Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey

Michel Chion

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Author wrote bestselling bfi Publishing title David Lynch 'a joy to the reader of film criticism' Choice; 2001: A Space Odyssey to be re-released in cinemas in The Spring and highly likely to be the focus of much media attention in the new year; Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), based on Arthur C Clarke's novel, is one of the most ambitious films ever made, an epic of space exploration that takes in the whole history of humanity (as well as speculation about its future). A technical triumph that stands up today 2001 is topical also because of its meditation on the relationship between man, animal and machine. Haunting and enigmatic, it's a film that contains myriad images that seem to defy any explanation. In this multilayered study, acclaimed critic and theorist of film sound Michel Chion offers some keys to understanding 2001. Setting the film first in its historical and cultural contexts (the Space Race, the Cold War, 1960s psychedelia), Chion goes on to locate it within Kubrick's career. He then conducts a meticulous and subtle analysis of its structure and style, arguing that 2001 is an 'absolute film', a unique assemblage of cinema's elements, through which pulses a vision of human existence. 'Animals who know they will die, beings lost on earth, forever caught between two species, not animal enough, not cerebral enough.' In a supplementary chapter Chion argues that Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), is a return to 2001, a final statement of its concerns. And in a series of appendices Chion provides production details, an analytic synopsis, credits and a consideration of the legacy of 2001.

Chapter One

The Genesis of 2001

Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’

Shot in England where Kubrick lived, 2001 had had a long and complex gestation. Kubrick eventually removed an enormous amount of the screenplay’s original narrative scaffolding (a documentary prologue about aliens, a voice-over commentary, Alex North’s epic score), a scaffolding that at the outset was an integral part of the project, and without the support of which he doubtless could not have constructed this singular film.

It was also Kubrick’s intention to bring special effects and models to an unprecedented level of perfection and to depict weightlessness more convincingly than ever – in other words, to create a world governed by new laws.

His previous film, Dr Strangelove, was a great popular success, and Kubrick was hailed by the New York Film Critics Circle as Best Director of 1964. At that time he was interested in the question of the existence of extraterrestrials, and began to think about collaborating with the English science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of (among many other works) a 1948 short story entitled ‘The Sentinel’, which would provide a point of departure for 2001.

In this brief piece, whose action is set in 1996, a geologist exploring the moon’s surface discovers an object shaped like a pyramid. It has been there for a very long time and was clearly constructed by ‘someone’. Its purpose is unknown (a building? a shrine?). But the geologist makes another surprising discovery: this object was preserved from meteorite attacks and cosmic dust by a sort of invisible hemispheric wall; stones thrown against it bounce off, proving that it is still being protected by active forces and is not the product of some defunct lunar civilisation. In a word, the object comes from elsewhere.

It takes twenty years of work to break through its invisible shield, whereupon closer examination indicates that a highly evolved technology from another solar system produced it. Whoever put it there, speculates the narrator, must have landed on the moon a very long time ago. They must have determined that the earth had the most suitable environment in the solar system for intelligent life, and then placed this monument on its satellite as an outpost sentinel, so that man would only see it if he attained a sufficiently high degree of evolution to be able to leave the ‘cradle’ of his own planet – and (the other necessary condition) if he has not already destroyed his species with the atomic energy he has unleashed. Now that the sentinel has been discovered and its protective shield forced open, it has stopped emitting its signal. Maybe those who left it there will show themselves, unless they are too old and in decline. The only thing to do from here on, says the narrator, is to wait; but ‘I do not think we will have to wait for long.’¹

Even if the screenplay by Kubrick and Clarke would end up being far more complex, bearing only a distant relationship to this short story, it is interesting to see the germ of several elements that remained in the film. There is, of course, the idea of an object left on the moon for centuries; there is also the secret relationship between the object and mankind’s mastery of the nuclear menace. We know that in the film the object did not end up in the form of a four-sided pyramid. In addition, instead of the idea of an invisible shield, the screenplay presents a monolith that has been deliberately buried; this substitution gives the object the equivalent of a protective shield, and similarly poses a challenge to humans, and suggests intention (‘Show that you are strong and smart enough to find me’). In the film, the earsplitting signal heard by the humans who start to photograph the object further suggests that the object is being protected.

The notion of the earth as a cradle that man must eventually leave also finds an echo in the finished film – ending up in the form of a gigantic Star Child, a baby who for the first time seems to be born into space and goes without maternal protection. The impossibility of escaping from the cradle seems to me to be at the heart of Kubrick’s work, and the feeling of fatality that emerges from it. Finally, the main thread running through the short story is the verb to wait, and clearly 2001, with each of its different parts setting the stage for the next, is subtended by the idea of waiting, of Advent (to take an associated word in Christian tradition that prepares for Christmas).

‘The Sentinel’ was a 4000-word short story written in 1948 for a Christmas story contest sponsored by the BBC, which rejected it. Clarke’s text was not published until 1951, as one of thirteen stories by various authors, in a short-lived magazine called 10 Story Fantasy. It was the author who exhumed it for Kubrick.

Evolution of the Screenplay

When Kubrick met Clarke in 1964 in order to develop ideas for a film about extraterrestrials, it was not especially this particular story he had in mind; rather, his interest was in the author, who had a reputation for writing ‘adult’ science fiction. Clarke, informed by Kubrick’s publicist Roger Caras of Kubrick’s desire to work with him, sent Caras a telex: ‘Frightfully interested in working with enfant terrible stop contact my agent stop what makes kubrick think I’m a recluse.’²

It is an interesting coincidence that each of the two artists became an expatriate. Just as Kubrick rarely left his home near London, so Clarke moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1956 in order to write – later boasting that his practice of working out of his home before anyone else was a precursor of electronic mail.

Born in 1917, Clarke served as president of astronautic societies³ and, in addition to his novels, was the author of a large number of popular science books. He is an exemplar, in the very diverse field of classic Anglo-Saxon science fiction, of the tendency to base fictional speculations on actual current science. Other science-fiction authors, such as Van Vogt, Philip Jose Farmer and Theodore Sturgeon, belong in the tradition of Lovecraft or mythic, fantastic or heroic fiction – not to mention the Swiftian or Voltairean strain represented by Robert Sheckley – and bother little with astronomical or technical authenticity. Two themes that recur through Clarke’s novels are contact with other civilisations, as in Rendezvous with Rama, and the question of the survival and regeneration of humanity, especially prominent in Childhood’s End.

‘The Sentinel’ is one of several short stories that Clarke and Kubrick briefly considered combining, before they made the decision to use it by itself as their point of departure. In May 1964, a contract was signed ‘for a film whose preparation was to last eighty-two weeks, until February 1967, the expected date of the Apollo programs’.⁴

Clarke’s The Lost Worlds of 2001 narrates in detail his version of this collaboration, and retraces the different forms the screenplay took as well as the many ideas that arose and evolved or fell by the wayside. First of all, they did not want to situate the film too far in the future, though they were eager not to have it become outmoded too soon either. They wanted to bring in the theme of machines, with a perfected robot; after a period as an ambulatory robot called Athena (referring to the protector of Odysseus in Homer), this ‘character’ became an invisible computer by the name of Hal.⁵ In its early stages, the screenplay dealt more with Russian–American relations, depicting the two countries working together. The authors also thought of giving extraterrestrials a role in the birth of humanity (the idea of marking the progress of evolution by the move to carnivorous existence is imputed to Kubrick, which does not surprise me). Finally, there is the idea of a kind of evolutionary process whereby ever more perfect machines take over from mankind.

This last idea, which continued to fascinate Kubrick (one of his last projects, which was well progressed when he died, concerned artificial intelligence), takes an unexpected turn in the film. 2001 allows us to imagine that these hypothetical invisible aliens who have ‘abducted’ Bowman possess technology a thousand times superior to our own. However, as the film in its final state shows nothing specific or recognisable of the aliens’ machines, we are also perfectly free to imagine the extraterrestrials as gods, and to read 2001 as an anti-technology film by drawing on old, mystical notions of power. In early versions of the screenplay, the neoclassical decor of Dave’s ‘bedroom’ has been created by robots. But if Kubrick chose to leave this undetermined in the final script, it is not so that we should reread the film in the light of his original intentions. The earlier ideas interest me as stages in a genesis, and not as the unveiling of a hidden meaning.

We know that Kubrick abhorred the idea of directly writing 2001 in the conventional form of a movie screenplay, ‘the most uncommunicative form of writing ever devised’.⁶ So he decided to write a novel with Clarke that would serve as the basis for making the film.

During the preparation and writing phase, which took place in New York (Clarke rented suite 1008 at the Chelsea Hotel), Kubrick got together to discuss ideas with a variety of scholars and artists, including Carl Sagan (whose writings inspired Robert Zemeckis’s film Contact).

Kubrick was so immersed in his project that sometimes he worried that real-life events might overtake his film and render it obsolete: for example, what if aliens were really discovered? What could his film possibly offer audiences then?

Late in 1964, a first version of the story (whose ending left the hero on the threshold of the Star Gate) was ready in novel form, permitting Kubrick to secure a contract with MGM and Cinerama. The film would be shot in 70mm Super Panavision (and part in 35mm) but would have the Cinerama label.⁷ Cinerama was originally a system that used three cameras side by side and, although its technical definition changed in the early 60s, prints continued to be struck in the three-image format and shown in a number of theatres equipped for this gigantic projection. For wider distribution, Cinerama movies made during the 60s – including How the West Was Won (1962), which used the three-image system, and 2001, in single-image format – were, after the first run, distributed in 35mm Cinema Scope copies, with the corresponding loss in definition and the frame format changes that this entailed.

In 1965, a New Yorker article described the shooting of a film with a working title of Journey Beyond the Stars (the movie already made conscious reference to 2001). Athena’s name was now Hal, having undergone a period as Socrates. Work on the screenplay, however, was stalled by numerous second thoughts and changes of mind, and the plan to release the film, already delayed in an announcement by MGM president Robert O’Brien who set it for Christmas 1966 or spring 1967 at the latest, was delayed further still.

In an interview in the New Yorker during pre-production in 1965, Clarke announced that the film ‘is set in the near future, at a time when the moon will have been colonized and space travel, at least around the planetary system, will have become commonplace’. Kubrick and Clarke characterised the film as an encounter with extraterrestrials: ‘the Odyssey unfolds as our descendants attempt to make contact with some extraterrestrial explorers’.⁸

Clarke continued, ‘There will be no women among those who make the trip, although there will be some on earth, some on the moon, and some working in space.’⁹ As we know, not much of this remains in the film. The women we see in 2001 are flight attendants, receptionists or hostesses, or they stay on earth, embodying the stability and the permanence of the family (Floyd’s daughter, Poole’s mother). The film does, however, sketchily present Elena, a Russian scientist who works on the moon and tells Floyd about her husband back on earth who studies the depths of the Baltic, so ‘I am afraid we don’t get the chance to see each other these days.’

In the same 1966 interview, Clarke told Jeremy Bernstein, ‘Sciencefiction fil...