Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
It was astonishing to see 2001 outdoors in Cambridge last Saturday night, and not just because of the huge venison pie Amanda had arranged and which defeated us all. The Institute had set up a big outdoor screen and had the luck to show this on the driest evening in recent memory; it was no washout, but a cool blackout lit by the occasional real star as well as the multitude of filmed ones. Excellent! But what on earth - or off it - to make of the actual film?
I'd seen it before, yes, and remembered enough to amaze my friends by saying Leonard Rossiter is in it (how did he manage to be cast as a Russian scientist?) but my last viewing had been on a small telly many years ago. This was quite a different experience. Seeing 2001 on a really big screen made me realise its full visual power and why it's undeniably a great film - better than I'd thought before. What's most impressive is not so much the grand visions of space, though they are good, as the way the story is told visually, or at least through sound and vision, at least as much as through dialogue. The first twenty minutes or so are without speech, until Dr. Floyd arrives at the space station on his way to Clavius, where Rossiter quizzes him about the rumoured epidemic before accepting in a not very convincing accent that it would have been очен трудний for him to say much. A key sequence, that, which together with the briefing at Clavius tells us what we need to know to understand the film's plot, such as it is. The final quarter or an hour or so is also largely silent, as Dave Bowman goes somewhere none of us quite understand. It's this skill at visual narrative that, I think, lifts 2001 out of the ordinary and takes us away from drama on film towards a total visual and sound experience - a bit like Wagner's imagined Gesamtkunstwerk. Music of course is also essential to this, which the unexpected use of the Blue Danube. That's great fun, although I felt that the pieces of Ligeti's music that were used worked better, really. Kubrick was surely right, though, to reject the original score composed by Alex North - it's just too expected, somehow, this music.
There are a number of other interesting aspects of the film, though. First, its convincing and in parts funny vision of the technological future, which matches the predictive accuracy of Arthur C. Clarke. There is space station, however little we hear about it; and we can now make video phone calls. I mention this because it contrasts so sharply with the film's total lack of imagination about social change. It's quite true that by 2001 air stewardesses really were still esses on the whole, but I think 2001 is a bit shocking actually in the lack of progress it sees in gender relations in the future. A shame.
Interpreting the film, now. We had a lot of fun afterwards discussing all the sorts of things it could possibly mean, without really reaching agreement, although the favourite seemed to be a reading that saw the monolith - which appears on earth early on at the dawn or man, and in other forms on the moon and then in space beyond Jupiter - as intervening in human evolution, spurring man to be born and then to evolve into something beyind humanity. Mm. This was a bit too spiritual and mystical for my taste, a bit too much of a Nietzschean take on evolution. For me, 2001 is a "contact" movie, firmly and clearly about the encounter with another intelligent civilisation, a civilisation which existed long before man though it may not exist now. The monoliths seem to me to be radio receivers and transmitters of the kind that might well be needed for interplanetary communication. Well, my approach may just be the result of my reading Intelligent Life in the Universe by Shlovskii and Sagan, an astonishing book written in the sixties. I've long been a fan of Carl Sagan - when I saw his TV show Cosmos as a youngster I liked the idea of a well-clever bloke who spoke with a strange emphasis and was called Carl - and this book just blows your mind. Shlovskii and Sagan were impressive scientists and 100% serious, but were prepared to contemplate the posisbility that Mars's moons were artifically created by a long-dead intelligence, for instance. Wow. You can see why I think what I think about the monolith. Sagan is well worth searching for on YouTube.
The trouble for both me and the mystical evolutionists is how to make sense of the juxtaposition on the monolith and HAL threads of the story. Why did HAL malfunction? Was it just a coincidence that the computer should turn on man just as he investigated Jupiter? How are the two stories connected? Well, this website makes a decent case for an intepretation that achieves that connection. Even if it is mystical. And a bit long-winded.
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