44th Anniversary of 2001

[blueshift]

I was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes thrillers with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Brice. I would
often wonder if some director would come along and produce a film where the audience got to
play the role of Sherlock Holmes. Stanley Kubrick would fill the bill. It appeared that
Kubrick saw film as something that did not really have to do with reality but was a form
of a dream, where an audience sits at the interface between reality and a dream sequence
on the screen. Just as many characters in our dreams have strong meaning to us, the story
line in Kubrick films were often latent with errors that go unnoticed to the conscious mind
but are sensed by the latent mind. Time and space were toyed with just as they are in our dreams and
characters would always have voids, making the audience scratch heads and fill in those voids.
To Kubrick, depth of a character was not filling in tons of detailed reasons why someone
behaved the way one does. That was too much like school was taught, shoveling
answers at people and tying all loose ends together, suffocating students. Depth of a
character lies in the voids that invite the audience to take part. So each of his characters branch into the audience, giving different meaning to each sitting there watching.

Dr. Strangelove ended with a rising sun.
2001 begins with a rising sun.
2001 ends with a star child starring at the audience.
A Clockwork Orange begins a teen age menace starring at the audience.

The symbols there and within those three films form a trilogy.
Pieces of Strangelove appeared in 2001.

Barry Lyndon, the Shining and Full Metal Jacket would be the second trilogy.

2001 was released on April 6, 1968 and Kubrick predicted that it wouldn't take off until
after the third week. It would be New Moon on the third week and the Michael Todd Cinestage,
where it would play for 52 straight weeks, was located on the east side of Dearborn at Lake
Street in Chicago. So when I walked into the theater the film was to begin with the Sun to my back and
the Moon in between. With the opening shot of the film, the Sun would be facing me with the
Moon and Earth in between. The north pole in the real world was to my left while the north
pole of the Moon and Earth in the opening shot was to my right, a violation of mirror
symmetry. Since the universe started with a violation of mirror symmetry, why not start a film the same way?

With the Earth located between the Moon and the Sun in the film's opening shot, any astronomer would notice that Grimaldi and Gassendi could easily be seen facing the audience. That puts the far side of the Moon facing the Earth, an impossibility. Kubrick would lace the film with many violations of the laws of physics but made the film
appear to be "real", a dream-like sequence. Kubrick would bombard the audience's senses more than any other science fiction film. His camera work would always leave the sense that free falling, body language, eating and breathing dominated the film, just as a newborn must first sense those same things at birth.

Rob Ager would provide by far the best analysis of his films I have read and he has many web pages
of evidence to back up his case.

http://www.collativelearning.com/200...sis%20new.html

The Shining would be his deepest film by far from my view although Barry Lyndon is now starting to draw
a lot of attention. Scroll down to the two vids on the Shining in the following you tube
videos:

http://www.collativelearning.com/Dr%...0chapter3.html

[ToSeek]

It occurred to me when spotting the title of this thread that 2001 was the first non-Disney film my parents took me to. Feeling old now....

[Gemini]

My first exposure to 2001 was the novel. I was at a Junior Beta Club (Middle School Honor Society) convention in Huntsville in 2005, and absolutely bored out of my mind. That night, we went to a mall that had a small bookstore, and in it, I found a copy of Clarke's novel. I remembered how fondly a guy who owned a website (oddly, the same place that caused me to first discover the BABB way back in the day) I frequented spoke of it and though it was worth a shot. I plowed through it two days, thinking it was the coolest thing I had read ( my first real hard Sci Fi novel) because it was about a plausible (past) future and not a pure fantasy novel like the stuff my friends were reading at the time (no offense to Potter or LOTR fans). I got the movie on DVD for my birthday that year.

[Swift]

It occurred to me when spotting the title of this thread that 2001 was the first non-Disney film my parents took me to. Feeling old now....

Probably pretty close to my experience too. I remember I went to see it as a birthday present for my 10th birthday.

[vonmazur]

Barry Lyndon is getting some attention? Wow! That was one of my favorite Kubrick films, just behind Paths of Glory and Strangelove...Were it not for some education in esoteric religious doctrines, I would not have understood 2001...

The soundtrack to Barry Lyndon was perfect!! Where else is one to get a surround sound full blast version of the Hohenfriedberger???

Not to mention, The Chieftains and Sean O'Radia's "Women of Ireland..."...."Lillybulero","The British Grenadiers"....etc...

Dale

[HenrikOlsen]

I had read 2001 before seeing the movie, so I was never really confused about what was going on. And that was in my early teens.

[blueshift]

I had read 2001 before seeing the movie, so I was never really confused about what was going on. And that was in my early teens.

I read the book as well but after looking through Rob Ager's analysis, he piled up too much evidence that the film and the book are not as related as one might think. The book is too much like Star Trek and the film is more visual and Rob's analysis of all of Kubrick's films simply show a different slant to things altogether. Kubrick thought that everything written in science fiction was horrible. He wanted to change the way stories were told. I agree with him. I couldn't stand Star Trek. All films concerning the future want to keep all of our present day culture's values intact, something simply not likely to happen. I'll admit that some present day sci fi flims have thrown in a little oriental culture, showing humans chasing after or struggling against their own inner demons that they see in the behavior of others but I didn't get any sense of any recognizable culture in 2001 like one sees in all other sci-fi films. If anything, the characters were bored with their own culture, being turned off to even birthday greetings and being told they are heroes to children. Kubrick left that undefined, allowing the future to take its own course and allowing the audience to fill things in on their own.

[JustAFriend]

Saw the movie when it came out (I was about 12 at the time and had read the book,
so I ended up spending 1/2 the movie explaining it to my parents.)

If you didn't get a chance to see it in the original 70mm Cinerama, you haven't really seen it.
The effects were jaw-dropping and Jupiter looked like 3D.

[Swift]

If you didn't get a chance to see it in the original 70mm Cinerama, you haven't really seen it.
The effects were jaw-dropping and Jupiter looked like 3D.

Some time when I was in college, so this would have been late 70s, they did a brief re-release in the regular theaters. I remember it was exam week, and I had a day without either exams or the need to study for them, so I went to see it in one of the big, pre-multiplex, Times Square movie theaters in New York. I went to like the 2 p.m. show and I think there were 3 people in the place, so it was like a private screening, big 70mm version. It was amazing.

[mike alexander]

JustAFriend is correct. I saw it opening week in Cleveland (Loew's Ohio?) on the Cinerama screen. We were fifth row, just off center, and the screen pretty much filled the visual field. Ur-IMAX, I guess. Amazing experience for an eighteen year old.

[blueshift]

Michael Cinestage had a curved screen with speakers behind the screen so that sounds from anyone or anything in the film came right from that area of the screen. They used 3 projectors at once to display the film.

Where the book differed from the film was in very many numerous areas. If one follows the phases of the Earth and Moon one will see phase shifts that push time forward two weeks, backward two weeks, back and forth several times, especially the scenes of Earth from Tycho and right at the excavation pit. Then, with the sound of a screech, the Earth changes phase once again in a second, becoming a crescent, and is displaced directly overhead of the monolith, an impossibility from Tycho.

The most absurd of phase relations was that it was Full Moon as the Pan Am flight approached the space station and, once inside and chatting with Russian astronauts, one can see the Full Earth out the window as well as in the phone booth. The only way that could happen is to locate the Sun between the two bodies, right near the space station

. Angular momentum, linear momentum and Newton's 3rd law are all violated in the confrontational scenes. The book didn't catch up on that and neither did a lot of scientists including A.C. Clarke who only admitted to one mistake being made, Bowman's taking a deep breath instead of pushing it out before opening the pod hatch, propelling him into Discovery.

[Jim]

... If one follows the phases of the Earth and Moon one will see phase shifts that push time forward two weeks, backward two weeks, back and forth several times, especially the scenes of Earth from Tycho and right at the excavation pit. Then, with the sound of a screech, the Earth changes phase once again in a second, becoming a crescent, and is displaced directly overhead of the monolith, an impossibility from Tycho.

The most absurd of phase relations was that it was Full Moon as the Pan Am flight approached the space station and, once inside and chatting with Russian astronauts, one can see the Full Earth out the window as well as in the phone booth. The only way that could happen is to locate the Sun between the two bodies, right near the space station ...

Well, sure, Kubrick saved his best, "this'll fool 'em" sfx for the Apollo hoax.

[Buttercup]

Oh great. Now I'm going to have "Thus Spake Zarathustra" stuck in my head for a while...
Bom-BOM!!!

I have the novel and the DVD. Love it.

[NEOWatcher]

The most absurd of phase relations was that it was Full Moon as the Pan Am flight approached the space station and, once inside and chatting with Russian astronauts, one can see the Full Earth out the window as well as in the phone booth. The only way that could happen is to locate the Sun between the two bodies, right near the space station

I don't see that. The Pan Am approach never showed the moon. The moon was shown right before the Pan Am appeared on the screen, but not with the station.
The station shots were with full Earth, and there doesn't seem to be anything indicating any of thier relative positions, so the station could have been in full sun the whole time on the opposite side of the Earth than the moon was.
Here's the clip

[blueshift]

I don't see that. The Pan Am approach never showed the moon. The moon was shown right before the Pan Am appeared on the screen, but not with the station.
The station shots were with full Earth, and there doesn't seem to be anything indicating any of thier relative positions, so the station could have been in full sun the whole time on the opposite side of the Earth than the moon was.
Here's the clip

52 seconds into the clip it shows the Full Moon. For the position of the space station to witness both a Full Earth and a Full Moon the station would have had to been displaced much closer to the Sun while the two bodies were at first quarter and that is hardly a place to put a station as a stop off before the Moon. Secondly, watch the shadows on the space station with a Full Earth in that background at about 1:42 into the clip. With the angle of the station to the viewer the shadows of the space station indicate the the Sun is to the upper right and that we should see a gibbous Earth phase. Angles of shadows onto the space station plus the angle of the station's tilt to Earth suggest no full view of the rotating Earth would have been possible from inside the space station unless the space station's wheel was face-on toward Earth like M51 is to astronomers on Earth.

[mike alexander]

Oh, just sit down and enjoy the movie.

[blueshift]

Oh, just sit down and enjoy the movie.

That is how I enjoy it. Kubrick was a puzzle maker and toying with his mind provoking puzzles to see how they operated is an enjoyable hobby.

[Disinfo Agent]

For me the worst liberties the movie takes with astronomy are not in the space station sequence, but in the Jupiter sequence. The phases of the moons and the planet don't always seem to match with their positions relative to each other and to the sun, in some shots the moons look too big, in some the monolith looks too big... This annoyed me a little the first time around, but nowadays I give the movie a pass considering how long ago it was made, and the accuracy and attention to detail it still managed to have overall, and that when Kubrick stretched the physics it was usually to achieve an esthetic effect.

I'm more annoyed when much more recent movies, made with all the comforts and possibilities of CGI, and with a couple more decades of space exploration to draw from, still have ludicrous astronomy.

[NEOWatcher]

52 seconds into the clip it shows the Full Moon.

Do we have evidence of where we are seeing it from at that point? We don't know there's a space station until 5 seconds later. (at least thats how it appears to me)

Secondly, watch the shadows on the space station with a Full Earth in that background at about 1:42 into the clip.

You must have mis-typed that or something. That's the inside of the spacecraft. I looked for other shots, but they all looked normal to me.
I guess it's just an interpretation problem when looking at something in 2D. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to enjoy it the way I see it.

Oh, just sit down and enjoy the movie.

Normally I do. But after I've seen something enough times, it's fun to add a little mental activity along with the viewing for a bit added entertainment and point of discussion.

[blueshift]

Do we have evidence of where we are seeing it from at that point? We don't know there's a space station until 5 seconds later. (at least thats how it appears to me)

You must have mis-typed that or something. That's the inside of the spacecraft. I looked for other shots, but they all looked normal to me.
I guess it's just an interpretation problem when looking at something in 2D. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to enjoy it the way I see it.


Normally I do. But after I've seen something enough times, it's fun to add a little mental activity along with the viewing for a bit added entertainment and point of discussion.

Whoops! You are right about the times I printed. Look from 3:00 to about 3:28. He does put a gibbous phase on the Earth at that point but the tilt of the space station would make viewing any Full Earth impossible. Yet it's the flight of the lunar shuttle bus that is the most obvious in revealing phase shifts and earthly position changes that cannot happen. Even the motions on the Moon contradict physics. While astronauts in full gear moved more slowly due to heavy suits and being at 1/6 g, the motions within the conference room on the Moon suggested it was taking place at 1 g.

All this doesn't really matter that much. I would poke into Rob Ager's site to see some very elaborate and detailed points about the film and the meaning of the monolith and that is what I was focusing on in the OP. He did a really good job IMHO. In fact, it is that neat British accent along with the way he organizes those videos that sets a such a Kubrickian atmosphere to things from this American's view.

[peteshimmon]

I had a little puzzle seeing Lawrence of
Arabia over Easter. The guy who falls off
the camal in that hot place and has to start
walking. Looked quite dramatic seeing the Sun
coming up in front of him as he walks. But wait,
if he is heading to Akaba in the west the sun
should rise behind him, right? Had to get my
copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom down to
confirm.

I know...just enjoy the darn film

[publiusr]

One of my early memories was of this film. Couldn't wait for "2010" when it came to theatres. In the mid 1980s, I could almost still believe the future depicted in A Space Odyssey.

When 2001 rolled around, we didn't get Space Station V--but 9/11

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...Station_V.html
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=6876

A sad end
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/...item=tr0748344
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/h...cestation.html

"The Future"
b 1968 d. 2001
RIP

[mike alexander]

For me, the most unbelievable part of the film was HAL going bonkers. Looking back, I think it more likely either Dave of Frank would slip a cog. I wrote a parody with such a circumstance and a) the first editor sent it back with revulsion so fast I think it came through hyperspace; b) the second sent it back saying I stopped the story just as it was getting interesting. Go figure.

[blueshift]

For me, the most unbelievable part of the film was HAL going bonkers. Looking back, I think it more likely either Dave of Frank would slip a cog. I wrote a parody with such a circumstance and a) the first editor sent it back with revulsion so fast I think it came through hyperspace; b) the second sent it back saying I stopped the story just as it was getting interesting. Go figure.

There has been all kinds of thoughts concerning HAL going off the wall. Some think it was due to being programmed to reveal everything while being programmed to conceal things at the same time. Others thought that HAL was like Pinocchio, wishing to become human and knowing that making an error is something that humans do. HAL then made the miscalculation expecting to be forgiven as any child might receive from humans and once disconnection was discussed HAL then became enraged. Not only did he commit murder but HAL then did what any sibling does to a rival by locking him out of the "house". Still others think that HAL was doing no different than the humans did at the beginning of the film, resorting to murder in order to evolve. Yet another opinion had the chess game setting the stage and one poster at Rob's site showed how the different moves the astronauts made within the craft matched the moves and order that the pieces of chess made in the chess game. According to some chess experts HAL cheated but Frank didn't pick it up.

My favorite quote? "Just what do you think you are doing Dave? Dave, I can see you are upset about all this"

[Jim]

I think HAL, having had a lot of time to think about it, decided that only he was capable of successfully completing the mission. So he removed the humans. Or tried.

It was actually very logical.

[blueshift]

I think HAL, having had a lot of time to think about it, decided that only he was capable of successfully completing the mission. So he removed the humans. Or tried.

It was actually very logical.

Even from an illogical point of view one could come to that conclusion. There are a lot of people who like to think that only they are capable of successfully completing some mission right here on Earth. Not all conclude that removing others is the solution but Arthur Clarke sure thought that way, wishing to see hippies exterminated.

[jokergirl]

I was re-reading 2001: A Space Odyssey the other week, due to a random pick from my bookshelf.

It depresses me.
Not because of the not going to Jupiter etc. (well... because of that too, especially with space programs being stopped left and right and so on...) but:
I read a line about a random topic: Jupiter exploration, tablet PCs or other tech and go: "Ha! We know/have/fixed that by now!"
Then I think: "But did we have that in 2001?"

...well, Censored.

[Disinfo Agent]

Not all conclude that removing others is the solution but Arthur Clarke sure thought that way, wishing to see hippies exterminated.

What are you talking about?

[blueshift]

What are you talking about?

Yeah, I was surprised myself. It is contained in Rob Ager's pouring through the Kubrick archives. You might find it yourself in the link from the OP. If I find it first I will give you the precise video clip. Ah, here it is:

http://www.collativelearning.com/200...apter%201.html Click on the first video clip. It continues right into the second video clip. It appears that he just wanted all hippies to commit suicide, exterminating themselves. But his attitude expressed in the second suggested more to some but can be taken several ways.

[Disinfo Agent]

I watched the first film. I wouldn't rush to judge Clarke's words without knowing more about the context in which he said them. For example, even though no context is provided by the author of the documentary, my interpretation of Clarke's words was somewhat different from the one you seem to have made: not that hippies should exterminate themselves because he didn't like them, but that he saw no point in "tuning out" from the world (a hippy motto), and thought one might as well commit suicide.

As an aside, I think the documentary overstates the differences between the movie and the book. While there are obvious differences in scenes, places, and so on, the overall themes and even the basic plot are very much the same, except that Kubrick's ending is more open to interpretation. Even there, Clarke's novel is also open-ended, though not as mystical.

Thanks all the same for the reply and the link.