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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31 Number 19 August 6, 1968

Films

page 9

Films

2001: Bush-babies in orbit

"Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a masterpiece, I do not use a word like that freely; I'm not exactly sure what it means, But there are times when no other description seems adequate, and this is one of those times.

"It is an unspeakably beautiful motion picture, a triumph of surpassing technical mastery and probing thematic eloquence. It is everything we ever dreamed it could be. Everything and more. It belongs in the same league with Antonioni's Red Desert, Godard's Alphaville and Emshwiller's Relativity. That's what I mean by a masterpiece."

These emotional opening paragraphs from a one-page review in the Los Angeles Free Press of May this year by Gene Youngblood, are indicative of the reception this film has had in most places.

Time (bogged down by fractory flights of bitchy verbose waffling) eventually declared somewhere, "thus, though it may fail as drama, the movie succeeds as visual art, and becomes another irritating, dazzling achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of the most erratic and original talents in the US cinema."

It is history, now, to know that it took Kubrick five years and $12 million to make. Kubrick, who fashioned cinema into trends with his films, Fear and Desire, The Killing, Killer's Kiss, Paths of Glory, Lolita, Spartacus and Dr Strangelove.

He is only 39 years old, and because of the ambiguities the film contains—the irritating riddles, the enigmatic self-questioning, the efficacy of terminating science fiction as a hallucinogenic Marienbad—he sets it up before the world, in an almost demented orgiastic gallacious fashion, and may gross more money (in New York over $3 million in 11 weeks) than any other film in cinema history.

Youngblood continues, "You sit there completely overwhelmed, numbed, staggered by what you are seeing. You try, but you can't guess how they did it. So you just relax and let it take you in. And when it has taken you in with technological achievements beyond your imagination, then it says something very meaningful and very beautiful. When the curtain closes you sit for a moment recollecting your wits."

Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic, a virile ans sensible critic, unfortunately disliked most of the film: "Because this is a major effort by an important director, it is a major disappointment."

Kubrick's explanation

To complement matters, due to the cinema world's unbelief in most of this movie, and taking their sheer in enjoyment from its visual attributes, Kubrick recently (end of June) made a world wide press statement from New York in Newsday, explaining the film.

Kubrick: "Here's where you get into what you might call the bonus area of ambiguity. Because there is a very simple literal explanation on the lowest possible plot level. An artifact is left on earth by extraterrestial explorers 5 million years ago.

"Another artifact is left on the moon so that it can signal man's first step into the universe. Another is placed in orbit around Jupiter, as a relay. When he gets to Jupiter, the astronaut is swept into a force field which takes him into another dimension of time and space in another part of the galaxy. He's put into the equivalent of a human zoo, so that he can be studied. His life passes in this room, and to him it seems like moments. He may either be spending his entire natural life there or it may be telescoped or it may be compressed into minutes.

"He dies and he's reborn in some enhanced way. He comes back to earth as an angel or as a superman or in some other way transfigured. On the simplest level, that's what 'happens'. Now the fact that you're not using words and the thing does have resonating implications beyond that, I think is good. On other levels, it means anything anybody is feeling about it. I don't feel I should speculate beyond the lowest possible storyline of the plot. Obviously any feeling that you have about it that doesn't contain contradiction, is valid. If it stirs your emotions, your subconscious, our mythological yearnings, then it has succeeded."

One of the most extraordinary sequences in the film is towards the end when astronaut Keir Dullea hurtles through cosmic human experience in his space pod to Jupiter. To satiate intelligentsia, and evoke curiosity of this unbelievable finale, we quote from the best.

John Coleman (New Statesman) There follows the sort of visual experience one has had intimations of in dreams, hardly to be described. We rush down encroaching walls of brilliant, shifting colours, which abruptly become oppressive ceilings and floors. Sometimes we are going headlong into the heart of something, a flaring white sun; sometimes beautiful, baleful whorls of pigments float up. Then there are fantastic landscapes, swept over, precipices and ravines in alarmingly wrong tints (like irridescent Niteglo ink) until the last cool descent."

Time: "An avalanche ol eerie, kinetic effects attacks the eye and bends the mind. Kubrick turns the screen into a planetarium gone mad and provides the viewer with the closest equivalent to psychedelic experience this side of hallucinogens . . . Some of the most dazzling visual happenings and technical achievements in the history of the motion picture."

Youngblood: "And then comes the incredible denouement, the wordless final half-hour of the film which becomes a tour-de-force display of abstract cinema and surrealistic imagery as powerful and inventive as any I've seen in the so-called "underground" or anywhere."

"Daisy, Daisy . . ."

You have never seen anything like it. For the kids, no doubt the August 9 NZ-wide release may prove a damp squib —during its nearly 3 hours, there is just over 40 minutes of dialogue! As the gargantuan cylindrical "Hilton Space Station No. 5" revolves serenely around the earth, the complete and original Johann Strauss Blue Danube Waltz is heard. The film abounds in natural humour and pathos inside the monstrous vehicles, Hal 9000, the human computer with feelings, goes mad, and with his silky voice says: "Look Dave, I can see you're upset about this". Circuit by circuit is withdrawn and his computer-nerve goes. He says, "I'm afraid," and after reciting his birth and history sings "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do," winding down to a basso profundo growl.

In space on one of the "stations", there is a Howard Johnson earthlight room, a colour transmission from a BBC-12, a Bell Telephone visual style (coins are asked to be inserted), and a traveller looks worriedly at the 10 long commandments to be obeyed in using the zero gravity toilet.

The music Kubrick uses is of undeniable importance. In the opening sequence of the sun rising in the void of the universe and during the long prologue "The Dawn of Man", we hear the opening bars to Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. Unthinking nature is what the motif expressed by Strauss means; corresponding to the source of the composition, where, magnificently exemplified (the sun as unchanging nature), is the monumental orchestral crescendo, that is used again and again in the film.

There are excerpts from Khachaturian's Gayeneh Suite and many strange and evocative sections from Gyorgy Ligeti's (instrumental) Atmospheres and (vocal) Mass.

Youngblood concludes his wonderful rave: "Finally comes the beautiful sequence where Dullea wrinkled and old finds himself in a strange colonial room with a luminous floor. Seated at a table eating off a silver plate is another image of himself, this time even more wrinkled and older. This image looks toward the bed, in which is lying even an older image of Dullea—so old and emaciated, in fact, that he incredibly resembles the humanoid apes in the "Dawn Of Man" prologue. The primitive creature reaches out timidly with his palsied hand and we see the huge metallic monolith standing in the middle of the room.

Suddenly there is that timeless image of the two globes with the sun bursting over them, and the old humanoid creature has transformed into a foetus with huge eyes drifting through space as one tiny element of the cosmos. The space traveller has discovered the secrets of life, the essence of the cosmos, and thus obliterates himself."