2001 space odyssey5/16/2023 All I can say is that it didn’t work on me. Fine, but the visceral approach is by definition unanalysable and unarguable. They, of course, say that what they were trying to do “could not be spelled out on any literal or intellectual level.” Direct visceral impact, instead, was preferred. Now speculation and ambiguity are fine, but it does rather look as if Kubrick and his co-writer, Arthur C. Instead, it ends there, an interstellar shaggy dog story. This, it would have seemed to me, is where the film might almost have begun. Photograph: The idea would seem to be that for this other-world, past, present and future are one. Each time the imagery of the shot becomes multiplied by these juxtapositions.” For me, it didn’t work that way rather, each time we saw the same shot its effect was halved.Ģ001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. (This is particularly true of the machines and the ironmongery in general.) Levy, on the other hand, claims that the “emotional imagery of a shot is given changing meaning by repeating it in different situations in the film. In Kubrick’s case I would imagine that having spent so much money on special effects – and having achieved such results – he could not resist showing them off as much as possible. The first time Levy tracks along a road and we miraculously see at each succeeding intersection his hero running up (or down) the cross street, the effect is breathtaking. Both Kubrick and Levy are far too self-indulgent. And then it goes on and on later in the film the same effect is used again. One never thought Johann Strauss would provide the music of the spheres, but somehow it seems invigoratingly right. As it slowly starts to fall, he cuts to a fantastic spaceship swirling round and round to the Blue Danube waltz. Not always: when Kubrick links yesterday, the dawn of man, the discovery of the first tool, the first weapon, with tomorrow, he has his primitive homo sapiens exultantly throw a jawbone into the air. By and large, both films remain a series of gorgeous images.Ģ001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. And in its quite different way Herostratus is stunningly photographed: W2, the twilight area between Westbourne Grove and the Harrow Road with its gasometers, its iron bridges, and rotting slums are rendered in such a way as to make them play an almost independent role in the film.īut neither film manages the much more important task: to create its own beauty – one independent of the individual shots – one which comes from the articulation of the shots, the construction of sequences, or even sometimes simply from a gracefully apt camera movement. Somehow, they are lit to look like nothing we have ever seen before, only perhaps dreamed of, or briefly glimpsed in those frighteningly awesome moments just before a summer storm breaks. Much of Kubrick’s £3 millions went for special effects, and, for the first time ever, a science fiction film looks plausible: the spaceships with complex exteriors like early Paolozzi sculptures, the surrealistic surface of the moon, and the fantastic prehistoric landscapes. Certainly, both are beautiful to look at.
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