Post by moviemouth on Feb 20, 2021 5:07:07 GMT
These 2 paragraphs echo my thoughts about the movie in a more precise way then I could do and also points out information I wasn't aware of. Movies about the nature of existence, particularly having to do with human consciousness is something that interests me to no end.
Here is the entire article - www.reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/2013/space_odyssey
Science, art, and the spiritual have been linked for centuries across pictorial traditions, but they achieve a unique synthesis in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an audaciously cerebral epic that, whenever seen or contemplated in its original 70mm format, never feels like anything less than a miracle of human imagination. The relevance of 2001 has kept pace with the times, too, as it coolly examines our relationship with technology and the grand mystery of cosmic reality, which grows richer and stranger the more we learn about the physics of massive phenomena we cannot directly observe (dark matter, black holes) and the even spookier action of quantum-scale particles. Grappling seriously with our place in the universe as individuals and as a species, 2001 was the first modern sci-fi movie; mature, intelligent, technically precise, and ambiguously metaphysical, the film mostly dispenses with conventional narrative in order to represent, for much of its 160-minute duration, the physical and psychological experience of “being in space.” More importantly, by coding his unusually realistic visual journey with mythic totems and baffling set pieces, Kubrick heightens the subjective experience of viewers, leaving the logic of the whole intentionally fuzzy and open to innumerable readings. Forty-seven years after its debut, 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to fascinate audiences, influencing filmmakers as artistically dissimilar as George Lucas, Alfonso Cuarón, and Christopher Nolan, and casting a long, monolithic shadow over any filmic depiction of interstellar space, all without losing its seemingly timeless mystique.
Leaving aside the enormously complex technical accomplishments of the film in the pre-computer age, which are well documented in books by Jerome Agel, Piers Bizony, and others, there is more to the story of 2001’s enduring appeal. The world Kubrick brings to life is not “the future.” Nor is it a place of love or striving, or a celebration of mammalian rationality and Apollo-era ingenuity, though it does hold the grace and beauty of aeronautic design in high regard. On one level, the film dramatizes the limits of our know-how and intelligence, and quite radically questions whether intelligence itself is uniquely human. A famous cut—the tapir bone thrown skyward by a Dawn of Man hominid, matched to a flying spacecraft in the film’s “present”—and the uncannily poignant dying vocalizations of a malignant HAL 9000 computer are two expressions of this theme. Yet 2001 is also an origin myth, an alternate history of the universe in which notions of evolution (Schelling’s idealism as much as Darwin’s biological materialism) are jumbled with extraterrestrial sentience, hippie-friendly astrological mysticism, and contemporary theories on the multi-dimensionality of space and time. Scientific thinking informs the production design and ambience of 2001, while a few inspired figurations of the Absolute—a consciousness-raising monolith, a death/birth wormhole passage, a Star Child incubating in a space bubble “beyond the infinite”— are wedded to elements of pure science fantasy. The power of mixing myth and empirical science in this way was essential to Kubrick’s enterprise. An avid reader of hard science and science fiction (as well as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which he asked co-writer Arthur C. Clarke to absorb), he aimed to connect audiences with realities that exist on a scale far vaster than we can comprehend.
Here is the entire article - www.reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/2013/space_odyssey
Science, art, and the spiritual have been linked for centuries across pictorial traditions, but they achieve a unique synthesis in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an audaciously cerebral epic that, whenever seen or contemplated in its original 70mm format, never feels like anything less than a miracle of human imagination. The relevance of 2001 has kept pace with the times, too, as it coolly examines our relationship with technology and the grand mystery of cosmic reality, which grows richer and stranger the more we learn about the physics of massive phenomena we cannot directly observe (dark matter, black holes) and the even spookier action of quantum-scale particles. Grappling seriously with our place in the universe as individuals and as a species, 2001 was the first modern sci-fi movie; mature, intelligent, technically precise, and ambiguously metaphysical, the film mostly dispenses with conventional narrative in order to represent, for much of its 160-minute duration, the physical and psychological experience of “being in space.” More importantly, by coding his unusually realistic visual journey with mythic totems and baffling set pieces, Kubrick heightens the subjective experience of viewers, leaving the logic of the whole intentionally fuzzy and open to innumerable readings. Forty-seven years after its debut, 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to fascinate audiences, influencing filmmakers as artistically dissimilar as George Lucas, Alfonso Cuarón, and Christopher Nolan, and casting a long, monolithic shadow over any filmic depiction of interstellar space, all without losing its seemingly timeless mystique.
Leaving aside the enormously complex technical accomplishments of the film in the pre-computer age, which are well documented in books by Jerome Agel, Piers Bizony, and others, there is more to the story of 2001’s enduring appeal. The world Kubrick brings to life is not “the future.” Nor is it a place of love or striving, or a celebration of mammalian rationality and Apollo-era ingenuity, though it does hold the grace and beauty of aeronautic design in high regard. On one level, the film dramatizes the limits of our know-how and intelligence, and quite radically questions whether intelligence itself is uniquely human. A famous cut—the tapir bone thrown skyward by a Dawn of Man hominid, matched to a flying spacecraft in the film’s “present”—and the uncannily poignant dying vocalizations of a malignant HAL 9000 computer are two expressions of this theme. Yet 2001 is also an origin myth, an alternate history of the universe in which notions of evolution (Schelling’s idealism as much as Darwin’s biological materialism) are jumbled with extraterrestrial sentience, hippie-friendly astrological mysticism, and contemporary theories on the multi-dimensionality of space and time. Scientific thinking informs the production design and ambience of 2001, while a few inspired figurations of the Absolute—a consciousness-raising monolith, a death/birth wormhole passage, a Star Child incubating in a space bubble “beyond the infinite”— are wedded to elements of pure science fantasy. The power of mixing myth and empirical science in this way was essential to Kubrick’s enterprise. An avid reader of hard science and science fiction (as well as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which he asked co-writer Arthur C. Clarke to absorb), he aimed to connect audiences with realities that exist on a scale far vaster than we can comprehend.