“Every critic… who has attempted to come to terms with Stanley Kubrick's work has been made painfully aware of the limits of his own discourse. To describe a film in words—which is to say, to present to the reader in conceptual terms a series of associations of animated images—is in itself a challenge. With films which their maker has always described as a ‘non-verbal experience’ the task is rendered even more difficult. And the refusal often shown by Kubrick to comment on his art comes from his desire to conserve a margin of mystery and uncertainty. His is an oeuvre that both demands and defies analysis” (Ciment 7).
I am grateful to Michel Ciment for providing such a convenient excuse for the inevitable failings of my essay on American film writer, director, and producer Stanley Kubrick. As he says, there is a tremendous challenge that comes with trying to describe the work of Stanley Kubrick, in particular his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. After a study of twentieth century art movements within a variety of mediums, I assumed that I would be able to dissect 2001 with relative ease. Instead after viewing the film several times and reading numerous articles and books on the subject, I found myself frustrated trying to align this film with any one particular movement. My struggle to label and categorize the film, coupled with my readings of the diverse reactions and interpretations critics and historians have had to it, and to all of Kubrick’s work, has lead to my realization of the scope of 2001’s greatness as a work of art. With 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick fully exploits the potential of cinema as few directors have ever done. To see the way in which he combines sounds and images to communicate ideas is to be awed by the ability of man to externally express whatever he can hold in his head. This is the power of film, to articulate ideas and emotions that are beyond the representation of theatre, music, literature, sculpture, or painting, by inventing a language unto itself. I believe that Stanley Kubrick’s use of this visual language in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a reinvention of film form, and that the film’s excellent reception is a reflection of changing culture attitudes within the United States. What will follow in this essay is an examination of the impact and influence of 2001, why it resonated so well with audiences at the time, and a close look at this visual language that Kubrick uses to create one of the most impressive art films in the medium’s history. It is the inability of writers, such as myself, to put into words the experience of viewing 2001: A Space Odyssey that ultimately sediments it as great work of art. So please, forgive me if I’m at a loss for words.
Familiarity with Stanley Kubrick’s early life sheds some light on how he developed into the kind of filmmaker he would be in later years. Kubrick was an academic underachiever, and was unable to attend college because his marks in high school were so poor. A Graftflex camera from his father on his seventeenth birthday gave the young Kubrick some early direction. One of the first snapshots he took, of a newspaper vendor standing mournfully next to a headline announcing the death of President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, got him his first job as a photographer for Look magazine. Kubrick spent four years working for Look travelling America, developing into one of the finest photographers the magazine had on staff. His talent as a photographer is intrinsic to his success as a film director in later years. Understanding the effects of different lenses, how light acts on camera, and how to dynamically compose figures, was all knowledge Kubrick garnered working for Look. Even early in his career Kubrick’s visual acuity was evident in the beautiful noir lighting of Killer’s Kiss (1955), and the innovative camera movement using wide-angle lenses in The Killing (1956). He continued to progress as a visual filmmaker throughout his career, pioneering special low-light lenses for the candlelit scenes in Barry Lyndon (1975), warping perspective with different focal lengths in A Clockwork Orange (1971), creating elaborate, long steadicam shots in The Shining (1980), and producing his own visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s early career as a photographer is the key to his success as a filmmaker because the visual element of his films is so essential, perhaps more so than any filmmaker during the period. If his work is characterized by one overriding trademark, it is that they all speak to the audience with visual language. His ability to convey narrative, thoughts, and feelings, using just images is largely the reason why 2001: A Space Odyssey, a 140 minute film with only forty minutes of dialogue, is able to hold the viewer’s attention and invoke any kind of reaction at all.
Kubrick’s clout within the industry, and his well-documented reclusive lifestyle, both had an influence on his art. He rarely granted interviews, did not present his work at festivals, did no public speaking, and published no writing on film theory or criticism. He never lived in Hollywood, and after the success of 2001, moved to the English countryside with his family and worked largely from home. This isolation from the rest of the world allowed Kubrick to work without any outside influence. He was not a slave to critics, his peers, pop culture, or mass media. Such isolation prevented Kubrick from ever becoming overly self-referential, or from having his artistic vision clouded by external pressures. The singularity of vision within all of his films can be partially attributed to this hermitic lifestyle, but also to his reputation as an expert film craftsman. The commercial success of almost all of Kubrick’s films from The Killing onward (with the exception of Barry Lyndon, which flopped at the box office, but recovered its costs through home video sales) granted him unprecedented autonomy over his own projects, free from the meddling of the studios that financed him. Not only did he have final cut over every film he did from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Kubrick also would often refuse to show his movies to studio representatives until as late as ten days before the public release. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, the studio that released 2001, had so much faith in Kubrick, that even though the budget during shooting doubled from $5 million to $10 million, an exorbitant sum for the time, they never even approached Kubrick to discuss how shooting was progressing. Because Kubrick maintained such a tyrannical grip over his finished product, it could be said that he got closer to achieving his original vision than any film director could. This atmosphere that Kubrick was permitted to create is unprecedented in film history, and the artistic freedom he was given is a very large reason why every film he directed after Dr. Strangelove was so unique, and often so controversial. Only with this kind of artistic freedom could Kubrick conceive of such an unconventional and innovative science-fiction film like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The 1960s saw the death of the golden age of Hollywood cinema, and a transitional decade before the explosion of American independent film in the 1970s. Cinema audiences were steadily becoming younger with the surge of the post-war Baby Boomer generation. This youthful audience hungered for new and inventive films that broke away from classical tradition, which led to the rise in popularity of arthouse cinema, and in particular the work of foreign masters like Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini, Polanski, and Kurosawa. It was at this time that Stanley Kubrick released his philosophical science-fiction mind-bender, 2001: A Space Odyssey, four years after Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb struck a powerful chord with Cold War audiences, and rocketed Kubrick to the forefront of American filmmakers. To the surprise of most industry professionals, 2001 was an immediate commercial success, grossing $138 million after two releases in the United States. Critical reaction however was decidedly mixed, and early on slanted more to the side of complete bewilderment and animosity. This clash between reviewers and audiences was not entirely unforeseeable however, as Barton Palmer would later point out, “the crisis in the industry coincided with the changing demographics of the cinema going public” (Palmer 14), and “the 15-25 year olds who had responded enthusiastically to European art films, characterized by ostentatious visual and aural stylizations, responded similarly to 2001” (Palmer 13). It could be inferred then that the commercial success of 2001 was the first instance of a new generation of filmgoers asserting their tastes and interest in the cinema. Kubrick’s unusual approach, while entirely suited to the appetite of young audiences, did not provoke a very positive reaction from film critics, who are generally an older crowd. By disregarding certain Hollywood expectations for mainstream films, such as a narrative driven, character-centred screenplay, Kubrick presented a piece that defied analysis in traditional terms. Although the technical perfection with which Kubrick orchestrates his symphony of sight and sound was impossible to miss, “the film’s attractive qualities, including its visual appeals, were not generally promoted by prominent reviewers” (Palmer 14). The themes and ideas of 2001 were expressed in a way so new, so contrary to popular understanding of the medium, critics didn’t know how to respond. As per all avant-garde art works of any age, and of any form, 2001: A Space Odyssey “challenged the analytical and critical acumen of journalists and reviewers at the time” (Palmer 16). Many film critics and older audiences would recant their negative responses to the film in later years, as Kubrick’s vision of cinema as a visual and auditory art form began to be adopted to some extent by many of his slightly younger contemporaries like Spielberg, DePalma, Scorsese, and Coppola. Steven Spielberg would confirm 2001’s importance to him personally in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001), saying that “it was the first time the motion picture form had been changed. It wasn’t a documentary, and it wasn’t a drama, and it wasn’t really science-fiction” (Harlan). With 2001: A Space Odyssey Kubrick had challenged everyone’s notions of what film could be.
Not only had Kubrick’s film sparked a revolution in film form, but the content of 2001 had some very radical implications as well. Hollywood had always been successful translating novels and plays to the screen, and creating historical dramas from real life events, but never before had the large, sometimes abstract ideas of 2001 been dealt with onscreen. Although, as previously stated, it can be difficult to define what exactly the film meditates on so thoughtfully, but one can say that “2001 offers a sweeping, if provocatively reductive, and ultimately ambiguous representation of human history that is deeply Spenglerian in its faulting of Enlightenment values, such as progress, humanism, and even civilization” (Palmer 15). These post-modern concepts in 2001 display a youthful population who were beginning to see themselves, and the world they were living in differently. Spurred on by these burgeoning post-modern North American ideas, there was a rebellion by the young generation of filmgoers against old stories and the standard content of what had been put on film. “The evolving tastes of a younger audience led to a different kind of American film: visually sophisticated, intellectually engaging, intriguingly disconnected to genre, and unmindful, as appropriate, of conventions that had for more than four decades determined the shape of the American commercial product” (Palmer 23). I believe that this taste for more intelligent and aesthetically sophisticated cinema, that bore so many similarities to European films from previous years, is indicative of an American culture renaissance of sorts after World War II. While before the war, art movements had seen their start in Paris, Zurich, and Berlin, before jumping across the ocean, afterward we see the United States as the starting point for new innovations in art. These innovations included abstract expressionist painting in the 1950s, and the reactionary pop art movement in the 60s led by Andy Warhol. I think that the popular reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey reflects this uprising of American culture as the dominant and most influential force in the world. Not just in terms of art and media, but in terms of political ideas and economic structures as well. 2001 had done what young people had wanted cinema to do since the end of the 1950s; it “challenged the clichés of the brain and consciousness dominating the literature, science, and popular writings on the brain” (Landy 94). This proud sense of intellectualism that arose in America after their successful campaign in World War II I believe manifested into a desire for a new kind of film that they could be proud of, and exhibit on the world stage as art, and not just commercial fare. In Kubrick, they found a filmmaker who could stand with European directors as an equally relevant film artist. It is my belief that the excellent public reception to the content and form of Kubrick’s film marks the coming of age, the maturation of an entire nation that would eventually become the only world superpower after the demise of the Soviet Union twenty years later.
After exploring the significance of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the next logical step is to discuss what it is about the way the film was constructed that wowed audiences. Unlike most American filmmakers, Kubrick speaks to his audience using a visual, and not a verbal vocabulary. He reaches back to the earliest days of the medium and takes advantage of, what was then regarded as, the most exciting aspects of film. Kubrick’s vision of what a film should be is taken from a time when it was not influenced by theatre, literature, and other art forms. Prominent in 2001 is what Balazas refers to as the “first international language… the language of gestures” (Balazas 98). In the Dawn of Man sequence at the beginning of the film, men dressed in primate suits use their actions in a precisely directed way to tell the viewer what is going on. Subtle gestures reveal Moon-Watcher (the main primate)’s thought process as he plays with the bones at his feet, slowly realizing their potential as tools and weapons. Kubrick underscores the significance of this moment in history with striking camera angles, slow-motion photography, offbeat edits, internal montage, and Richard Strauss’s iconic Also sprach Zarathustra (better known as the theme music to 2001). The thirty-minute Dawn of Man sequence showcases how Kubrick is able to not only convey story material without words, but also explore very large metaphorical ideas. In this case, gesture helps to snap the viewer to attention, and invites speculation as to the image’s meaning. The triumphant pounding of Moon-Watcher on the ground, the epic qualities of the music, and the fantastic cutaways to the falling boar suggest something beyond what is literally being presented. In this case, I believe it speaks to the paradoxical evolution of mankind. With every step forward comes a step back; with the discovery of a tool comes a weapon. The scene then ends with Moon-Watcher tossing the bone into the air, and Kubrick using a brilliant match cut to leap us to a new scene, thousands of years into the future. We understand the change in time and space without titles or words, but simply through this magical edit, a tool of this visual language. The Dawn of Man sequence provides a brief overview of the way Kubrick deploys visual technique to convey the substance of a scene, but there are many more instances that could be examined.
The infamous Stargate sequence in the fourth act of 2001 is also an ideal representative of the way Kubrick uses visual and auditory language. So unconventional is this stream of hallucinogenic colours and misrepresented landscapes that it calls to mind Dada films from the 1930s by artists like Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp because it is “more like a nonrepresentational experimental film than a mainstream movie” (Grant 80). It is a series of images that makes no effort to accurately represent time or space, nor does it provide any comprehendible narrative information, both essential elements of Hollywood film production. “The very length of the sequence seems motivated by the desire to immerse us in a visual experience rather than to convey narrative information, and advance the story, the primary goal of classical narration” (Grant 80). The combination of such extraordinary sight and sound seems to communicate directly with the subconscious mind, moving the audience’s train of thought into abstraction, and pushing the limits of the audience’s cognitive abilities. “The spaces he created are stylized, other worldly, strange, ironic, and often terrifying—not just in terms of visual design, but for the ability they have to convey large feelings and ideas” (Mamber 68). This sentiment seems to echo Balazas’s belief that verbal language cannot express everything that human beings think and feel. Kubrick’s film, the Stargate sequence in particular, seems to indicate that he felt the same way. There were themes that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick wanted to touch on that were so large and abstract, they called for a more ambiguous exploration of the ideas, rather than a literal discussion. “Kubrick purposely chose to convey the meaning through visual sights and symbols, aiming at both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the viewer, rather than explication through text. By making what is essentially a silent film, with language used sparingly to convey certain necessary narrative cues or to act as a counterpoint to visual messages, Kubrick made it more difficult to determine what he intended” (Gilbert 34). The challenging nature of 2001 that Gilbert refers to is created through the use of visual language, and is largely the reason why audiences responded to the film as well as they did in 1968, and why it went on to become such an influential work.
More than almost any other film in history, you need to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. If you have ever gone to bed watching a film, and let your eyes close while you drift off to sleep, you might one day realize that you can understand what is going on in most mainstream motion pictures without actually seeing the images. The structure of most Hollywood cinema centres so heavily around dialogue, that you could close your eyes and listen to Double Indemnity for instance, and understand the plot, character motivations, and a great deal of the action taking place in the film as well. Stanley Kubrick, with his background in photography, offers a completely different form of film with 2001: A Space Odyssey. His mastery of visual imagery, developed during his days as a photographer, gave him the skills to create a film that, quite literally, must be seen. His independence over the production of his films gave him the artistic freedom to defy conventions of narrative cinema, both in form, and in the breath and abstraction of the content. The combination of his artistic freedom, and his visual panache, culminated into the creation of a film that was released at a moment when young American audiences hungered for a new method of expression in the cinema. With 2001 Stanley Kubrick had provided an intellectual and creative stimulus for a population that had been given the same kind of films, inspired by theatre and literature, for four decades. With the same film, he confounded critics, altered audiences, and inspired a new generation of filmmakers to fulfill the potential of cinema that Balazas described in the medium’s early years. By opening up a whole new world of expression using visual language, Kubrick makes possible the articulation of a whole range of emotions and philosophical concepts that may never have been filmable before. It must be said after examining the contextual history of 2001: A Space Odyssey that it was a film that truly broke new ground with its emphasis on visual expression, and that Stanley Kubrick was able to make significant strides towards moving film forward as an art form. Unlike many of Kubrick’s films, 2001: A Space Odyssey can be read to have a positive ending, particularly in regards to the future of art when the credits roll. Like the Starchild at the end of the film, 2001 “emphasizes that humanity will not be bound by the conventional laws of science, by paradigms that seem to insist on a limited human trajectory, and that once the journey of discovery begins, we need not be drawn back to or fall back on primitive condition” (Tellote 51).
Bibliography and Works Cited
2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1968. DVD.
Balazas, B. "Visible Man, or the Culture of Film." Screen. Oxford UP, 2007. 96-108. Print.
Ciment, Michel. Kubrick. London: Collins, 1983. Print.
Gilbert, James. "Auteur with a Capital A." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 29-42. Print.
Grant, Barry. "Of Men and Monoliths: Science Fiction, Gender, and 2001: A Space Odyssey." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 69-86. Print.
Landy, Marcia. "The Cinematographic Brain in 2001: A Space Odyssey." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 87-104. Print.
Making The Shining. Dir. Vivian Kubrick. Warner Brothers, 1980. DVD.
Mamber, Stephen. "Kubrick in Space." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 55-68. Print.
Nelson, Thomas A. Kubrick: Inside a Film Aritst's Maze. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Print.
Palmer, Barton. "2001: The Critical Reception and the Generation Gap." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 13-28. Print.
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Brothers, 2001. DVD.
Tellote, J. P. "The Gravity of 2001: A Space Odyssey." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 43-54. Print.
Tzara, Tristan. "Dada Manifesto." Art in Theory 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. 252-57. Print.
Walker, Alexander. Stanley Kubrick Directs. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Print.
White, Susan. "Kubrick's Obscene Shadows." Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey : New Essays. Oxford UP, 2006. 127-46. Print.
Posts
Thanks for sharing this essay Brendan! It illuminated some key facets of that great film :)
ReplyDelete