ALL SCI-FI Forum Index ALL SCI-FI
The place to “find your people”.
 
 FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   MemberlistMemberlist   UsergroupsUsergroups   RegisterRegister 
 ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 9, 10, 11  Next
 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    ALL SCI-FI Forum Index -> Sci-Fi Movies and Serials from 1950 to 1969
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 5:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote



One of the best (and first) posters for the film.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:11 pm    Post subject: 2001: A FAKE ODYSSEY? part one Reply with quote

2001: A FAKE ODYSSEY?

I'd like to bring your attention to several details that reveal the "alien intelligence" theme of 2001 to be a deliberately fabricated "cover story".

Let's start with the council meeting scene and pay some attention to the three figures sat with their backs to us. Floyd is in the middle chatting to his colleague Bill, who is on the right. Floyd uses his finger to roughly draw an invisible monolith in mid-air. Bill responds by swiftly arcing his extended hand 90 degrees, perhaps encouraging us to mentally rotate the monolith.

Notice also that at the far end of the room we see not only a large white cinema screen, but a roughly three foot tall white monolith, which the speaker stands behind. And from where Floyd is sat his head is framed by this small white monolith.

During his extremely vague speech Floyd makes a very important comment — "congratulations on your discovery". His two colleagues, who still have their backs to us, immediately respond by glancing at each other.

This all seems to suggest that Floyd and his colleagues already know what the monolith is, though it could just be Kubrick offering more visually encoded clues for our benefit.

The "congratulations" could also be addressing we the audience for having cracked the monolith / screen connection and thus having arrived outside the false narrative. Remember also that the Jupiter mission took place aboard a ship called the Discovery. So the term "congratulations on your discovery" may be another indicator that during the surreal ending of the film Bowman was actually asleep and dreaming aboard the ship that he had seized back from HAL.

In the council meeting we don't actually get to see the briefing that Floyd was about to give - only his introduction, but a clue can be found in the footage that HAL plays as he is being shut down. Floyd is seen sitting at a desk with an image of an unidentified planet or moon projected onto a screen behind him — the words National Council of Astronautics are written across the bottom of the screen. This desk looks very similar to the one he was sitting at in the council meeting and so the recording of his message was probably part of the briefing session.

If this is true then we have found a timeline error in the "alien intelligence" narrative. If the monolith sent it's "radio emission" to Jupiter during the excavation scene — then how could the Jupiter mission instruction video have been recorded in the council briefing, which took place in advance?

Also, what exactly is the purpose of the Jupiter mission? Even if we ignore all the interpretation in this review and just follow the standard "alien intelligence" version of the story, the Jupiter mission intent is still very vague. Why the secrecy and compartmentalization? Just what exactly are the crew supposed to do when they reach Jupiter and its many moons? If there is a monolith there then how will they know where to find it? As HAL puts it "there are some extremely odd things about this mission". HAL also talks about the "strange stories floating around before we left", which could double up as an aesthetic hint about the floating monolith and its alignment with the cinema screen.

The scene where Bowman and Poole watch themselves broadcast in a television interview has a scripted feel to it. The true purpose of the mission is not told and so the whole broadcast smacks of propaganda. As they watch this footage the astronauts are eating processed fake food. Like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange, they are literally being fed a pack of lies, but here they are eating their own lies.

The metaphor of fake food as an indicator of lying is also featured on the moon bus. Floyd eats a fake chicken sandwich while discussing the monolith, and Halvorsen, who is eating a fake ham sandwich, tells Floyd that his speech "beefed up morale". A strange detail of this scene is the lighting, which has an ethereal glow. The music played during the exterior shots of this moon bus is called Lux Aeterna, which translates as "Eternal Light". This all ties in with the concept of Floyd and his friends as the self-proclaimed "enlightened ones" as described in the previous chapter of this review. Watch the light carefully in the moon busscene. When Floyd bites into his synthetic chicken sandwich, the luminous light source suddenly dims.

Is this an unintended detail? Possibly not. It links in perfectly with the concept of Floyd and his colleagues as the falsely illuminated ones.

Notice also the blas?? humour with which the three men discuss the excavated "finding".

Floyd, "I'd just like to say I think you guys have done a wonderful job. I appreciate the way you've handled this thing."

Halvorsen, "Well, the way we see it, t's our job to do this thing the way you want it done and we're only too happy to oblige."

... Floyd, "I don't suppose you know what the damn thing is?"

Halvorsen, "Well, all we know is it was buried four million years ago."

Floyd, "Well, you guys have really come up with something."

This is all said within ear shot of the pilots, which totally contradicts Floyd's lecture to the council about the "need for absolute secrecy". He also flatly refused to talk about the monolith when questioned by Smyslov when he could have eased Smyslov's concerns by offering an alternate explanation of some kind.

Remember also that Floyd spoke in the council room about "the grave potential for social shock and cultural disorientation contained in this present situation — if the facts were made public without proper preparation and conditioning. "I believe this to be one of the most important lines of dialogue in the whole movie. The term "adequate preparation and conditioning" is a user-friendly term for propaganda. Obviously they are trying to either hide or falsify some major event that will widely affect the human race.

An explanation for all this may be that the council are about to stage a discovery of extra-terrestrial life. The rumours of "something being dug up on the moon" and the "reliable intelligence reports" of something having been found of an "unknown origin" can be understood as standard propaganda practice. In propaganda public opinion is often tested or conditioned by deliberate information "leaks" or falsified rumours. The party responsible for putting out the information encourages it to spread behind the scenes, yet publicly denies its authenticity - just as Floyd does when questioned by Smyslov. So the conversation on the moon bus could be Floyd and his council colleagues deliberately jesting with each other in ear shot of the pilots in order to further spread the rumour.

Looking at the council meeting again it's not difficult to notice that the meeting has been scripted by its three central characters. Floyd and Bill are privately whispering to each other before the meeting starts. After Floyds introduction speech, he asks if there are any questions. Bill then asks how long the cover story will have to be maintained. Of course Bill already knows the answer because he has just been privately chatting to Floyd. Notice how utterly silent the rest of the group are. If you strip away the pretence, Floyds talk is basically a scripted question and answer session. It is a mystery as to whether the rest of the council are in on the propaganda stunt or are being manipulated into spreading the rumours.

In an ultimate reflection of the films surface narrative, which is basically a "cover story" for Kubrick's hidden narratives, the famous poster of 2001 features the deceptive tagline "An epic drama of adventure and exploration".

The entire dialogue of the council meeting scene is embedded with hidden narrative innuendos. An amusing example is the presence of a parallel or mirrored reality, as featured in the excavation site. Dr Halvorsen introduces Floyd to the group and then walks around the right side of the table and back to his seat in a way that virtually mirrors Floyds movement around the table on the left side. The two characters also look very much alike and when Floyd addresses the group he says "nice to be back again" as if he has just got up and introduced himself twice. He then delivers a message from a Dr Howell, perhaps encouraging us to "howl" with laughter at the double identity joke.

He tells the group that their discovery "may well be one of the most important in the history of science", but he mentions nothing about what that discovery is. If this film is about the discovery of alien intelligence then why doesn't he say something specific to that effect? He does however pass on the "appreciation" of the aforementioned myterious "Doctor Howell" for the many "sacrifices" they have had to make. Again, this is very vague. What sacrifices?

After cutting to a close up shot, Floyd makes comments about "conflicting views" and "opposition to the cover story" and that he sympathizes with the groups "negative views". These comments could apply to some of the deliberate visually continuity errors, such as images being flipped vertically and horizontally, or to the hidden narratives.

The camera angle now switches back to a wide shot as Floyd says "well, this is the view of the council". Again this could be hinting at the mirrored reality theme. Is Floyd referring to his own physical view of the room or to our view (the films audience)? The position Floyd is stood in while speaking this line is also probably the position the camera was in when his pre-recorded briefing of the Jupiter mission was filmed. Floyd would have been sat in his chair in the middle of the desk.

He next says "the purpose of my visit here is to gather additional facts and opinions on the situation and to prepare a report recommending when and how the news should eventually be announced".

Again, why so vague? What is "the situation" that he is waffling about and why does he hesitate before speaking the word "news"? Perhaps because the "news" announcement is a grand lie to the public.
There is another interpretation for the meeting room scene, which could be running in parallel with the theme of a faked alien artefact discovery, and this is most evident in an unbelievable continuity error. All of the characters movements as they walk about the council room are occurring under full gravity identical to Earth's. This is supposed to be a moon base, but the photographer practically runs around the table.
Everywhere else in 2001 we find careful attention paid to convincing gravity effects. The hostesses wear grip shoes that fasten their feet to the floor and aboard the Discovery Poole and Bowman walk carefully about the pod bay indicating that they are wearing grip shoes as well.

Now I know it's easy to pass off the Earth like gravity in the council meeting as a simple continuity error, but we only need to look at the shots leading up to the council scene to discredit such a dismissive explanation. As Floyds landing craft approaches the Clavius base three astronauts are seen standing on a lunar mountain top with their backs to us, overlooking the base.

Notice that they are discussing something and pointing down at the base. One of them then walks away to the left and starts preparing to take a photo.
The choreography of these three men parallels that of Floyd and his two closest colleagues in the council room and both scenes feature photographers, but the walking movements on the lunar surface are slow and careful by comparison.

So why would Kubrick depict low gravity in the lunar surface shot and then completely forget about it for the council meeting scene? Surely somebody on set would have pointed this out to the director. No, the gravity differences are most likely exaggerated as part of yet another hidden narrative.

So have you guessed what this other hidden narrative is yet? Well, basically it is communicating another controversial subject — the fake moon landings theories. Now before you shake your head in disbelief and disagreement, remember what I said about conspiracy theories and the polarization effect. The truth often lies somewhere in the middle.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:16 pm    Post subject: 2001: A FAKE ODYSSEY? part two Reply with quote

My intention here is not to try and convince you that the moon landings were faked.

I am simply interpreting what I believe to be subjective themes expressed in 2001. Even if Kubrick did believe the moon landings were faked then that doesn't make it so.

So let's explore this idea further. The astronaut on the mountain top prepares to take a photo as Floyds landing ship floats in on the left. It doesn't take a great leap of logic to realize that he will be taking photos of Floyds moon landing, which is paralleled by the photographer taking photos of Floyd in the council room.

Considering that the meeting is supposed to be highly secretive, why the hell is this guy taking pictures anyway? Why is he only taking photos of Floyd and why the various angles?

For potential insight into this puzzle I recommend you seek out a documentary film called "Dark Side of the Moon". This strange film explores a rumour that Stanley Kubrick may have filmed fake moon landing footage for the US government in return for massive budgets on his films. The film states that Kubrick was approached on the contention that if communication with the astronauts were to fail during the moon landings then false backup footage would be needed to keep the public satisfied about this great historical event. The film features interviews with Kubricks wife, Christiane, and other people associated with the director. It shows photographs of fake moon landing sets in which Kubrick had apparently left photographs on the ground to try and expose the landing as a hoax — and so on. At the end of the film it is revealed that the interviews have been scripted and that the whole documentary is actually poking fun at moon landing conspiracy theories. To prove this Christiane and the other people interviewed are shown in the end credits getting their lines wrong and laughing.

One of the weirdest things about the "dark side of the moon" mockumentary is that political heavyweights such as Henry Kissinger and ex-CIA director Donald Rumsfeld are also shown laughing at the end of the film, as if they also were acting in the scripted interviews. Why would such powerful and influential men take time out of their schedule to act in a silly conspiracy mockumentary?

Note: one of the members on the forum for this site recently explained that the director of Dark Side of the Moon, William Karel, lifted interview footage from another of his own documentary films called The World According to Bush and placed that footage out of context in Dark Side of the Moon. It's odd that a supposedly serious documentary film maker would risk his own reputation by making a film such as Dark Side of the Moon. Is the film a determined attempt to scramble the debate about the whether the moon landings were staged? Did William Karel really believe the moon landings were fake, while disguising his message within a "comedy" film?

Was Karel just going through a weird phase and decided to make a useless film for his own amusement?

Even after almost forty years the conspiracy theories over the moon landings have not subsided. There are all kinds of video documentaries, articles and web pages that argue both sides of the debate and the subject has even made it's way into other Hollywood movies such as the fake Mars landings in the sci-fi film Capricorn One.

Before showing you the other moon landing conspiracy clues in 2001, I must mention that the first US moon landings were broadcast on the 20th July 1969, but the film 2001 was released on the 6th April 1968 — over a year in advance. So how could Kubrick have been giving out conspiracy messages about a major event that hadn't even happened yet? As I said the truth is often somewhere in the middle ground. Here are some possibilities.

⦁ Kubrick mistakenly believed that the moon landing project was going to be faked and so he tried to expose it in advance.

⦁ Kubrick was asked to film back up footage, but the footage was not needed due to a successful landing and transmission.

⦁ The conspiracy theory is true, Kubrick did film the fake footage and it was broadcast for the world to see.

⦁ The first moon landings were unmanned and so fake footage of astronaut involvement helped boost the public relations aspect.

⦁ The first moon landings were faked but the later ones were genuine.

⦁ There are no conspiracy messages in 2001 at all and people like myself have misinterpreted the film.

My contention is that, right or wrong, Kubrick was convinced the moon landing project was a conspiracy in the making and hence he embedded a fake moon landing narrative in 2001. Here are my additional observations in this respect.

The long sequence of colour filtered landscape shots before the Renaissance room seem random, but the fact that they take up such a lengthy section of the film suggests that they are of paramount importance. They are often perceived to be the landscapes of an alien planet, but why are they so unconvincing?

With the huge budget and talented crew he had, Kubrick could have filmed something much more impressive - the lunar landscape special effects. from earlier in the film, demonstrate what he was capable of.
There are absolutely no signs of organic life in the "alien" terrain — only rock formations, but yet we see vast expanses of water, which suggest there should be life.

I believe this was Kubrick's way of trying to tell us that the lunar landscape footage broadcast in 1969 was filmed on Earth in some rocky region that could be made to pass for the moon, and that false filtering was somehow used to make the footage convincing.
Sound far-fetched? Well, remember I'm not saying that the moon landings actually were faked, just that Kubrick believed they were.

Let's go back to the lunar landscape scenes and pay close attention to the footage. Most of these lunar lansdscape shots have also been colour filtered in the film, but to a very faint degree that bypasses our conscious attention. Depending on which shot you're looking at the moonscapes are either blue, green, purple or yellow.

It's extremely subtle messaging. The rocky landscapes during the dawn of man, the lunar surface shots and the colour filtered alien landscape sequence are the same terrain. The presence of lakes and oceans in the end sequence drives the message home that these landscapes are definitely not the moon. They are Earth.

Note: Something else worth considering about the presence of oceans is that water is a valued resource to all life, but the apes are seen battling over a tiny pool of muddy water in the films opening sequence.
Exaggerated colour filtering is a part of 2001s visual code and is boldly expressed in several of the marketing posters and production stills. Compare the following poster with its corresponding footage from the dvd. Not only have the colours been drastically altered in the poster, but the footage of Poole's parents has been turned to black and white. The orange goggles Frank is wearing also communicate the colour filter theme.

Given all these clues, it could be that the lunar landing shots of 2001 are actually fake moon footage that Floyd has been showing to his colleagues in the council room. This would mean that the council meeting takes place either on Earth or on the Torus station. This also explains the presence of full gravity and would be yet another variation on the "film within a film" motif put forth in previous chapters.

The vague council meeting dialogue also fits well with the contention that Floyd and his colleagues are conspiring to publicly stage the moon landings (as well as intending to fake the discovery of extra terrestrial intelligence). For example, the comment "I completely sympathize with your negative views" could be an innuendo about the colourization themes. The comment about "the potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation" may be a warning that the operation must be done convincingly.

There are even more details in the council meeting scene to support this fake moon landing interpretation. One of the most famous of the moon landing conspiracy claims is that the US flag is seen blowing in the wind on the lunar surface even though there is no atmosphere on the moon. Here we see a US flag, which is very prominent in some of the close ups of Floyd, and there's an unidentified blue flag on the right. Both of these flags are seen faintly moving during the wide shots, as if blown by a mysterious wind.

Also look at the ceiling. Its unsophisticated mottled grey could pass for an out of focus view of the moon's surface. The colours of the floor, chairs, water flasks and desks are also similar to those of a cloudy sky.
If we apply the vertical flipping suggested by the letter "i" in the octahedron sequence and the matching celings of the Torus station that reappear as floor tiles in the renaissance room, then we may actually be seeing a subtle depiction of the fake moon surface accompanied by an Earth sky - and of course the US flag.

Lastly, in another classic Kubrick film, The Shining, young Danny is seen wearing a sweater with a cartoonish depiction of an Apollo moon mission rocket - perhaps hinting that the moon landings are equivalant to a childs fairy tale.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
scotpens
Starship Captain


Joined: 19 Sep 2014
Posts: 871
Location: The Left Coast

PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2017 7:55 pm    Post subject: Re: 2001: A FAKE ODYSSEY? part two Reply with quote

Gord Green wrote:
. . . There are no conspiracy messages in 2001 at all and people like myself have misinterpreted the film.

YESSS!!! By George, you've got it!

Gord Green wrote:
The long sequence of colour filtered landscape shots before the Renaissance room seem random, but the fact that they take up such a lengthy section of the film suggests that they are of paramount importance. They are often perceived to be the landscapes of an alien planet, but why are they so unconvincing?

Maybe because you're looking at them from today's perspective, with all the advances in SFX technology in the intervening half-century? I thought that whole "psychedelic" sequence was pretty cool back then. "Mind-blowing," as we used to say.

Gord Green wrote:
Well, remember I'm not saying that the moon landings actually were faked, just that Kubrick believed they were.

Filming on 2001: A Space Odyssey actually began in December 1965 -- three-and-a-half years before the Apollo 11 landing. The first "moon landing hoax" conspiracy theories didn't start appearing till the mid-1970s.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2017 10:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Scottpens wrote:
And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

And sometimes you could check out the date of the original post!

Still, food for thought.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
scotpens
Starship Captain


Joined: 19 Sep 2014
Posts: 871
Location: The Left Coast

PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2017 11:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Gord Green wrote:
And sometimes you could check out the date of the original post!



Irony doesn't always travel well.


Last edited by scotpens on Thu May 04, 2017 5:03 pm; edited 1 time in total
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2017 11:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I appreciate your reading of the post, because the point I was trying to make is that sometimes we tend to over analyze the details.

I'm sure Kubrick left very little to the obvious in his films (except perhaps for SPARTACUS, his most Hollywood influenced movie.), but 2001 ALSO was one of his most micro engineered opuses.


Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
Skullislander
Solar Explorer


Joined: 13 Jul 2016
Posts: 74

PostPosted: Thu May 04, 2017 5:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just got some money in for my cartoon art so I treated myself to a batch of blu-rays, including 2001.

I first saw the movie in 1986 on VHS tape and to be honest the clarity was pretty basic.

Today I have no TV thru choice and most movies I see at home are front-projected onto a screen.

2001 is a prime candidate for this approach and I look forwards to seeing it like this later this week.

Its pretty boring in bits to me personally however there is no denying it is a real landmark film.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Fri May 05, 2017 1:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Skull, I think you'll find that 2001 ASO is not just a movie.....It's an experience!

It truly is a film you don't just watch....you feel.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
Skullislander
Solar Explorer


Joined: 13 Jul 2016
Posts: 74

PostPosted: Fri May 05, 2017 12:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Very Happy Very Happy Very Happy Very Happy
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Sun Oct 22, 2017 12:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

From Dec. 2014 issue of SIGHT & SOUND magazine.
I made the pictues a little bigger than usual for easier reading. A great piece with art I haven't seen elsewhere.

















Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
alltare
Quantum Engineer


Joined: 17 Jul 2015
Posts: 351

PostPosted: Sat Mar 10, 2018 2:10 pm    Post subject: Happy 50th Anniversary Reply with quote

An interesting article from Wall Street Journal:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey-saw-into-the-future-1520609361

WSJ won't usually allow reading the whole article unless you subscribe, so here's the full text.
---------------------------------------------

How Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Saw Into the Future
Michael Benson

Fifty years ago next month, invitation-only audiences gathered in specially equipped Cinerama theaters in Washington, New York and Los Angeles to preview a widescreen epic that director Stanley Kubrick had been working on for four years. Conceived in collaboration with the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was way over budget, and Hollywood rumor held that MGM had essentially bet the studio on the project.

The film’s previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film’s iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick’s panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.

Audience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day’s reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie “a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.” And yet that afternoon, a long line—comprised predominantly of younger people—extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee.

Stung by the initial reactions and under great pressure from MGM, Kubrick soon cut almost 20 minutes from the film. Although “2001” remained willfully opaque and open to interpretation, the trims removed redundancies, and the film spoke more clearly. Critics began to come around. In her review for the Boston Globe, Marjorie Adams, who had seen the shortened version, called it “the world’s most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before, or for that matter, anywhere. The film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life.”

Although incomprehensible by prevailing Hollywood standards, Kubrick’s cryptic, mostly dialogue-free structure fit well with the radical avant-garde artistic innovations of the period, and the movie was an immediate countercultural hit. John Lennon quipped, “‘2001’? I see it every week,” and David Bowie was inspired to record his hit single “Space Oddity” just under a year later—a clear allusion to the film. “2001” became a genuine late-’60s cultural happening and a bellwether of the decade’s generational divide. With ticket sales brisk from day one, the production ended up the highest-grossing film of 1968. “As for the dwindling minority who still don’t like it, that’s their problem, not ours,” Clarke wrote. “Stanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank.”

Fifty years later, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is widely recognized as ranking among the most influential movies ever made. The most respected poll of such things, conducted every decade by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine, asks the world’s leading directors and critics to name the 100 greatest films of all time. The last BFI decadal survey, conducted in 2012, placed it at No. 2 among directors and No. 6 among critics. Not bad for a film that critic Pauline Kael had waited a contemptuous 10 months before dismissing as “trash masquerading as art” in the pages of Harper’s.

Although the film’s vision of humanity expanding throughout the solar system proved overoptimistic, its portrait of a screen-based, technology-mediated future now seems almost uncannily accurate, and it devastatingly evokes the dehumanization that can result from such communication. As for the cyclopean HAL-9000 supercomputer, often considered the most human character in “2001,” it foreshadowed our anxious contemporary discussion about the potentially dystopian impact of artificial-intelligence technologies.

The film’s extraordinary predictive realism was entirely premeditated, the result of Kubrick and Clarke’s questing, cerebral commitment to scientific and technical accuracy. By all accounts the production was run less like a big-budget Hollywood production than an extended futurological R&D exercise. A broad slate of top aerospace and computer companies were brought on board as consultants and advisers, with such leading innovators as IBM , Bell Labs and Hewlett-Packard all playing important roles.

In the summer of 1965, Kubrick received two detailed Bell Labs reports written by A. Michael Noll (a trailblazer in the development of digital arts and 3-D animation) and information theorist John R. Pierce (who coined the term “transistor” and headed the team that built the first communications satellite). They recommended that the spacecraft systems in “2001” all feature multiple “fairly large, flat and rectangular” screens, with “no indication of the massive depth of equipment behind them.” Flat screens were, of course, unknown in the ’60s—at least outside of movie theaters—and they helped to ensure 2001’s futuristic sheen.

The role of the film’s sentient supercomputer, originally named Athena, grew throughout the film’s development, under the influence of discussions that Kubrick and Clarke held with MIT cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky and British cryptologist and mathematician I. J. Good. The computer’s physical look resulted from advice provided by IBM’s influential design bureau-think-tank—the Apple Industrial Design Group of its day—then led by industrial designer Eliot Noyes.

In July 1965, Noyes and his team provided drawings of astronauts floating within a kind of “brain room”—a concept that Kubrick initially rejected but later recognized as having intriguing dramatic possibilities. The astronaut Dave Bowman’s methodical lobotomization of the computer after it—or rather, “he”—had killed off the rest of the crew, conducted within the dappled red confines of the film’s remarkable brain-room set, remains one of the most powerfully disturbing scenes ever committed to celluloid.

HAL stood for “Heuristic Algorithmic,” a Minsky suggestion. The computer’s homicidal tendencies emerged only gradually, forcing the production to remove its original IBM nameplate and to substitute another acronym—a kind of subliminal cognate, with “HAL” being displaced from “IBM” by only one letter in each case, something that both Kubrick and Clarke strenuously denied was intentional.

Another fascinating result of the production’s consultation with Big Blue was the film’s forward-looking flat-screen tablet computers, which retained their IBM logos and were called “Newspads.” Constructed long before such technologies were feasible, the movie’s seemingly portable Newspads were actually welded to the tables on which they appeared casually placed, with hidden 16mm film projectors recessed underneath to provide content for their frosted-glass displays.

In the film’s final cut, the Newspads were only used by the astronauts to watch a TV program ostensibly from the BBC and were thus largely indistinguishable from the various other displays embedded in the sets. But the production had received permission from the New York Times to use its logo, and Kubrick’s designers had mocked up a digital front page for the Newspads, complete with multiple story choices to be accessed by touch-screen command. If the page had been used, the movie would almost certainly now be seen as having predicted the internet.

More than four decades later, however, the predictive futurism of “2001” was decisively ratified when Apple released its first iPad in 2010. Samsung issued a similar device a year later, and Apple immediately sued for patent infringement. That August the Korean company filed a response in federal court in San Jose, Calif., asserting that Apple couldn’t possibly have invented the iPad because the device had already been envisioned in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Samsung’s unusual defense, which featured both stills and YouTube links from the film, was ultimately ruled inadmissible as evidence, but it confirmed what many fans have long appreciated: the continuing relevance and still-startling prescience of Kubrick’s masterpiece.

—Mr. Benson is the author of “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece,” which will be published on April 3 by Simon & Schuster.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Gord Green
Galactic Ambassador


Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 2940
Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 3:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The following is an excerpt from Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson, a book which reveals the making of the classic Kubrick film and analyzes its impact on popular culture. The book will be released by Simon & Schuster on April 3; pre-order it here.

Prologue: The Odyssey

The twentieth century produced two great latter-day iterations of Homer’s Odyssey. The first was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which collapsed Odysseus’s decade of wandering down to a single city, Dublin, and a seemingly arbitrary day, June 16, 1904. In Ulysses, the role of Ithaca’s wily king was played by a commoner, Leopold Bloom—a peaceable Jewish cuckold with an uncommonly fascinating inner life, one the author effectively allowed us to hear. Serialized from 1918 to 1920, it was published in full in 1922.

The other was Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the islands of the southeastern Mediterranean became the solar system’s planets and moons, and the wine-dark sea the airless void of interplanetary, interstellar, and even intergalactic space.

Shot in large-format panoramic 65-millimeter negative and initially projected on giant, curving Cinerama screens in specially modified theaters, 2001 premiered in Washington, DC, on April 2, 1968, and in New York City the following day. Produced and directed by Kubrick and conceived in collaboration with Clarke, one of the leading authors of science fiction’s “golden age,” the film was initially 161 minutes long. Following a disastrous series of preview and premiere screenings, the director cut it down to a leaner 142 minutes.

Where Joyce’s strategy had been to transform Odysseus into a benevolently meditative cosmopolitan flaneur, and to reduce ten years of close calls and escape artistry to twenty-four hours in proximity of the River Liffey, Kubrick and Clarke took the opposite approach. Deploying science as a kind of prism, which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries entirely transformed our sense of the size and duration of the universe, they vastly expanded Homer’s spatiotemporal parameters. 2001: A Space Odyssey encompassed four million years of human evolution, from prehuman Australopithecine man-apes struggling to survive in southern Africa, through to twenty-first-century space-faring Homo sapiens, then on to the death and rebirth of their Odysseus astronaut, Dave Bowman, as an eerily posthuman “Star Child.” In the final scene, the weightless fetus returns to Earth as Richard Strauss’s 1896 composition Thus Spoke Zarathustra pounds cathartically on the soundtrack.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the meddlesome gods of the ancients have become an inscrutable, prying alien super-race. Never seen directly, they swoop down periodically from their galactic Olympus to intervene in human affairs. The instrument of their power, a rectangular black monolith, appears at key turning points in human destiny. First seen among starving man-apes in a parched African landscape at the “Dawn of Man,” 2001’s totemic extraterrestrial artifact engenders the idea among our distant ancestors of using weaponized bones to harvest the animal protein grazing plentifully all around them. This prompting toward tool use implicitly channels the species toward survival, success—and, eventually, technologically mediated global domination.

After vaulting into that happy future in a match cut that has deservedly acquired the reputation of being the single most astonishing transition in cinematic history, 2001 leads us to understand that a lunar survey team has discovered another monolith, this one seemingly deliberately buried under the surface of the Moon eons before. When excavated and hit by sunlight for the first time in millions of years, it fires a powerful radio pulse in the direction of Jupiter—evidently a signal, warning its makers that a species capable of space travel has arisen on Earth. A giant spacecraft, Discovery, is sent to investigate.

While parallels with The Odyssey aren’t as thoroughly woven into the structure of 2001 as they are in Ulysses, they certainly exist. Seemingly prodded into action by flawed programming, a cyclopean supercomputer named HAL-9000—represented by an ultracalm disembodied voice and a network of individual glowing eyes positioned throughout Discovery—goes bad and kills off most of the crew. The sole surviving astronaut, mission commander Dave Bowman, then has to fight the computer to the death. Apart from dueling a cybernetic Cyclops, Bowman’s name references Odysseus, who returns to Ithaca, strings the bow of Apollo, shoots an arrow through twelve axe shafts, and proceeds to slaughter his wife’s suitors. A nostos, or homecoming, was as necessary to Kubrick’s and Clarke’s Odyssey as it was to Homer’s.

Much like Joyce and in keeping with their expansive vision, 2001’s authors took parallels with Homer as a starting point, not a final word. When they started work in 1964, one initial motivation was to study the universal structures of all human myths. They were aided by Joseph Campbell’s magisterial study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which provided them with a template for the conscious creation of a new work of mythology. Early in their collaboration, Kubrick quoted a passage to Clarke concerning the universal rite of passage of any mythological hero, which Campbell suggested invariably encompasses “separation–initiation–return.” This tripartite structure “might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth,” Campbell wrote—a term he borrowed from Joyce, who’d coined it in his last major work, Finnegans Wake.

Campbell’s research helped Kubrick and Clarke delve into the archetypal workings of human mythological yearnings, expanding that template to encompass not just one story and hero, and not even just one species, but rather the entire trajectory of humanity—“from ape to angel,” as Kubrick put it in 1968. In this, they also overtly referenced Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1891 philosophical novel Also sprach Zarathustra, with its concept of mankind as merely a transitional species—sentient enough to understand its animal origins but not yet truly civilized. It was an idea both could get behind, Clarke with his innate optimism about human possibilities, and Kubrick with his deeply ingrained skepticism. It was this seemingly contradictory mesh of worldviews that gave 2001: A Space Odyssey its exhilarating fusion of agnosticism and belief, cynicism and idealism, death and rebirth.

In Clarke, Kubrick had found the most balanced and productive creative partnership of his career. While the director made all the critical decisions during the film’s production, the project started out—and in important ways remained—a largely equal collaboration between two very different, singularly creative characters. Like Joyce, both were expatriates, with the Kubrick family finally settling for good in England during the making of 2001, and Clarke being a resident of Ceylon—later Sri Lanka—from 1956 until his death in 2008.

At 2001’s release in 1968, Kubrick was thirty-nine, the same age as Joyce when Ulysses was being serialized. He was at the pinnacle of his abilities, having already made two of the twentieth century’s great films. Each was a devastating indictment of human behavior as expressed through the military mind-set. Released in 1957, Paths of Glory served as a comprehensive indictment of the hypocrisy of the French general staff during World War I—though its meanings were by no means limited to any one army or conflict. And his 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove, written in collaboration with Peter George and Terry Southern, cut to the core of the Cold War nuclear arms race, equal parts savage critique and caustic black comedy. A resounding critical and commercial success, it set the stage for the large-scale studio support necessary to realize 2001.

Kubrick’s method was to find an existing novel or source concept and adapt it for the screen, always stamping it with his own bleak—but not necessarily despairing—assessment of the human condition. A self-educated polymath, he was in some ways the ultimate genre director, switching virtuosically between established cinematic categories and forms with a restless analytical intelligence, always transcending and expanding their boundaries. During his career, he reinvented and redefined the film noir heist film, the war movie, the period costume feature, the horror flick, and the science fiction epic, each time transforming and reinvigorating the genre through extensive, time-consuming research followed by an uncompromising winnowing away of clichés and extraneous elements.

Kubrick treated every film as a grand investigation, drilling down into his subject with a relentless perfectionist’s tenacity as he forced it to yield every secret and possibility. Once he’d decided on a theme, he subjected it to years of interrogation, reading everything and exploring all aspects before finally jump-starting the cumbersome filmmaking machinery. Having concluded his preproduction research, he directed his pictures with all the authority of an enlightened despot. Following a stint as hired-gun director on Spartacus in 1960, he conceived of a personal kind of slave revolt, never again working on a project he didn’t produce himself. While in practice, studios such as MGM footed the bills and exerted some influence, this gave him near-complete artistic independence. (Still Spartacus, which Kirk Douglas both produced and starred in, marked Kubrick’s definitive induction into big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. The picture, which dramatized the bloody trajectory of a Thracian gladiator as he led a successful uprising against Rome, won four Oscars and a Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture Drama.)

As the ne plus ultra example of Kubrick’s methods, 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t just rooted in extensive preproduction fieldwork, it continued throughout—an uninterrupted, well-funded research project spanning its live-action filming and extending across its postproduction as well (which, given the importance of its visual effects, was actually production by another name). All the while, the director and his team pioneered a variety of innovative new cinematic techniques. Highly unorthodox in big-budget filmmaking, this improvisatory, research-based approach was practically unheard of in a project of this scale. 2001 never had a definitive script. Major plot points remained in flux well into filming. Significant scenes were modified beyond recognition or tossed altogether as their moment on the schedule arrived. A documentary prelude featuring leading scientists discussing extraterrestrial intelligence was shot but discarded. Giant sets were built, found wanting, and rejected. A transparent two-ton Plexiglas monolith was produced at huge expense and then shelved as inadequate. And so forth.

Throughout, Kubrick and Clarke remained locked in dialogue. One strategy they’d agreed on in advance was that their story’s metaphysical and even mystical elements had to be earned through absolute scientific-technical realism. 2001’s space shuttles, orbiting stations, lunar bases, and Jupiter missions were thoroughly grounded in actual research and rigorously informed extrapolation, much of it provided by leading American companies then also busy providing technologies and expertise to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. In late 1965, George Mueller, the czar of the Apollo lunar program, visited 2001’s studio facilities north of London. Apollo was then still flight-testing unmanned launch vehicles, while NASA launched the precursor Gemini program’s two-man capsules in an ambitious series of Earth-orbiting missions. After touring the film’s emerging sets and viewing detailed scale models of its centrifuges and spacecraft, the man in charge of landing men on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth—the ultimate Odyssean voyage yet accomplished by the species—was impressed enough to dub the production “NASA East.”

Clarke was fifty when 2001 came out. When Kubrick first contacted him early in 1964, he had already enjoyed an exceptionally prolific career. Best known as a formidably imaginative science fiction novelist and short-story writer, he was also a trenchant essayist and one of the twentieth century’s leading advocates of human expansion into the solar system. Apart from his fictional and nonfictional output, he had played a noteworthy role in the history of technology. Clarke’s 1945 paper on “extraterrestrial relays,” published in the British magazine Wireless World, proposed a global system of geostationary satellites, which, he argued, would revolutionize global telecommunications. While some of the ideas he presented had already been in circulation, he synthesized them impeccably, and the paper is regarded as an important document of the space age and the information revolution.

Clarke’s fictions were greatly influenced by the work of British science fiction novelist Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), whose seminal Last and First Men and Star Maker encompassed multiple phases of human evolution across vast timescales. Clarke’s early novels Childhood’s End (1953) and The City and the Stars (1956) likewise encompassed sweeps of time so expansive that monumental civilizational changes could be examined in great detail. Still considered his best work, Childhood’s End closed with the human race being shepherded through an accelerated evolutionary transformation by a seemingly benevolent alien race, the “Overlords.” In it, humanity is depicted as obsolete—destined for replacement by a telepathically linked successor species composed, oddly, of children. Clarke’s strange vision of mankind outgrowing its childhood was also influenced directly by the great Russian rocket scientist and futurist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who, in an essay published in 1912, stated, “Earth is the cradle of the mind, but humanity can’t remain in its cradle forever.” As the central utopian credo of the space age, Tsiolkovsky’s pronouncement would find direct expression in 2001’s final scenes.

As with Ulysses, 2001 was initially greeted with varying degrees of incomprehension, dismissal, and scorn—but also awed admiration, particularly among the younger generation. Its first screenings were a harrowing ordeal, with audience reactions at the New York premiere including boos, catcalls, and large-scale walkouts. Most of the city’s leading critics dismissed the film, some in personal and humiliating terms. And as with Joyce, some of Kubrick’s and Clarke’s peers went out of their way to disparage the film. Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, possibly the greatest filmmaker of the twentieth century, found 2001 repellant. Calling it “phony on many points,” he argued that its fixation on “the details of the material structure of the future” resulted in a transformation of “the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to the truth.” Soon after its release, Clarke’s friend and fellow science fiction writer Ray Bradbury wrote a negative review decrying 2001’s slow pace and banal dialogue. He had a solution, though: it should be “run through the chopper, heartlessly.”

In retrospect, these initial waves of hostility and incomprehension can be understood as a result of the film’s radical innovations in technique and structure—another similarity to Ulysses. They were followed by grudging reappraisals, at least on the part of some, and a dawning understanding that a truly significant work of art had materialized. 2001: A Space Odyssey is now recognized as one of the exceedingly rare works that will forever define its historical period. Put simply, it changed how we think about ourselves. In this way, too, it easily withstands comparison to James Joyce’s masterpiece.

In both of these modernist Odysseys, audiences were asked to accept new ways of receiving narrative. While Joyce didn’t invent stream of consciousness and interior monologue as literary devices, he brought them to new levels of proficiency and complexity. Likewise, Kubrick didn’t create oblique auteurist indirection and dialogue-free imagistic storytelling—but by transposing it into the science fiction genre and setting it within such a vast expanse of space and time, he effectively kicked it upstairs. 2001 is essentially a nonverbal experience, one more comparable to a musical composition than to the usual dialogue-based commercial cinema. An art film made with a Hollywood blockbuster budget, it put audiences in the unaccustomed position of “paying attention with their eyes,” as Kubrick put it.

Joyce’s tidally impressionistic portrait of provincial Dublin allowed us to sample previously inaccessible internal currents of human thought and feeling. Kubrick’s and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey presented a disturbing vision of human transformation due to technology, positioning all our strivings within a colossal cosmic framework and evoking the existence of extraterrestrial entities so powerful as to be godlike. Each was highly influential, with innumerable successor works striving to equal their philosophical breadth and technical virtuosity. Neither has yet been surpassed

_________________
There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail
Custer
Space Sector Commander


Joined: 22 Aug 2015
Posts: 932
Location: Earth

PostPosted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 11:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

From the "Diary" section of Today's Times:

Quote:
It is 50 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Mark Mason, TMS’s trivia guru, tells me that its making was disturbed by England winning the [Soccer] World Cup. Stanley Kubrick’s rotating space station was shot in very slow motion, six seconds per frame, which meant it needed to turn for three hours to get enough footage. It was only when reviewing the film a few weeks later that Kubrick noticed the station lurch violently for a few frames. Checking the shooting log, he discovered it occurred on July 30, 1966, at the same time as Geoff Hurst’s winning goal. Clearly the cameraman’s attention was on Wembley rather than outer space.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
bulldogtrekker
Space Sector Admiral


Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 1024
Location: Columbia,SC

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 11:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

19 things you probably don't know about '2001: A Space Odyssey'
Michael Cavna, Washington Post



Fifty years ago this week, Stanley Kubrick's epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" opened, first in Washington, D.C., and then New York. The influential film, which won an Oscar for its pioneering special effects, has been called Kubrick's "crowning, confounding achievement" and a "quantum leap" in technological achievement by film critic James Verniere, who notes that Steven Spielberg called "2001" the Big Bang of his filmmaking generation.
Timed to the anniversary, author Michael Benson's latest work, "Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arther C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece" (Simon & Schuster), debuted Tuesday, and within Benson's devotional telling is a wealth of intriguing facts and anecdotes.
Here are 19 things you probably don't know about "2001," according to Benson and other sources.


1. "2001" was originally going to show a precursor to the internet.

Kubrick's intrepid band of futurists, Benson writes, "had seemingly already visualized important aspects of (a) new technology's implications." The film's props would include a "2001 newspaper to be read on some kind of television screen." And if the prop, which had a New York Times logo, had appeared in the film, it would have been "read by an astronaut on the iPad-type tablet computers" aboard the ship Discovery.
"Had Kubrick followed through and actually presented the newspaper in this way," the author writes, "there's no doubt that '2001: A Space Odyssey' would be remembered today as an important harbinger of the internet."

2. The filmmakers also envisioned a world with self-driving cars.

"In early chapter drafts," Benson writes, "the character who would become David Bowman is named Bruno," and he rides a "computer-guided Rolls" along the "auto-highway" bisecting the great "Washington-New York complex," child and dog in tow.

3. Neither Kubrick nor collaborator-author Arthur C. Clarke believed they had ever seen a great sci-fi film.

Kubrick's two-page introductory letter to Clarke teased the "possibility of doing the proverbial 'really good' science fiction movie." Clarke's reply: "The 'really good' science fiction movie is a great many years overdue.".......

16 more items at the link below......

For full story, click on below link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-2001-a-space-odyssey-19-things-20180404-story.html
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    ALL SCI-FI Forum Index -> Sci-Fi Movies and Serials from 1950 to 1969 All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 9, 10, 11  Next
Page 4 of 11

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group