photographer and
who will bring about a new form of art. But that day, I think, is a
long way off, but maybe by the year 2001 . . .
I am currently directing my thinking and my mental and financial
resources toward the production of several complete symphonies. If I
succeed, you will no doubt hear of -- or from -- me. I would like to
succeed if for no other reason than to pay you back for 2001 -- to
cause you as much elation with my creativeness as you have caused me
with yours.
Finally, I would like to comment on some of the aspects of 2001. My
favorite scene is the discovering of the "tool" by the simian. It is
the most heroic sequence I have ever encountered. Just the scene alone
would have been brilliant -- but to show the scene with the music of
Strauss was the proverbial "frosting" on the cinematic cake. Also, the
changing of the "tool" into a spaceship was brilliant. I was
particularly taken with the entire opening sequence -- from the glowing
eyes of the tiger (?) to that haunting night sequence when the ape-men
crowd together for warmth and for the atavistic sense of security such
bodily contact must have represented. However, the most devastating
part of that scene was the close-up of the eyes -- those human,
frightened eyes realizing even then that their security was a
collective illusion and that the night was fraught with individual
danger.
I found the obelisk -- slab, or whatever -- to be a masterstroke of a
leitmotif -- especially with Ligeti's voices. And the shots of the
obelisk and the sun were hauntingly powerful. The space sequences were,
of course, exquisite. After the show, some friends and I debated the
"why" of your use of the Strauss waltz. I advanced the theory that
several centuries ago three-quarter time was referred to as "perfect
time," and that you thought this best described the motion of the
universe and man-made objects attempting to imitate and/or conquer that
universe. Your incredible sense of humor was particularly noticeable a
number of times, but especially in two scenes. In the opening, when one
of the simians looks full-face at the camera and growls, and in HAL's
rather laconic comment, "I know I've made a number of poor decisions
recently . . ." Too much!
At the end of the motion picture, when your name appeared on the
screen, I broke into wild applause. The rest of the audience finally
caught on, but I must say I was rather disappointed in them. Did they
think the film just came into existence? I hope by my applause I made
them aware that for the last three hours they had been watching the
work of a brilliant man possessing a brilliant mind. I am led to
believe that perhaps a number of people don't deserve to see 2001. But
that is a moral issue I shan't go into at this time.
In conclusion, Mr. Kubrick, I thank you for reading my letter and --
for ever and ever -- I thank you for making 2001. I believe that art is
a psychological necessity for man -- a provider of emotional fuel and
mental food. And 2001 has appeared at a time when most artists are
poisoning their audiences with anti-art and anti-heroes.
I would not be at all afraid to state that with 2001 you may have quite
possibly saved any number of spiritual and physical lives. For it is
within the power of a film such as yours to give people a reason to go
on living -- to give them the courage to go on living. For 2001 implies
much more than just an artistic revelation. On a philosophical level,
it implies that if man is capable of this, he is capable of anything --
anything rational and heroic and glorious and good. Think of how many
men and women might very possibly thrust off the shackles of the
monotonous stagnation of their day-to-day existence -- how many might
strive to reach goals they thought impossible before -- how many might
find elation and pleasure hitherto denied them by their own lack of
courage. How can man now be content to consider the trivial and
mundane, when you have shown them a world full of stars, a world beyond
the infinite?
Stephen Grosscup
Santa Monica, California
Mr. Kubrick responded:
Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What did Penelope Gilliatt have to say about 2001?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[Here is one of Penelope Gilliatt's best-written reviews, which
appeared in THE NEW YORKER, titled "After Man".]
I THINK Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is some sort of great
film, and an unforgettable endeavor. Technically and imaginatively,
what he put into it is staggering: five years of his life; his novel
and screenplay, with Arthur C. Clarke; his production, his direction,
his special effects; his humor and stamina and particular disquiet. The
film is not only hideously funny -- like DR. STRANGELOVE -- about human
speech and response at a point where they have begun to seem
computerized, and where more and more people sound like recordings left
on while the soul is out. It is also a uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi,
made by a man who truly possesses the drives of both science and
fiction.
Kubrick's tale of quest in the year 2001, which eventually takes us to
the Moon and Jupiter, begins on prehistoric Earth. Tapirs snuffle over
the Valhalla landscape, and a leopard with broken-glass eyes guards the
carcass of a zebra in the moonlight. Crowds of apes, scratching and
ganging up, are disturbingly represented not by real animals, like the
others, but by actors in costume. They are on the brink of evolving
into men, and the overlap is horrible. Their stalking movements are
already exactly ours: an old tramp's, drunk, at the end of his tether
and fighting mad. Brute fear has been refined into the infinitely more
painful human capacity for dread. The creatures are so nearly human
that they have religious impulses. A slab that they suddenly come upon
sends them into panicked reverence as they touch it, and the film emits
a colossal sacred din of chanting. The shock of faith boots them
forward a few thousand years, and one of the apes, squatting in front
of a bed of bones, picks up his first weapon. In slow motion, the hairy
arm swings up into an empty frame and then down again, and the smashed
bones bounce into the air. What makes him do it? Curiosity? What makes
people destroy anything, or throw away the known, or set off in
spaceships? To see what Nothing feels like, driven by some bedrock
instinct that it is time for something else? The last bone thrown in
the air is matched, in the next cut, to a spaceship at the same angle.
It is now 2001. The race has survived thirty-three years more without
extinction, though not with any growth of spirit. There are no Negroes
in this vision of America's space program; conversation with Russian
scientists is brittle with mannerly terror, and the Chinese can still
be dealt with only by pretending they're not there. But technological
man has advanced no end. A space way station shaped like a Ferris wheel
and housing a hotel called the Orbiter Hilton hangs off the pocked old
cheek of Earth. The soundtrack, bless its sour heart, meanwhile thumps
out THE BLUE DANUBE, to confer a little of the courtliness of bygone
years on space. The civilization that Kubrick sees coming has the
brains of a nuclear physicist and the sensibility of an airline hostess
smiling through an oxygen-mask demonstration.
Kubrick is a clever man. The grim joke is that life in 2001 is only
faintly more gruesome in its details of sophisticated affluence than it
is now. When we first meet William Sylvester as a space scientist, for
instance, he is in transit to the Moon, via the Orbiter Hilton, to
investigate another of the mysterious slabs. The heroic man of
intellect is given a nice meal on the way -- a row of spacecraft foods
to suck through straws out of little plastic cartons, each decorated
with a picture of sweet corn, or whatever, to tell him that sweet corn
is what he is sucking. He is really going through very much the same
ersatz form of the experience of being well looked after as the
foreigner who arrives at an airport now with a couple of babies, reads
in five or six languages on luggage carts that he is welcome, and then
finds that he has to manage his luggage and the babies without actual
help from a porter. The scientist of 2001 is only more inured. He takes
the inanities of space personnel on the chin. "Did you have a pleasant
flight?" Smile, smile. Another smile, possibly pre-filmed, from a girl
on a television monitor handling voice-print identification at
Immigration. The Orbiter Hilton is decorated in fresh plumbing-white,
with magenta armchairs shaped like pelvic bones scattered through it.
Artificial gravity is provided by centrifugal force; inside the
rotating Ferris wheel people have weight. The architecture gives the
white floor of the Orbiter Hilton's conversation area quite a
gradient, but no one lets slip a sign of humor about the slant. The
citizens of 2001 have forgotten how to joke and resist, just as they
have forgotten how to chat, speculate, grow intimate, or interest one
another. But otherwise everything is splendid. They lack the mind for
acknowledging that they have managed to diminish outer space into the
ultimate in humdrum, or for dealing with the fact that they are spent
and insufficient, like the apes.
The film is hypnotically entertaining, and it is funny without once
being gaggy, but it is also rather harrowing. It is as eloquent about
what is missing from the people of 2001 as about what is there. The
characters seem isolated almost beyond endurance. Even in the most
absurd scenes, there is often a fugitive melancholy -- as astronauts
solemnly watch themselves on homey B.B.C. interviews seen millions of
miles from Earth, for instance, or as they burn their fingers on their
space meals, prepared with the utmost scientific care but a shade too
hot to touch, or as they plod around a centrifuge to get some
exercise, shadowboxing alone past white coffins where the rest of the
Crew hibernates in deep freeze. Separation from other people is total
and unmentioned. Kubrick has no characters in the film who are sexually
related, nor any close friends. Communication is stuffy and guarded,
made at the level of men together on committees or of someone being
interviewed. The space scientist telephones his daughter by
television for her birthday, but he has nothing to say, and his wife is
out; an astronaut on the nine month mission to Jupiter gets a
prerecorded TV birthday message from his parents. That's the sum of
intimacy. No enjoyment -- only the mechanical celebration of the
anniversaries of days when the race perpetuated itself. Again, another
astronaut, played by Keir Dullea, takes a considerable risk to try to
save a fellow-spaceman, but you feel it hasn't anything to do with
affection or with courage. He has simply been trained to save an
expensive colleague by a society that has slaughtered instinct.
Fortitude is a matter of programming, and companionship seems lost.
There remains only longing, and this is buried under banality, for
English has finally been booted to death. Even informally, people say
"Will that suffice?" for "Will that do?" The computer on the Jupiter
spaceship -- a chatty, fussy genius called HAL, which has nice manners
and a rather querulous need for reassurance about being wanted -- talks
more like a human being than any human being does in the picture. HAL
runs the craft, watches over the rotating quota of men in deep freeze,
and plays chess. He gives a lot of thought to how he strikes others,
and sometimes carries on about himself like a mother fussing on the
telephone to keep a bored grown child hanging on. At a low ebb and
growing paranoid, he tells a hysterical lie about a faulty piece of
equipment to recover the crew's respect, but a less emotional twin
computer on Earth coolly picks him up on the judgment and degradingly
defines it as a mistake. HAL, his mimic humanness perfected, detests
the witnesses of his humiliation and restores his ego by vengeance. He
manages to kill all the astronauts but Keir Dullea, including the
hibernating crew members, who die in the most chillingly modern death
scene imaginable: warning lights simply signal "Computer Malfunction,"
and sets off electrophysiological needles above the sleepers run amok
on the graphs and then record the straight lines of extinction. The
survivor of HAL's marauding self-justification, alone on the craft, has
to battle his way into the computer's red-flashing brain, which is the
size of your living room, to unscrew the high cerebral functions. HAL's
sophisticated voice gradually slows and he loses his grip. All he can
remember in the end is how to sing "Daisy" -- which he was taught at
the start of his training long ago -- grinding down like an old
phonograph. It is an upsetting image of human decay from command into
senility. Kubrick makes it seem a lot worse than a berserk computer
being controlled with a screwdriver.
The startling metaphysics of the picture are symbolized in the slabs.
It is curious that we should all still be so subconsciously trained in
apparently distant imagery. Even to atheists, the slabs wouldn't look
simply like girders. They immediately have to do with Mosaic tablets or
druidical stones. Four million years ago, says the story, an
extraterrestrial intelligence existed. The slabs are its manifest
sentinels. The one we first saw on prehistoric Earth is like the one
discovered in 2001 on the Moon. The lunar finding sends out an upper-
harmonic shriek to Jupiter and puts the scientists on the trail of the
forces of creation. The surviving astronaut goes on alone and Jupiter's
influence pulls him into a world where time and space are relative in
ways beyond Einstein. Physically almost pulped, seeing visions of the
planet's surface that are like chloroform nightmares and that sometimes
turn into closeups of his own agonized eyeball and eardrum, he then
suddenly lands, and he is in a tranquilly furnished repro Louis XVI
room. The shot of it through the window of his space pod is one of the
most heavily charged things in the whole picture, though its effect and
its logic are hard to explain.
In the strange, fake room, which is movingly conventional, as if the
most that the ill man's imagination can manage in conceiving a better
world beyond the infinite is to recollect something he has once been
taught to see as beautiful in a grand decorating magazine, time jumps
and things disappear. The barely surviving astronaut sees an old
grandee from the back, dining on the one decent meal in the film; and
when the man turns around it is the astronaut himself in old age. The
noise of the chair moving on the white marble in the silence is typical
of ihe brilliantly selective soundtrack. The old man drops his
wineglass, and then sees himself bald and dying on the bed, twenty or
thirty years older still, with his hand up to another of the slabs,
which has appeared in the room and stands more clearly than ever for
the forces of change. Destruction and creation coexist in them. They
are like Siva. The last shot of the man is totally transcendental, but
in spite of my resistance to mysticism I found it stirring. It shows an
X-raylike image of the dead man's skull re-created as a baby, and
approaching Earth. His eyes are enormous. He looks like a mutant.
Perhaps he is the first of the needed new species.
It might seem a risky notion to drive sci-fi into magic. But, as with
STRANGELOVE, Kubrick has gone too far and made it the poetically just
place to go. He and his collaborator have found a powerful idea to
impel space conquerors whom puny times have robbed of much curiosity.
The hunt for the remnant of a civilization that has been signaling the
existence of its intelligence to the future for four million years,
tirelessly stating the fact that it occurred, turns the shots of
emptied, comic, ludicrously dehumanized men into something more
poignant. There is a hidden parallel to the shot of the ape's arm
swinging up into the empty frame with its first weapon, enthralled by
the liberation of something new to do; I keep remembering the shot of
the space scientist asleep in a craft with the "Weightless Conditions"
sign turned on, his body fixed down by his safety belt while one arm
floats free in the air.
(J.A., pp. 209-13)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What about the Harvard Crimson review?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
[This review of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Tim Hunter (with Stephen
Kaplan and Peter Jasziis) is said to be the longest film review ever
published in THE HARVARD CRIMSON prior to 1968].
As a film about progress -- physical, social, and technological --
Stanley Kubrick's huge and provocative 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY remains
essentially linear until its extraordinary ending. In the final
transfiguration, director Kubrick and co-author Arthur Clarke
(CHILDHOOD'S END) suggest that evolutionary progress may in fact be
cyclical, perhaps in the shape of a helix formation. Man progresses to
a certain point in evolution, then begins again from scratch on a
higher level. Much of 2001's conceptual originality derives from its
being both anti-Christian and antievolutionary in its theme of man's
progress controlled by an ambiguous extraterrestrial force, possibly
both capricious and destructive.
If the above seems a roundabout way to open a discussion of an eleven-
million-dollar Cinerama spectacular, it can only be said that Kubrick's
film is as personal as it is expensive, and as ambitious an attempt at
metaphysical philosophy as it is at creating a superb science-fiction
genre film. Consequently, 2001 is probable commercial poison. A sure-
fire audience baffler guaranteed to empty any theater of ten percent of
its audience, 2001 is even now being reedited by Kubrick to shorten the
165 minute length by 15-odd minutes. 2001, as it is being shown in
Boston now, is in a transitional stage, the theater currently
exhibiting a splice-ridden rough-cut while awaiting new prints from the
M-G-M labs. Although some sequences are gone, most of the cutting
consists of shortening lengthy shots that dwelled on slow and difficult
operation of space-age machinery. Kubrick probably regrets his current
job of attempting to satisfy future audiences: the trimming of two
sequences involving the mechanics of entering and controlling "space
pods," one-man spaceships launched from the larger craft, may emphasize
plot action but only at the expense of the eerie and important
continuity of technology that dominates most of the film. 2001 is,
among other things, a slow-paced intricate stab at creating an
aesthetic from natural and material things we have never seen before:
the film's opening, "The Dawn of Man," takes place four million years
ago (with a cast composed solely of australopithecines, tapirs, and a
prehistoric leopard), and a quick cut takes us past the history of man
into the future.
Kubrick's dilemma in terms of satisfying an audience is that his best
work in 2001 is plotless slow-paced material, an always successful
creation of often ritualistic behavior of apes, men, and machines with
whom we are totally unfamiliar. In the longer version, the opening of
Astronaut Poole's (Gary Lockwood) pod scene is shot identically to the
preceding pod scene with Astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea), stressing
standardized operational method by duplicating camera setups. This
laborious preparation may appear initially repetitive until Poole's
computer-controlled pod turns on him and murders him in space, thus
justifying the prior duplication by undercutting it with a terrifyingly
different conclusion. Throughout 2001, Kubrick suggests a constantly
shifting balance between man and his tools, a dimension that largely
vanishes from this particular scene in cutting the first half and
making the murder more abrupt dramatically than any other single action
in the film.
Even compromised in order to placate audiences, Kubrick's handling of
the visual relationship between time and space is more than impressive.
He has discovered that slow movement (of spacecraft, for example) is as
impressive on a Cinerama screen as fast movement (the famous Cinerama
roller-coaster approach), also that properly timed sequences of slow
movement actually appear more real -- sometimes even faster -- than
equally long long sequences of fast motion shots. No film in history
achieves the degree of three-dimensional depth maintained consistently
in 2001 (and climaxed rhapsodically in a shot of a pulsating stellar
galaxy); Kubrick frequently focuses our attention to one side of the
wide screen, then introduces an element from the opposite corner,
forcing a reorientation which heightens our sense of personal
observation of spontaneous reality.
His triumph, both in terms of film technique and directorial approach,
is in the audience's almost immediate acceptance of special effects as
reality: after we have seen a stewardess walk up a wall and across the
ceiling early in the film, we no longer question similar amazements and
accept Kubrick's new world without question. The credibility of the
special effects established, we can suspend disbelief, to use a
justifiable cliche, and revel in the beauty and imagination of
Kubrick/Clarke's space. And turn to the challenging substance of the
excellent screenplay.
2001 begins with a shot of an eclipse condition: the Earth, moon, and
sun in orbital conjunction, shown on a single vertical plane in center
screen. The image is central and becomes one of three prerequisites for
each major progression made in the film.
The initial act of progress is evolutionary. A series of brief scenes
establishes the life cycle of the australopithecine before its division
into what became both ape and man -- they eat grass, are victimized by
carnivores, huddle together defensively. One morning they awake to find
in their midst a tall, thin, black rectangular monolith, its base
embedded in the ground, towering monumentally above them, plainly not a
natural formation. They touch it, and we note at that moment that the
moon and sun are in orbital conjunction.
In the following scene, an australopithecine discovers what we will
call the tool, a bone from a skeleton which, when used as an extension
of the arm, adds considerably to the creature's strength. The discovery
is executed in brilliant slow-motion montage of the pre-ape destroying
the skeleton with the bone, establishing Kubrick and Clarke's
subjective anthropological notion that the discovery of the tool was
identical to that of the weapon. The "dawn of man," then, is
represented by a coupling of progress and destruction; a theme of
murder runs through 2001 simultaneously with that of progress.
Ultimately, Kubrick shows an ambiguous spiritual growth through
physical death.
The transition from prehistory to future becomes a simple cut from the
bone descending in the air to a rocket preparing to land at a space
station midway between Earth and Moon. A classic example of Bazin's
"associative montage," the cut proves an effective, if simplistic,
method of bypassing history and setting up the link between bone and
rocket as the spectral tools of man, one primitive and one incredibly
sophisticated.
On the Moon, American scientists discover an identical black monolith,
apparently buried over four million years before, completely inert save
for the constant emission of a powerful radio signal directed toward
Jupiter. The scientists examine it (touching it tentatively as the apes
did) at a moment when the Earth and sun are in conjunctive orbit. They
conclude that some form of life on Jupiter may have placed the monolith
there and, fourteen months later, an expedition is sent to Jupiter to
investigate.
Two major progressions have been made: an evolutionary progression in
the discovery of the tool, and a technological progression inherent in
the trip to Jupiter. The discovery of the monolith has preceded each
advance, and with it the conjunction of the sun and moons of a given
planet, as well as the presence of ape or human at a stage of
development where they are ready to make the significant progression.
The monolith, then, begins to represent something of a deity; for our
own purposes, we will assume that, given the three conditions, the
inert monolith actually teaches or inspires ape and man to make the
crucial advance. Therefore, it becomes a major force in man's
evolution: man is not responsible for his own development, and perhaps
the monolith even brings the men to it at the precise moment of the
conjunctive orbits.
To Kubrick, this dehumanization is more than the result of the
undefined force exerted by the monolith and proves a direct consequence
of advanced technology. Kubrick is no stranger to the subject: THE
KILLING and LOLITA both involve man's self-expression through the
automobile; Spartacus's defeat comes because he is not adequately
prepared to meet the advanced military technology of the Roman army;
DR. STRANGELOVE, of course, contains a running motif of machines
assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening
titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in
2001. The central portion of 2001, the trip to Jupiter, can, as an
odyssey toward a final progression of man, concern itself largely with
Kubrick's persistent preoccupation of the relationship between man and
his tools.
Kubrick prepares us for the ultimate emotional detachment of Bowman and
Poole; his characterization of Dr. Floyd, the protagonist of the Moon
sequence and the initiator of the Jupiter expedition, stresses his
coldness, noticeably in a telephone conversation with his young
daughter, a dialogue which suggests a reliance on manipulating her more
than it demonstrates any love for her. These men, all professional, are
no longer excited by space travel: they sleep during flights and pay no
attention to what-we-consider-extraordinary phenomenon occuring
before their eyes (the rapid rotation of the Earth in the background
during the telephone scene).
Bowman and Poole are inhuman. Their faces register no emotion and they
show no tension; their few decisions are always logical and the two
always agree; Poole greets a televised birthday message from his gauche
middle-class parents on Earth with complete lack of interest -- he is,
for practical purposes, no longer their child. With subtle humor,
Kubrick separates one from the other only in their choice of food from
the dispensing machine: Poole chooses food with clashing colors and
Bowman selects a meal composed entirely within the ochre-to-dark brown
range. In a fascinating selection of material, Kubrick omits the actual
act of Poole's murder, cutting to his body in space directly after the
mechanical pod-hands sever his air hose, thus taking emphasis off any
identification we might suddenly feel and turning the murder into cold,
further dehumanized abstraction.
The only human in the film is HAL 9000, the super-computer which runs
the ship and exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and
Poole. The script development is, again, linear: the accepted
relationship of man using machine is presented initially, then
discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two (HAL, for
example, asks Bowman to show him some sketches, then comments on them).
This equilibrium where men and machine perversely share characteristics
shatters only when HAL mistakenly detects a fault in the communications
system. The HAL computers cannot make mistakes and a confirmation of
the error would necessitate disconnection. At this point the balance
shifts again: Bowman asks HAL to explain his mistake and HAL denies it,
attributing it to "human error"; we are reminded of the maxim, "a bad
workman blames his tools," and realize HAL is acting from a distinctly
human point of view in trying to cover up his error.
As the only human in the film HAL proves a greater murderer than any of
the men. Returning 2001 to the theme of inherent destruction in social
and technological progress, Kubrick's chilling last-shot-before-the-
intermission (a shot from HAL's point-of-view, lip-reading a
conversation of Bowman and Poole deciding to dismantle him if the
mistake is confirmed) suggests the potential of machine to control man,
the ultimate reversal of roles in a situation where man makes machines
in his own image. HAL's success is partial; he murders Poole, and the
three doctors on the ship in a state of induced hibernation. The murder
of the sleeping doctors is filmed almost entirely as closeups of
electronically controlled charts, a pulsating coordination of
respiration regulators, cardiographs, and encephalographs. HAL shuts
his power off gradually and we experience the ultimate dehumanization
of watching men die not in their bed-coffins but in the diminished
activity of the lines on the charts.
In attempting to reenter the ship from the pod he has used to retrieve
Poole's corpse, Bowman must improvise -- for the first time -- ad-lib
emergency procedures to break in against HAL's wishes. His
determination is perhaps motivated by the first anger he has shown, and
is certainly indicative of a crucial reassertion of man over machine,
again shifting the film's balance concerning the relationship between
man and tool. In a brilliant and indescribable sequence, preceded by
some stunning low-angle camera gyrations as Bowman makes his way toward
HAL's controls, the man performs a 1obotomy on the computer,
dismantling all except its mechanical functions. Symbolically, it is
the murder of an equal, and HAL's "death" becomes the only empathy-
evoking scene in 2001. Unlike any of the humans, HAL dies a natural
human death at Bowman's hand, slowing down into senility and second
childhood, until he remembers only his first programmed memory, the
song "Daisy," which he sings until his final expiration.
Bowman's complex act parallels that of the australopithecus: his use of
the pod ejector to reenter the craft was improvisational, the mechanism
undoubtedly designed for a different purpose -- this referring to the
use of bone as weapon-tool. Finally in committing murder, Bowman has
essentially lost his dehumanization and become an archetypal new being:
one worthy of the transcendental experience that follows. For the last
part of the film, we must assume Bowman an individual by virtue of his
improvised triumph over the complex computer. Left alone in the
spaceship, Bowman sees the monolith slab floating in space in Jupiter's
atmosphere and takes off in a pod to follow it; knowing by now the
properties of the pod, we can conjure images of the mechanical arms
controlled by Bowman reaching to touch the monolith as did the
australopithecines and the humans. The nine moons of Jupiter are in
orbital conjunction (a near-impossible astronomical occurrence) and the
monolith floats into that orbit and disappears. Bowman follows it and
enters what Clarke calls the timespace warp, a zone "beyond the
infinite" conceived cinematically as a five-minute three-part light
show, and intercut with frozen details of Bowman's reactions.
If the monolith has previously guided man to major evolutionary and
technological progression, it leads Bowman now into a realm of
perception man cannot conceive, an experience unbearable for him to
endure while simultaneously marking a new level in his progress. The
frozen shots intercut with the light sequences show, debatably,
Bowman's horror in terms of perception and physical ordeal, and his
physical death: the last of many multicolored solarized close-ups of
his eye appears entirely flesh-colored, and, if we are justified in
creating a color metaphor, the eye is totally wasted, almost subsumed
into a pallid flesh. When man journeys far enough into time and space,
Kubrick and Clarke are saying, man will find things he has no right to
see.
But this is not, as Clarke suggests in LIFE, the end of an Ahab-like
quest on the part of men driven to seek the outer reaches of the
universe. Bowman is led into the time warp by the monolith. The Moon
monolith's radio signals directed toward Jupiter were not indicative of
life as we know it on Jupiter, but were a roadmap, in effect, to show
Bowman how to find his way to the monolith that guides him toward
transcendent experience.
At the end, Bowman, probably dead (if we are to interpret makeup in
conventional terms), finds himself in a room decorated with Louis XVI
period furniture with fluorescent-lighted floors. He sees himself at
different stages of old age and physical decay. Perhaps he is seeing
representative stages of what his life would have been had he not been
drawn into the infinite. As a bed-ridden dying man, the monolith
appears before him and he reaches out to it. He is replaced by a
glowing embryo on the bed and, presumably, reborn or transfigured into
an embryo-baby enclosed in a sphere in our own solar system, watching
Earth. He has plainly become an integral part of the cosmos, perhaps as
LIFE suggests, as a "star-child" or, as Penelope Gilliatt suggests, as
the first of a species of mutant that will inhabit the Earth and begin
to grow. What seemed a linear progression may ultimately be cyclical,
in that the final effect of the monolith on man can be interpreted as a
progress ending in the beginning of a new revolutionary cycle on a
vastly higher plane. But the intrinsic suggestiveness of the final
image is such that any consistent theory about the nature of 2001 can
be extended to apply to the last shot: there are no clear answers.
Several less-than-affirmative ideas can be advanced. The monolith is a
representation of an extraterrestrial force which keeps mankind (and
finally Bowman) under observation, and manipulates it at will. Man's
progress is not of his own making, but a function of the monolith --
man cannot predict, therefore, the ensuing stages of his own evolution.
That the initiation of man into higher stages of development involves
murder casts ambiguity as to the nature of the monolith force. In its
statement that man cannot control his destiny, 2001 is antihumanistic
-- this also in the concept that what we consider humanity is actually
a finite set of traits reproducible by machines.
The final appearance of the Louis XVI room suggests that Bowman was, in
fact, being observed as if he were a rat in a maze, perhaps to test his
readiness for a further progression, this time a transcendence. The
decor of the room is probably not significant, and is either an
arbitrary choice made by the observers, or else a projection of
Bowman's own personality (the floor and the food are specifically
within Bowman's immediate frame of reference).
If Kubrick's superb film has a problem, it may simply be that great
philosophical-metaphysical films about human progress and man's
relationship to the cosmos have one strike against them when they
attempt to be literally just that. Rossellini's radiant religious films
or Bresson's meditative asceticism ultimately say far more, I think,
than Kubrick's far-more-ambitious attempt at synthesizing genre and
meaning.
Nevertheless, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY cannot be easily judged if only
because of its dazzling technical perfection. To be able to see beyond
that may take a few years. When we have grown used to beautiful strange
machines, and the wonder of Kubrick's special effects wears off by
duplication in other Hollywood films, then we can probe confidently
beyond 2001's initial fascination and decide what kind of a film it
really is.
(J.A., pp. 215-22)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What are some miscellaneous insights on 2001?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Opening of film dovetails neatly with end of DR. STRANGELOVE: "We'll
meet again, some sunny day . . ." First image in film is of the Sun.
-- Opening of film a twist on GARDEN OF EDEN myth. The "Garden" turned
out to be a desert, and it turns out Adam was a chimp. Adam's rib
isn't his, it's from a dead animal. The Tree of Knowledge is
inanimate. The Apple eaten: meat? steel? [the Monolith]).
-- Twist on Nietzsche: Man can't go it alone. Existentialism +
Theology, not just Existentialism.
-- Almost utter submergence of the "female" principle [or soft vs. hard
or warm vs. cold or "yin" vs. "yang", for a more neutral
formulation] (except huddling of apes in beginning): warmth,
caring, nurturing, real physical contact, "down to earth" etc.
GONE. Child and Parents viewed through a TV screen. Women in film
made robotic, just like the men.
-- Surface of film is outer space, depth of film is inner/outer space.
-- Radical film: use of sound especially -- abstract images -- no
dialogue at end. (Lao Tzu: "[T]he sage . . . spreads doctrines
without words . . ." [A SOURCE BOOK IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, p.
140]. "Of that which we cannot speak, we must be silent." Showing,
not telling.
-- First words of the film: "Here you are, sir."
-- Last word of the film: "mystery."
-- Banality of dialogue matches quality of food. Garbage in, garbage
out.
-- Kubrick reverses typical semiotic code: black here is good
(monolith = knowledge, or black = the stage, the platform, open
possibilities, hole to jump through), white is death, evil (bones,
sterility, cold, clean = lack of diversity).
-- MoonWatcher went first; took risk.
-- The bone goes UP. UP = "progress"?
-- Hypothesis: World finally achieved cooperation (Russians together
with Americans on space station), and was given their reward.
-- Everyman/Hero leaves spacecraft to save his companion; goes out to
take the risk, so impulsively that he leaves his helmet behind
(also, error, trust). Does something "stupid" that we "rational"
people would not do. Has faith in himself and his fellow man.
Ultimately, conquers obstacle. This entitles him to receive insight.
-- DAVID (David vs. Goliath) BOWMAN (Ulysses was an archer). Bowman
kills the Cyclops (HAL has one eye [tunnel-vision? Seeing only at
one level? Only seeing one interpretation as legitimate?]).
-- David draws ("back to the drawing board"). His drawing is of
almost childlike simplicity.
-- Astronaut food looks like baby food.
-- HAL wins the chess game (beats Bowman). HAL will always win in a
closed, finite system. In an open system, humanity can prevail; that
is, IF humans have retained their humanity -- and if they make sure
the system remains open.
-- Astronauts in closed pod attempt to beat HAL at his own game -- and
they fail.
-- Hibernating astronauts: sleep becomes death with a machine at the
helm.
-- Pod turning = machines turning on man. (G.A.)
-- Bowman has to let go of death for life. (M.W.)
-- Inside HAL's brain: red. (Color of leopard's and HAL's eyes).
-- HAL's brain: tiny monoliths (many, broken up, not unified). When HAL
loses the Monoliths, he dies.
-- HAL knew what was on Jupiter. Wanted to fight to receive the honor.
The human spirit beat the mechanical "spirit."
-- HAL made a mistake, and that's what made him "human". (Kubrick
proves computer erred by contrasting the Space HAL's answer with
the Earth HAL's answer. One of them had to be wrong). (Also: HAL's
ingenuity at reading lips, curiousity at seeing Bowman's picture).
-- As the Jupiter monolith (the crossbar of the "crucifix") turns
edge-wise from the light, it becomes invisible. (G.A.)
-- Journey through Infinite: He's being fed all the knowledge of the
Universe -- and he can barely take it (trembling, almost shattered).
-- The Last Supper: finally, the food looks good!
-- Four times monolith appears:
-- When ape-man learns to use bone as tool.
-- When astronauts on moon examine monolith.
-- When Bowman approaches Jupiter.
-- When Bowman is reborn.
(J.A., p. 290)
-- Shape of monolith: a piece of the puzzle -- you only see a little
knowledge at a time -- just enough to get you to the next level.
-- Shape of monolith: a brick (building material).
-- Shape of monolith: a tablet (e.g. Ten Commandments). (P.G)
-- Shape of monolith: a door.
-- William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
-- Confucius: "The way out is through the door."
(J.A., p. 289)
-- 18th Century decor at end: must go backward to go forward? We took
the wrong turn back in the 18th century (pre-Industrial
Revolution), so now we have to backtrack to get back to the
right fork? (Compare myth of THESEUS AND THE MINOTAUR. Goes
into the maze, but carries a thread with him so he can go back
in case he takes a wrong turn; compare that myth with the end of
THE SHINING).
-- "Charge: $1.70": 170 first three digits of 1700 (beginning of
18th Century).
-- "Progression" of man; close to earth to away from earth (Myth
of ANTAEUS). At end of film Starchild is coming back to Earth?
Has to leave Earth to understand why must go back to Earth (going
backward to go forward).
-- The room is a cage. The room is a cradle. (C.P.)
-- End of film: twist on the VIRGIN BIRTH myth. Here, not only
no Father, but no Mother.
-- By volunteering for the mission, Dave Bowman risks going to Jupiter
and losing all human contact -- which is exactly what happens.
(J.B)
-- INDIRECT COMMUNICATION
-- When Human touches Monolith the second time, he touches
through a coating. Now secondhand, not direct.
-- HAL: Artificial intelligence.
-- HAL/IBM connection.
-- Banal dialogue.
-- "I'm really not at liberty to discuss this."
-- Talking to daughter and parents through screen.
-- Lip-reading.
-- LYING
-- Cover story on base.
-- Astronauts not told purpose of mission.
-- Hal lies to astronauts.
-- LACK OF AWE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE AWESOME
-- Floyd has no reaction to spinning Earth in the phone booth.
-- Astronaut photos in front of monolith (contrast with ape
reaction).
-- [X deliberately planted Y] "How about a little coffee?"
-- MURDERS
-- By MoonWatcher
-- By HAL
-- By Bowman
-- By the Monolith?
-- BIRTHDAYS
-- Man
-- Floyd's daughter
-- Poole
-- HAL
-- StarChild
-- At end of film Starchild is looking directly at us.
(Compiled by B.K.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What are some outside references Kubrick refers to in the film
[intentionally or otherwise]?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Literary
Nietzsche: THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA
Dante: THE DIVINE COMEDY
Myths: THESEUS AND THE MINOTAUR
DAVID VS. GOLIATH
ANTAEUS
ACHILLES' HEEL
ULYSSES (AND THE SIRENS)
GARDEN OF EDEN
CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION
Musical
Strauss, Richard: THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA (opening/end)
Ligeti, Gyorgy: ATMOSPHERES (monolith)
LUX AETERNA
REQUIEM
Strauss, Johann: THE BLUE DANUBE (space station)
Khatchaturian, Aram: GAYANE BALLET SUITE (inside space station)
Socio/Political
IBM (Offset by one letter from HAL)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What are some relevant passages in THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA that
pertain to the film?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
APE TO MAN TO SUPERMAN (from Zarathustra's PROLOGUE, Section 3)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoined the forest,
he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been
announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra
spoke thus unto the people:
"I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed.
What have you done to surpass man?
All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and
you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to
the beast than surpass man?
What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just
the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of
shame.
You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is
still worm. Once were you apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than
any of the apes.
Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and
phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?
Lo, I teach you the Superman!"
BREAKING THE CUP (from Zarathustra's PROLOGUE, Section 1)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
WHEN Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of
his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and
his solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his
heart changed, and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went
before the sun, and spoke thus unto it:
"Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those
for whom thou shinest!
For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have
wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine
eagle, and my serpent.
But we awaited thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow,and
blessed thee for it.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much
honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.
I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more
become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.
Therefore must I descend into the deep: as thou doest in the evening,
when thou goest behind the sea, and givest light also to the nether-
world, thou exuberant star!
Like thee must I go down, as men say, to whom I shall descend.
Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest
happiness without envy!
Bless the cup that is about to overflow, that the water may flow golden
out of it, and carry everywhere the reflection of thy bliss!
Lo! This cup is again going to empty itself, and Zarathustra is again
going to be a man."
Thus began Zarathustra's down-going.
[And also this relevant passage, from ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES by
Paul Reps, p. 5]
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on
pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain
himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and
speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) Has anyone ever figured out the ending of 2001?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This may be the question of all questions. I suspect that there isn't a
"logical" explanation . . .
Some seems indisputable: the same aliens who deposited the slab on
earth at the Dawn of Man to teach the apes left the buried slab on the
moon; the job of the slab on the moon was to notify the aliens when it
got discovered. In other words, to say "Remember those apes? They just
made it to the moon." The moonslab beamed its message towards Jupiter;
hence the Discovery mission was sent towards Jupiter to see who the
moonslab was talking to. Now we get to the part where the fun starts,
and where anybody's interpretation is as good as anyone else's, I
guess. Mine:
Bowman encounters a slab floating in space, and seems to get sucked
into it; he travels for a long time and sees lots of cool stuff. Some
of what he sees seems vaguely biological; sperm and eggs. Other stuff
seems like formations of land and oceans. Still other stuff seems like
an exposition of geometrical form. It seems to me that Bowman is having
the "mysteries of the Universe" shown to him, perhaps courtesy of the
aliens. Why Bowman? Well, maybe because he was there. Or maybe it
happens to all of us when we die; who knows? Bowman ends up in what
seems like a hotel suite, where he seems to age very quickly. My own
view is that Bowman ages normally; but that now that he sees things in
a much larger, universal context, he sees his own life for what it is:
trivial, short, and unimportant in the scheme of things. It passes in
what seems like seconds, cosmically speaking. At the same time, his
life IS important; DOES have meaning; an entire environment has been
created for him, apparently solely so that he can live out the rest of
his days in comfort. (For the first time in the film, somebody is seen
eating what seems like an appetizing meal.) Bowman breaks his
wineglass; I, personally, don't think this is a nod at Jewish symbology
or anything along those lines. I think it's just the core of Kubrick's
message: even after learning all there is to know about the universe,
man is still man; still makes the same stupid mistakes and -- in the
next shot, as he lies on his deathbed, still reaches out for the slab
exactly as the apes did millions of years ago, and as Heywood Floyd did
on the moon. In dying, Bowman graduates to a higher plane of being, the
starchild. It is only through such a complete transformation that man
can change at all. We are doomed to be mere apes until we die - apes
driving fancy cars and spaceships, maybe, but still apes. The only
possibilities for real change in human nature are not of this earth,
and not of this lifetime.
Logical? I dunno. But that's what it says to me.
(A.K.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What are some quotes from the film?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Miller: Did you have a nice flight?
Floyd: Very nice, indeed.
Floyd: Elena, you're looking wonderful.
Elena: Thank you. You're looking well too.
Floyd: Did the crew get back all right?
Smyslov: Yes, yes. Fortunately, they did.
Floyd: I'm glad about that.
Floyd: Deliberately buried? [Chuckle]
Companion: Well, how about a little coffee?
FINAL WORDS OF THE FILM
Dr. Floyd: . . . the four-million-year-old black monolith has remained
completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total
mystery.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) Why should you see 2001 on a big screen?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Seeing the film on TV scarcely does it justice. For one thing, the film
is typically cropped when broadcast (the outer edges of the film are
unceremoniously cut off). Unfortunately for Art, Kubrick, a former LIFE
photographer, uses composition to convey meaning, along with dialogue,
soundtrack, editing, etc. The cropping destroys this composition (it's
like reading HAMLET with 15% of the words missing).
Even worse, on a small screen you can miss many subtle details (e.g.,
the shot of the IBM nameplate in nearly the same place on the screen as
the HAL nameplate, which gives a little extra credence to the HAL/IBM
connection).
The final sequence, with just breathing, is masterful in the theatre.
You are surrounded by the breathing sounds; you really feel a part of
that room. This is lost on the TV.
You miss scale, details, colors, awe, a great many of the things that
make this such a great film!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What formal recognition did 2001 receive?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Academy Award: Special Visual Effects
British Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Art Direction,
Soundtrack
Best Film of 1968: NEWSDAY, FILM CRITICS CIRCLE OF SPAIN,
HOUSTON POST, Italian Oscar Best Film from
the West
Saturday Review: "Motion Picture of the Decade"
National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures:
Best Film of Educational Value, 1968
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What Academy Award nominations has Kubrick received?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nominated for Writing (Best Screenplay based on material from another
medium) 1964: DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND
LOVE THE BOMB
Nominated for Directing 1964: DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
Nominated for Best Picture 1964: DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB Producer Nominated for Writing (Best
Story and Screenplay written directly for the screen) 1968: 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY
Special Visual Effects 1968: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Nominated for Directing 1968: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Nominated for Writing (Best Screenplay based on material from another
medium) 1971: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Nominated for Directing 1971: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Nominated for Best Picture 1971: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Producer
Nominated for Writing (Best Screenplay adapted from other material)
1975: BARRY LYNDON
Nominated for Directing 1975: BARRY LYNDON
Nominated for Best Picture 1975: BARRY LYNDON Producer
Nominated for Best Screenplay Based on Material From Another Medium
1987: FULL METAL JACKET
(J.B)
1964 - vs. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
Writing: Edward Anhalt - Becket
Directing: George Cukor - My Fair Lady
Picture: My Fair Lady
1968 - Vs. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Writing: Mel Brooks - The Producers
Directing: Sir Carol Reed - Oliver
1971 - Vs. A Clockwork Orange
Writing: Ernest Tidyman - French Connection
Directing: William Friedkin - French Connection
Picture: French Connection
1975 - Vs. Barry Lyndon
Writing: Frank Pierson - Dog Day Afternoon
Directing: Milos Foreman - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Picture: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
1987 - Vs. Full Metal Jacket
Writing: Mark Peploe & Bernardo Bertolucci - The Last Emperor
(J.U)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) Can you give us some off-line references?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Great book, though out of print: MAKING OF KUBRICK'S 2001 by
JeromeAgel, originally published by New American Library (Signet).
Filled with reviews of the film, letters to Kubrick, behind-the-scenes
info, photos, and a whole lot more.
GEDULD, CAROLYN. Filmguide to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1973.
KUBRICK: A FILM ARTIST'S MAZE by Thomas Nelson. In-depth commentary.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) Can you give us some on-line references to Kubrick?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CARDIFF'S MOVIE BROWSER http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/
A great collection of quotes, cast members, and other miscellaneous
information, all hot-linked.
KUBRICK ON THE WEB http://www.automatrix.com/~bak/kubrick.html
Updates to the FAQ stored here, as well as pointers to other
Kubrick sites on the Web.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
=======================================================================
THE SHINING
^^^^^^^^^^^
=======================================================================
ke...@ori.org Ken Loge at Oregon Research Institute
SHINING THINGS:
Anyone ever notice the little "toy" axe that's in the pencil holder on
Ulman's desk during the interview? It's hard to see on video, but it
shows up very well on film. Good example of Kubrick's "mise en scene"
(i.e., that which is "put into the scene", such as in the background).
Sorry if the axe is common knowledge, but I haven't read the FAQ yet.
- Ken
=======================================================================
THE KILLING
^^^^^^^^^^^
=======================================================================
I believe the cheap suitcase was actually well planned by SK. IMHO he
was attempting to show that man, in his desire to be perfect (ie:
Johnny's perfect crime), only emphasizes his imperfection. Johnny
didn't get a suitcase as a contingency because in his arrogance he
never really believed he would need a contingency. The rigamarole about
the person with the money taking off and meeting up with the others
later for the split "if something goes wrong" was Johnny's only
acknowledgement that something could go wrong. However, NOTHING would
go wrong because the plan was ... PERFECT. Why make contingencies for a
perfect plan?
In reality, the robbery WAS perfect. It was the escape that was flawed.
By underestimating the human weakness of the others, as well as
overestimating the weakness of Elisha Cook's wife, Johnny laid the
foundation for the failure. It was his arrogance in assuming perfection
which led to these errors.
When the escape went awry, Johnny had no choice but to improvise - with
disastrous results - just as the rest of the gang met with disaster. It
was inevitable.
ro...@ionet.net (JSM)
=======================================================================
[BACKGROUND ON MORE FILMS TO FOLLOW]
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
GENERAL
=======================================================================
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What stylistic devices does Kubrick use?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CONTORTED FACE
A fascinating thread that runs through Kubrick's output is that in
EVERY film of his there is a character(s) who at one point become the
focus of the camera's attention while there face is most mangled
position:
Full Metal Jacket - Leonard when he is crazy in the head
The Shining - Jack Nicholson's face obviously, in several
scenes: Heeere's Johnny; looking out the window
at the snow; banging on the door or the pantry etc.
Barry Lyndon - Captain Quinn's face during his duel with Barry when
he goes to raise his pistol.
A Clockwork Orange - Alex obviously - the scene when he gets home
from the milk bar and after having set upon Billy Boy and the
residents of HOME. And the end of course.
2001 - When Bowman is going "beyond the infinite" there are several
scenes of his face being contorted.
Dr. Strangelove - The characters Gen. Buck Turgidson, Gen. Ripper
and Strangelove himself all exhibit the contorted face at
one time or another.
Lolita - Lolita herself makes a few of them, but James Mason doesn't
really make any of those severe face contortions that charac-
terize the others.
Paths of Glory - Kirk Douglas during the failed attack on the
anthill - his face gets twisted while blowing his whistle.
The Killing - Elisha Cook (George Petey) makes the weirdest of faces
when he kills his wife, her boyfriend and his hoodlum friend.
(R.P.)
THE USE OF SPACE
[the following was a dialogue on Kubrick's use of space which appeared
in the Kubrick newsgroup]
MG:
Frances Yates was an British scholar who specialized in hermetic
philosophy. (Two of her other books are Giordano Bruno & The Hermetic
Tradition and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.) The books can be tough
going, but are well worth the repeated readings.
The Art of Memory was a mnemonic technique developed by classical
orators as a way of remembering a speech. They would form in their
minds an image of an architectural space (someplace large and open,
usually a place they were familiar with), and then they would place
within that space striking images and objects that reminded them of
various parts of the speech. When it came time to speak, they would
imagine themselves entering the architectural space and would proceed
through it, room by room, seeing the icons that would then jog their
memories. The space represented the structure of the speech, the icons
represented the content. One of the rules was that the icons should be
as striking as possible, even bizarre and grotesque. (To me, this
sounds like the Overlook, with its stillframe horrors, and its endless
snapshots of its history hanging on the walls. Also consider the
sealed-off spaces of the WWI trenches, the War Room and Burpleson Air
Force Base, Discovery, and Parris Island. And consider, of course,
Kubrick's penchant for bizarre iconic imagery.)
Later, during the Middle Ages, hermetic philosophers used the Art of
Memory for their own purposes, weaving it into their philosophy of a
pantheistic universe (for instance, seeing the icons as talismans that
would draw down the influence of the stars). (Sorry if I've only
confused the matter. Yates does a much better job at exposition.)
For me, the most important point is that these fictional internal
memory-scapes were used to catalog the contents of a person's mind, not
unlike the function of a personal computer or, eventually, virtual
reality, which will make objective and shareable the metaphor of a
personal architectural space. (All of which suggests that Kubrick is
much farther ahead of his time than most people realize.)
GA:
Wonderful; very much like what a friend of mine, and anthropologist
(and a friend & student of Jerome Rothenberg's) who said much the same
thing about the though patterns of meso-american peoples -- they too
used systems of architectural mnemonics.
Reading this I recall at once all the tracking shots of K's, most if
not all of which center a character walking through a maze or set of
hallways -- The Shining of course but remember all those similar shots
in Clockwork; and even the handheld shots following Bowman & Poole
around the ship in 2001. Even in Strangelove, the camera following the
crew up and down the fuselage of the plane, and in FMJ, the final
scenes through the burned-out maze of buildings (or the camera
following Bowman as he wanders about the alien's hotel suite...)
....describing just as much the topology of the place as carrying
forward the narrative of the characters actions; as though the place,
its shape, its look & feel itself held the Message, and not the
action...
MG: The tracking shots are definitely part of it. So are the faces. But
as with everything in Kubrick, these elements work on so many levels,
and play off from each other in so many complex ways, that it's very
hard to hold a good representation of it in your mind. (For example,
remember that Kubrick first used the corridor tracking shot, in
Killer's Kiss, to represent a dream. And faces are used, in all the
films, as an alienation effect. As far as faces representing an
emotional index, see below.) That might be one reason why there's been
so little good writing on Kubrick -- Any attempt to articulate the
experience becomes a parody, because it does so little justice to the
original experience. The best writing has come from people, like
Annette Michelson and Gene Youngblood, who have staked claims on small
pieces of territory and then mined them for all they're worth,
fractally hoping that the part would somehow stand in for the whole.
But I digress . . .
The Shining might be the best example of the (hypothetical) use of the
Art of Memory. It's an isolated space that stands-in for an historical
whole (the history of America). (What's really spooky is that it
anticipated the whole direction of the 80s--but that's another
digression.) The movie revolves around memory (shining), especially
subjective or fractured memory. Subjective: Wendy experiences the hotel
as a series of horror movie cliches; Jack sees it as a vice den; Danny,
the innocent, sees it for what it is. They create the space as
projections of themselves. Fractured: The disorienting intersection of
Jack's real-time experience and Danny's memory (his shining to
Halloran) when Jack encounters the naked woman in the bathroom. Also,
paper memory, in the form of the scrapbook containing the hotel's
history that sits on Jack's writing table (which could be seen as the
document that sends Jack over the edge). The icons: the Indian motifs
dominate the architecture (and the site, a burial ground) while the
official history populates the walls in staid black & white photos, all
the same size. (And this is a dead giveaway, but Kubrick quotes Diane
Arbus' Identical Twins, and Kubrick and Arbus were friends. He quotes
Jim Thompson, from The Killer Inside Me, and he and Thompson were
friends.) Etc., etc., etc.
OBJECTIVITY: THE ARTIST PARING HIS FINGERNAILS (THE "COLD")
Kubrick's "coldness" has always been a point of critics. Even
Ray Bradbury, criticizing _2001_, said that the "freezing touch of
Antonioni" hovers over Kubrick in this film. And Harlan Ellison
described Kubrick's view as so remote that it's almost alien -- this,
while praising Kubrick as one of the few authentic artists in film.
The coldness we see in Kubrick's work is there, but I think
it's a result of Kubrick trying to look at the human condition as
rationally as he can. After all, in _Dr Strangelove_, we were willing
to destroy the world over economic and political differences that,
five hundred years from now, will seem meaningless. (Anyone remember
15th century ecclesiastical debates?) _2001_ wasn't about the human
characters at all, and the central character of _A Clockwork Orange_
was the subject of a very cold medical experiment. _Barry Lyndon_
forced this same distance on us as well -- these were people long dead,
whose goals were as ephemeral as the paper their eternal bills and
checks were written on.
Is Kubrick really this cold? I doubt it; there are scenes in
his films of genuine human pain and caring, but presented in an
observational, we're-watching-people-with-hidden-cameras style. The
death of Barry's son, and the horror of the final duel. That awful
scene between Jack and Danny, where Jack tells Danny he wants to stay
in the hotel "forever and ever." The exchage between Joker and Cowboy,
where they both 'agree" not to discuss Pyle's collapse, and Pyle's own
mental implosion.
But I think that the coldness people see in Kubrick's films is
mainly his observational stance. It's one of the things I like about
his films.
(B.S.)
Traditional films tend to tell you what to think and feel every step of
the way. There is a kind of fear that pervades the classical cinema,
part of it a reflection of the culture and its fear of disruption and
outsiders, part of it a reflection of the rigid assembly-line structure
put in place by the never-benign studio patriarchs. (THIS, more than
storytelling and characters, which were already pretty moribund
concepts, is what hyper-moguls like Spielberg and Lucas have brought
back to cinema.)
Kubrick uses a more open-ended, less authoritarian approach. He places
the pieces out there in the way that pleases him most and then says, in
effect, See what you can make of this. This allows the viewers the
option of investing their emotions in the work, unguided by the
characters. It also offers the viewers the option of rejecting the work
if they want to (as many have). Rather than approach the films through
the predetermined gateway of the hero (which, for instance, forces most
women to either stand outside the film or see it from a, usually,
hostile viewpoint), Kubrick encourages the viewer to approach the film
directly, with as little mediation as possible.
(M.G.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What films has Kubrick done, and what are the credits?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1951 DAY OF THE FIGHT
Director/Photography/Editor/Sound Stanley Kubrick
Commentary Douglas Edwards
Documentary short on Walter Cartier, middleweight prize fighter
Running Time: 16 minutes
Distributor RKO Radio
1951 FLYING PADRE
Director/Photograohy/Editor/Sound Stanley Kubrick
Documentary short on the Reverend Fred Stadmueller, Roman Catholic
missionary of a New Mexico parish that covers 400 square miles
Running Time: 9 minutes
Distributor: RKO Radio
1953 THE SEAFARERS
Director/Photography/Editor Stanley Kubrick
Script Will Chasen
Producer Lester Cooper
Narrator Don Hollenbeck
Documentary short in color about the Seafarers International Union
Running Time: 30 minutes
1953 FEAR AND DESIRE
Production Company Stanley Kubrick Productions
Producer Stanley Kubrick
Associate Producer Martin Perveler
Director/Photography/Editor Stanley Kubrick
Script Howard O. Sackler
Dialogue Director Toba Kubrick
Music Gerald Fried
Cast: Frank Silvera (Mac), Kenneth Harp (Corby), Virginia Leith (The
Girl), Paul Mazursky (Sydney), Steve Coit (Fletcher), David Allen
(Narrator)
Running Time: 68 Minutes
Distributor: Joseph Burstyn
1955 KILLER'S KISS
Production Company Minotaur
Producers Stanley Kubrick, Morris Bousel
Director/Photography/Editor Stanley Kubrick
Script Stanley Kubrick, Howard O. Sackler
Music Gerald Fried
Choreographer David Vaughan
Cast: Frank Silvera (Vincent Rapallo), Jamie Smith (Davy Gordon),
Irene Kane (Gloria Price), Jerry Jarret (Albert), Ruth Sobotka (Iris),
Mike Dana, Felice Orlandi, Ralph Roberts, Phil Stevenson (Hoodlums),
Julius Adelman (Mannequin Factory Owner), David Vaughan, Alec Rubins
(Conventioneers)
Running Time: 64 Minutes
Distributor: United Artists, United Artists/16
1956 THE KILLING
Production Company Harris-Kubrick Productions
Producer James B. Harris
Director Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel CLEAN BREAK, by Lionel
White
Additional dialogue Jim Thompson
Photography Lucien Ballard
Editor Betty Steinberg
Art Director Ruth Sobotka Kubrick
Music Gerald Fried
Sound Earl Snyder
Cast: Sterling Hayden (Johnny Clay), Jack C. Flippen (Marvin Unger),
Marie Windsor (Sherry Peatty), Elisha Cook Jr. (George Peatty), Coleen
Gray (Fay), Vince Edwards (Val Cannon), Ted de Corsia (Randy Kennan),
Joe Sawyer (Mike O'Reilly), Tim Carey (Nikki), Kola Kwariana (Maurice),
James Edwards (Parking Lot Attendant), Jay Adler (Leo), Joseph Turkel
(Tiny)
Running Time: 83 minutes
Distributor: United Artists, United Artists/16
1957 PATHS OF GLORY
Production Company Harris-Kubrick Productions
Producer James B. Harris
Director Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson, based on
the novel by Humphrey Cobb
Photography George Krause
Editor Eva Kroll
Art Director Ludwig Reiber
Music Gerlad Fried
Sound Martin Muller
Cast: Kirk Douglas (Colonel Dax), Ralph Meeker (Corporal Paris),
Adolphe Menjou (General Broulard), George Macready (General Mireau),
Wayne Morris (Lieutenant Roget), Richard Anderson (Major Saint-Auban),
Joseph Turkel (Private Arnaud), Timothy Carey (Private Ferol), Peter
Capel (Colonel Judge), Suzanne Christian (German Girl), Bert Freed
(Sergeant Boulanger), Emile Meyer (Priest), John Stein (Captain
Rousseau), Ken Dibbs (Private Lejeune), Jerry Hausner (Tavern Owner),
Harold Benedict (Captain Nichols)
Running Time: 86 minutes
Distributor: United Artists (presented by Byrna Productions), United
Artists/16
1960 SPARTACUS
Production Company Byrna
Executive Producer Kirk Douglas
Producer Edward Lewis
Director Anthony Mann, Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay Dlaton Trumbo, based on the book by Howard Fast
Photography Russel Metty
Additional Photography Clifford Stine
Screen Process Super Technirama-70
Color technicolor
Editors Robert Lawrence, Robert Schultz, fred Chulack
Production Designer Alexander Golitzen
Art Director Eric Orbom
Set Decoration Russel A. Gausman, Julia Heron
Titles Saul Bass
Technical Advisor Vittorio Nino Novarese
Costumes Peruzzi, Valles, Bill Thomas
Music Alex North
Music Director Joseph Gershenson
Sound Waldo O. Watson, Joe Lapis, Murray Spivack, Ronald Pierce
Assistant Director Marshal Green
Cast: Kirk Douglas (Spartacus), Laurence Olivier (Marcus Crassus),
Jean Simmons (Varinia), Charles Laughton (Gracchus), Peter Ustinov
(Batiatus), John Gavin (Julius Caesar), Tony Curtis (Antoninus), Nina
Foch (Helena), Herbert Lom (Tigranes), John Ireland (Crixus), Joh Dall
(Glabrus), Charles McGraw (Marcellus), Joanna Barnes (Claudia), Harold
J. Stone (David), Woody Strode (Draba), Peter Brocco (Ramon), Paul
Lambert (Gannicus), Robert J. Wilke (Captain of Guard), Nicholas Dennis
(Dionysius), John Hoyt (Roman Officer), Fred Worlock (Laelius), Dayton
Lummis (Symmachus)
Original Running Time: 196 Minutes
Original Released Running Time: 184 Minutes
Distributor: Universal Pictures, Univeral/16
1962 LOLITA
Production Company Seven Arts/Anya/Transworld
Producer James B. Harris
Director Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel
Photography Oswald Morris
Editor Anthony Harvey
Art Director William Andrews
Set Design Andrew Low
Music Nelson Riddle
Lolita's Theme Bob Harris
Sound H. L. Bird, Len Shilton
Assistant Directors Roy Millichip, John Danischewsky
Cast: James Mason (Humbert Humbert), Sue Lyon (Lolita Haze), Shelley
Winters (Charlotte Haze), Peter Sellers (Clare Quilty), Diana Decker
(Jean Farlow), Jerry Stovin (John Farlow), Suzanne Gibbs (Mona Farlow),
Gary Cockrell (Dick Schiller), Marianne Stone (Vivian Darkbloom), Cec
Linder (Physician), Lois Maxwell (Nurse Mary Lord), William Greene (Mr.
Swine), C. Denier Warren (Mr. Potts), Isobel Lucas (Louise), Maxine
Holden (Hospital Receptionist), James Dyrenforth (Mr. Beale), Roberta
Shore (Lorna), Eric Lane (Roy), Shirley Douglas (Mr. Starch), Roland
Brand (Bill), Colin Maitland (Charlie Holmes), Irvin Allen (Hospital
Attendant), Marion Mathie (Miss Lebone), Craig Sams (Rex), John
Harrison
(Tom)
Running Time: 153 Minutes
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Films Incorporated/16
1964 DR. STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE
THE BOMB
Production Company Hawk Films
Producer/Director Stanley Kubrick
Associate Producer Victor Lyndon
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, based on
the novel Red Alert by Peter George
Photography Gilbert Taylor
Editor Anthony Harvey
Production Design Ken Adam
Art Direction Peter Murton
Special Effects Wally Veevers
Music Laurie Johnson
Aviation Advisor Captain John Crewdson
Sound John Cox
Cast: Peter Sellers (Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Muffley,
Dr. Strangelove), George C. Scott (Buck Turgidson), Sterling Hayden
(General Jack D. Ripper), Keenan Wynn (Colonel Bat Guano), Slim Pickens
(Major T. J. "King" Kong) Peter Bull (Ambassador de Sadesky), Tracy
Reed (Miss Scott), James Earl Jones (Lieutenant H. HR. Dietrich,
D.S.O.), Glenn Beck (Lieutenant W. D. Kivel, Navigator), Shane Rimmer
(Captain G.A. "Ace" Owens, Co-pilot), Paul Tamarin (Lieutenant B.
Goldberg, Radio Operator), Gordon Tanner (General Faceman), Robert
O'Neil (Admiral Randolph), Roy Stephens (Frank), Laurence Herder, John
McCarthy, Hal Galili (Memebers of Burpleson Base Defense Corps)
Running Time: 94 Minutes
Distributor: Columbia Pictures, Swank/16
1968 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Production Company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer Stanley Kubrick
Director Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark, based on Clarke's short
story "The Sentinel"
Photography Geoffrey Unsworth
Screen Process Super Panavision, presented in Cinerama
Color Metrocolor
Additional Photography John Alcott
Special Photographic Effects Designer and Director Stanley Kubrick
Editor Ray Lovejoy
Production Design Tony Masters, Harry Lange, Ernie Archer
Art Direction John Hoesli
Special Photographic Effects Supervisors Wally Veevers, Douglas
Trumbull, Con Pedereson, Tom Howard
Music Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Aram Khachaturian, Gyorgy
Ligeti
Costumes Hardy Amies
Sound Winston Ryder
Cast: Keir Dullea (David Bowman), Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole),
William Sylvester (Dr. Heywood Floyd), Daniel Richter (Moon-Watcher),
Douglas Rain (HAL's Voice), Leonard Rossiter (Smyslov), Margaret Tyzack
(Elena), Robert Beatty (Halvorsen), Sean Sullivan (Michaels), Frank
Miller (Mission Control), Penny Edwina Carroll, Mike Lovell, Peter
Delman, Danny Grover, Brian Hawley
Running Time: 141 Minutes
Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Films Incorporated/16
1971 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Production Company Warner Brothers/Hawk Films
Producer/Director Stanley Kubrick
Executive Producers Max L. Raab, Si Litvinoff
Associate Producer Bernard Williams
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess
Photography John Alcott
Color Warnercolor
Editor Bill Butler
Production Design John Barry
Art Direction Russell Hagg, Peter Shields
Music Ludwig van Beethoven, Edward Elgar, Gioacchino Rossini, Terry
Tucker, Henry Purcell, James Yorkston, Arthur Freed, Nacio Herb Brown,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Erika Eigen
Original Electronic Music Walter Carlos
Songs Gene Kelly, Erika Eigen
Costumes Milena Canonero
Special Paintings and Sculpture Herman Makkink, Cornelius Makkink,
Liz Moore, Christiane Kubrick
Production Assistant Andros Epaminondas
Sound Brian Blamey
Assistant to Producer Jan Harlan
Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Alex), Patrick Magee (Mr. Alexander), Michael
Bates (Chief Guard), Warren Clark (Dim), John Clive (Stage Actor),
Adrienne Corri (Mrs. Alexander), Carl Duering (Dr. Brodsky), Paul
Farrel (Tramp), Clive Francis (Joe, the Lodger), Michael Gover (Prison
Governor), Miriam Karlin (Miss Weber, the Cat Lady), James Marcus
(Georgie), Aubrey Morris (Mr. Deltoid), Godfrey Quigley (Prison
Chaplain), Sheila Raynour (Mum), Madge Ryan (Dr. Branom), John Savident
(Conspirator), Anthony Sharp (Minister of the Interior), Philip Stone
(Dad), Pauline Taylor (Dr. Taylor, Psychiatrist), Margaret Tyzack
(Conspirator), Steven Berkoff (Constable), Lindsay Campbell
(Inspector), Michael Tarn (Pete), David Prowse (Julian), Jan Adair,
Vivienne Chandler, Prudence Drage (Handmaidens), John J. Carney (CID
Man), Richard Connaught (Billyboy), Carol Drinkwater (Nurse Feeley),
Cheryl Grunwald (Rape Girl), Gillian Hills (Sonietta), Barbara Scott
(Marty), Virginia Wetherell (Stage Actress), Katya Wyeth (Girl), Barrie
Cookson, Gaye Brown, Peter Burton, Lee Fox, Craig Hunter, Shirley
Jaffe,
Neil Wilson
Running Time: 137 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Brothers, Swank/16
1975 BARRY LYNDON
Production Company Warner Brothers/Hawk Films
Producer/Director Stanley Kubrick
Associate Producer Jan Harlan
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by William Makepeace
Thackeray
Photography John Alcott
Editor Tony Lawson
Production Design Ken Adam
Art Direction Roy Walker
Music J.S. Bach, Frederick the Great, G. F. Handel, W. A. Mozart,
Giovanni Paisiello, Franz Schubert, Antonio Vivaldi
Music Adaptation Leonard Rosenman
Costumes Ulla-Britt Soderlund, Milena Cannonero
Screen Process Panavision
Color Metrocolor
Sound Rodney Holland
Assistant Director Brian Cook
Cast: Ryan O'Neal (Barry Lyndon), Marisa Berenson (Lady Lyndon),
Patrick Magee (The Chevalier), Hardy Kruger (Captain Potzdorf), Marie
Kean (Mrs. Barry), Gay Hamilton (Nora Brady), Melvin Murray (Reverend
Runt), Godfrey Quigley (Captain George), Leonard Rossiter (Captain
Quin), Leon Vitali (Lord Bullington), Diana Koerner (Lischen), Frank
Middlemass (Sir Charles Lyndon), Andre Morell (Lord Wendover), Arthur
O'Sullivan (Captain Freny), Philip Stone (Graham), Steven Berkoff (Lord
Ludd), Anthony Sharp (Lord Hallum), Michael Hordern (the narrator)
Running Time: 185 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Brothers, Swank/16
1980 THE SHINING
Production Company Warner Brothers/Hawk Films
Produced in association with The Producer Circle Company
Robert Fryer, Martin Richards, Mary Lea Johnson
Producer/Director Stanley Kubrick
Executive Producer Jan Harlan
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson, based on the novel by
Stephen King
Photography John Alcott
Editor Ray Lovejoy
Production Design Roy Walker
Music Bela Bartok, Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkin, Gyorgy Ligeti,
Krzystof Penderecki
Costumes Milena Canonera
2nd Unit Photography Douglas Milsome, Gregg Macgillivray
Steadicam Operator Garrett Brown
Art Direction Les Tomkins
Assistant Director Brian Cook
Assistant to Producer Andros Epaminondas
Personal Assistant to Director Leon Vitali
Cast: Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duvall (Wendy
Torrance), Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance), Scatman Crothers (Halloran),
Barry Nelson (Stuart Ullman), Philip Stone (Delbert Grady), Joe Turkel
(Lloyd), Anne Jackson (Doctor), Tony Burton (Larry Durkin), Lia Beldam
(Young Woman in Bath), Billie Gibson (Old Woman in Bath), Barry Dennen
(Watson), David Baxter (Forest Ranger1), Manning Redwood (Forest Ranger
2), Lisa Burns, Louise Burns (The Grady Girls), Alison Coleridge
(Ullman's Secretary), Jana Sheldon (Stewardess), Kate Phelps (Overlook
Receptionist), Norman Gay (Injured Guest with Head-Wound)
Running Time: 145 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Brothers
1987 FULL METAL JACKET
Production Company Warner Brother
Producer /Director Stanley Kubrick
Executive Producer Jan Harlan
Co-Producer Philip Hobbs
Associate Producer Michael Herr
Screenplay Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on
the novel by Gustav Hasford
Production Design Anton Furst
Editor Martin Hunter
Assistant to Director Leon Vitali
Cast: Mathew Modine (Pvt. Joker), Adam Baldwin (Animal Mother),
Vincent
D'onofrio (Pvt. Pile), Lee Ermey (Gnn. Sgt. Hartman), Dorian Harewood
(Eightball), Arliss Howard (Pvt. Cowboy), Kevyn Major Howard
(Rapterman), Ed O'Ross (Lt. Touchdown), John Terry (Lt. Lockhart),
Kieron Jechinis (Crazy Earl), Bruce Boa, Kirk Taylor, John Stafford,
Tim Colceri, Ian Tyler, Gary Landon Mills, Sal Lopez, Papillon Soo Soo,
Ngoc Le, Peter Edmund, Tan Hung Francione, Leanne Hong, Marcus D'amico,
Costas Dino Chimona, Gil Kopel, Keith Hodiak, Peter Merrill, Herbert
Norville, Nguyen Hue Phong
Running Time: 117 Minutes
Distributor: Warner Brothers
*Filmography typed and contributed by S.C. as it appeared in T.N.,
KUBRICK, A FILM ARTIST'S MAZE *
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) Are there any other Kubrickian films out there for Kubrick fans?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kubrick, of course, is a director unto himself. However, there are many
other films which have that Kubrickian blend of intellect, humanity,
depth, philosophical perspective, and (sometimes suppressed) emotion,
as well other films which have that "on the edge" or "over the top"
Kubrickian quality. Perhaps the most prominent feature of Kubrick's
films, internal congruence, is also present in thse films.
Here is a short, incomplete, and very eclectic list of other excellent
Kubrick-like films. Many of these films belong in more than one
category, so use these categories just as a temporary reference point:
"I SMELL THE AIR OF ANOTHER PLANET"
(2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY)
AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD
ERASERHEAD
BLUE VELVET
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
MARAT/SADE
FILMS WHERE DIALOGUE IS PROMINENT
(FULL METAL JACKET, DR. STRANGELOVE, BARRY LYNDON)
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
SWEPT AWAY
MINDWALK
MY DINNER WITH ANDRE
DYSTOPIA
(A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, FULL METAL JACKET)
1984
BRAZIL
COMEDIES
(DR. STRANGELOVE)
LOST IN AMERICA
KING OF COMEDY
THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
RAISING ARIZONA
MONTHY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE
DOCUMENTARIES
(DAY OF THE FIGHT, FLYING PADRE)
TITICUT FOLLIES
THE THIN BLUE LINE
VERNON, FLORIDA
THE ATOMIC CAFE
ROGER AND ME
HOOP DREAMS
MISCELLANEOUS FILMS
(internal congruence and excellence in concept and execution)
CITIZEN KANE
MIDNIGHT COWBOY
FIVE EASY PIECES
OBSESSION
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
HAIR
BLOW-UP
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
THE SEVEN SAMURAI
RAN
KOYAANISQAATSI
BARAKA
BADLANDS (G.A)
IF . . . (G.A.)
O LUCKY MAN! (G.A.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q) What are Kubrick's favorite films?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I VITELLONI
WILD STRAWBERRIES
CITIZEN KANE
TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE
CITY LIGHTS
HENRY V
LA NOTTE
THE BANK DICK
ROXIE HART
HELL'S ANGELS
(J.B./T.G.)
TS Eliot: "Let us go then you and I, with the evening spread out
against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The following people have contributed to this FAQ:
Geoffrey Alexander (G.A.)
Jules N. Binoculas (J.B.)
Stephen Clark (S.C.)
Sean Cole (S.C.)
Michael Gaughn (M.G.)
Tim Gould (T.G.)
Ari Kahan (A.K)
Barry Krusch (B.K.)
Joel Kuntonen (J.K.)
Hari G. Nair (H.N.)
Thomas Nelson (T.N.)
"Roman Polanski" (R.P.)
C. Powers (C.P.)
Brian Siano (B.S.)
Jirawat Uttayaya (J.U.)
Mike Weston (M.W.)
and
Jerome Agel (J.A) [from MAKING OF KUBRICK'S 2001]
Penelope Gilliat (P.G).
This FAQ is currently being maintained by Barry Krusch (b...@netcom.com)
Your contributions are welcome. Please send them to that e-mail
address.
This FAQ is currently archived at
http://www.automatrix.com/~bak/kubrick.html
Last updated: March 26, 1995
Copyright is retained by the respective authors.
--
-------------------------------------------------
Barry Krusch
b...@netcom.com
URL: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/kr/krusch/home.html