2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey
File:Tom Cruise.jpg Original film poster
Directed by	Stanley Kubrick
Written by	Short story: Arthur C. Clarke Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick Arthur C. Clarke
Produced by	Stanley Kubrick
Starring	Keir Dullea Gary Lockwood William Sylvester Daniel Richter Douglas Rain
Cinematography	Geoffrey Unsworth
Edited by	Ray Lovejoy
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1968-1998) Warner Bros. (1999-present)
Release dates	April 6, 1968 (USA)
Running time	141 min
Country	UK / USA
Language	English
Budget	$10,500,000

2001: A Space Odyssey sucks.

Production

Filming of 2001 began on December 29, 1965 at Shepperton Studios in Shepperton, England. The studio was chosen for its size, big enough for the 60-by-120-by-60-foot pit built as the set for the Tycho crater excavation scene, the first to be shot. From year 1966 the filming took place at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, England. It was here that a "command post" was established to facilitate the filming of special effects scenes, described as a "huge throbbing nerve center... with much the same frenetic atmosphere as a Cape Kennedy blockhouse during the final stages of Countdown." The film was shot in Super Panavision 70 with a 65mm film negative format, and the 35mm general release prints were made using the Technicolor dye transfer process. Kubrick began editing the film in March of 1968 and made his final 19-minute cut just days before the public premiere on April 6. By then the film had run $4.5 million over its initial $6 million budget and was 16 months late of its scheduled release.

This film pioneered the use of retroreflective matting (later called front projection), which was used in the African scenes where apes learn to use tools. Static transparency images of landscapes, taken in Africa, were projected through a partially silvered mirror, placed diagonally in front of the camera. The projected image illuminates both the costumed characters and a retroreflective glass-bead background screen. The projected image is not visible on the characters as its intensity is well below other illumination. It is, however, reflected selectively back to the film camera by the background screen, passing through the partially silvered mirror, along with the view of the characters, and is seen as a background in the complete scene. This technique produced much more realistic images than other methods available at the time but is now supplanted by more flexible computer-processed bluescreen techniques.

Kubrick filmed a number of scenes that did not make the first cut. These include a schoolroom scene at the Clavius moon base in which Kubrick's own daughter appeared in the cast, and the purchase of a bush baby in a futuristic department store for Heywood Floyd's little girl who appeared in the visiophone scene. Additional footage includes some redundant "spacewalking" material and a scene where Bowman retrieves a spare antenna part from an octagonal corridor. MGM made a publicity still from this which was used as a lobby card. But most notable was an opening scene where scientists are shown discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It has been rumoured that Arthur C. Clarke himself played one of the scientists.

Kubrick's final cut of the film was made after the April 1968 premiere, when he removed 10 minutes of footage.

Synopsis

File:Apemen.JPG

Tribal apes approach a mysterious black monolith.

2001 opens with György Ligeti's opening cluster (which spans five octaves) from "Atmosphères," unaccompanied by any on-screen image (in a theater presentation the curtains remain drawn). The main title sequence depicts a perfectly aligned Sun rising behind the Earth and the Moon accompanied by the first movement of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra." The rest of the film can be divided into three chapters, each preceded by on-screen title cards.

The first chapter of 2001, entitled "The Dawn of Man", shows a tribe of prehistoric man-apes in their regular life activities: digging among sparse vegetation for sustenance, being preyed upon by a leopard and competing with another tribe over a waterhole. The primary tribe is clearly struggling to survive with minimal resources available in the dry desert. One morning, a mysterious black rectangular monolith appears near their habitation, and is nervously examined by the apes.

Following this encounter, a lone man-ape is shown discovering the first tool, while scavenging through a pile of bones. The man-ape picks up a bone and plays with it, finally crushing the other bones as with a club. The man-apes are next shown eating meat — presumably that of a freshly killed tapir. The man-ape who created the tool, now leading the tribe and standing partially upright, recaptures the waterhole, clubbing an enemy ape to death with the new-found weapon. As one or two of his tribe mimic his actions, he howls in triumph -- Man has learned to kill.

In a famous match cut that follows, the victorious man-ape throws his bone weapon high into the air, at which point the film jumps forward to the future, matching the image of the tumbling bone to that of a man-made satellite. Johann Strauss II's "The Blue Danube" waltz accompanies the following scenes of man-made objects orbiting the Earth. As the sequence develops, it depicts a transport shuttle docking to an Earth-orbital space station.

Several shots of the shuttle interior show that it carries only one passenger, Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester), a leading American scientist bound for the Moon. Floyd arrives at the station (and the waltz has its final cadence). Then, after disembarking, a monotone stewardess announces the first spoken lines of the film: "Here you are, sir. Main Level, please." Floyd meets Mr. Miller of Station Security, and the two walk through the sterile station to a restaurant, but Floyd stops to make a videophone call as Miller goes on ahead.

In the first narrative exposition, Floyd meets a group of Soviet scientists including an "old friend," Elena, and sits down for a brief chat. After Floyd reveals that he is going to the Moon base Clavius, Dr. Andrei Smyslov (Leonard Rossiter) inquires as to why nobody had been able to establish contact there, and Elena mentions that the base recently denied emergency landing to one of their shuttles. Floyd feigns naïve surprise, but when Smyslov inquires about a rumor that an epidemic has broken out at the base, Floyd ominously refuses to comment on the situation, citing security restrictions.

The next scene depicts a lunar landing craft heading towards the Moon base Clavius. It lands and is lowered on an elevated platform into the base. In a meeting room here, Floyd is introduced to the base's scientists and administrators, and speaks on the importance of hiding the true reason for the base's suspicious quarantine. He applauds their momentous discovery, and then blithely informs the assembled staff that renewed "security oaths" are required. During a Q&A, he states that the "cover story" of an epidemic, and a base-wide communications black-out, will remain in effect until decided otherwise by their superiors on Earth. He reminds them of "the potential for cultural shock and social disorientation" that their discovery presents.

The scene cuts to a subsequent moonbus ride to the excavation (accompanied by Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna"). Discussion between Floyd and a base administrator reveals the mystery: they have discovered an object buried on the Moon (dubbed Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1 or TMA-1 for short). Investigation of the object has revealed conclusively that it was "deliberately buried" four million years earlier. The shuttle lands at the dig site, and the scientists warily approach a monolith exactly like that seen during the "Dawn of Man" sequence (to the accompaniment by the returning ”Kyrie" from the Ligeti "Requiem"). Floyd reaches out and strokes the smooth surface of the object, mirroring the awe and curiosity that the man-ape exhibited millions of years earlier. They gather around it for a group photo, but are interrupted when an earsplitting, continuous high-pitched tone is picked up by their radio receivers, emitted by the monolith as the sun shines down on it.

2001: A Space Odyssey --Three of the Discovery One crew are in a state of hibernation, ostensibly to conserve resources for the voyage.

The film cuts to its second chapter entitled "Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later," introduced with a montage accompanied by Gayane's Adagio from Aram Khatchaturian's Gayane ballet. Aboard the spaceship Discovery One are the mission pilots, astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and three scientists "sleeping" in cryogenic hibernation. Various scenes are shown depicting mundane daily life on board the spacecraft: ship maintenance and operations, physical exercise, eating, sleeping, receiving birthday greetings from home, playing chess, and even sketching. The crew is shown watching a BBC television program about themselves, in which the "sixth member" of the crew, the HAL 9000 supercomputer (Douglas Rain), is introduced and interviewed. The interview reveals that though the supercomputer is the pinnacle in artificial machine intelligence, with a remarkable, error-free performance record, it is designed to communicate and interact like a human, and even displays false emotions, though they are sometimes very lifelike, and in fact the astronauts have quickly learned to treat it like another crewman, addressing it as "Hal."

During an informal conversation with Bowman, HAL expresses anxiety about the mission, fueled by concerns about strange rumors of "something being dug up on the Moon," as well as the unusual training and preparation regimen for the mission. When Bowman suggests that HAL's quizzical conversation is actually part of his "crew psychology report," HAL feigns embarrassment, then immediately detects an impending failure of the ship's communications system. Bowman exits the Discovery in an EVA pod to retrieve and replace the faulty AE-35 unit, but upon detailed examination no fault can be found. Mission controllers back on Earth assert that HAL is "in error in predicting the fault," something unheard of for the 9000 series. HAL suggests another EVA mission to restore the part and wait for it to fail, to determine the problem. Hiding their concern, Bowman and Poole retreat to an EVA pod, ostensibly to troubleshoot a radio, but in fact to discuss HAL's questionable reliability in secret, finally agreeing to "disconnect" him should the AE-35 not fail as predicted. Unbeknownst to them, HAL is spying on them, reading their lips. An intermission follows.

After the intermission, Poole exits the Discovery in an EVA pod to put back the original AE-35 unit while Bowman watches from inside the ship. After Poole exits the pod, HAL takes control of the empty pod and accelerates it towards Poole, murdering him. Bowman sees both Poole and the pod careering away from the ship. He hurriedly exits the ship in another pod to rescue Poole (forgetting to bring his space helmet). While Bowman is outside, HAL kills the three hibernating scientists by deactivating their life support systems.

Bowman's rescue attempt turns out to be only a body retrieval mission, and upon returning, commands HAL to "open the pod bay doors." HAL refuses, and reveals that he knows of Poole and Bowman's plan to disconnect him. HAL asserts that the mission is "too important" to allow Bowman to jeopardize it. Bowman answers that he'll simply reenter the ship via an emergency air lock (a risky maneuver without a helmet for the air lock even when he has entered the ship, he is still exposed to the vacuum of space until he closes the door through a manual pull switch). HAL terminates the conversation. After jettisoning the lifeless body of Poole, Bowman opens the air lock, and jettisons the pod's hatch. The explosive decompression propels him into the airlock. Exposed to vacuum, he manages to close the airlock in the few seconds of time a human can survive.

Now safely inside the ship, Bowman, now donning the helmet from the air lock's space suit, renters the ship -- HAL can not touch him. As HAL futilely attempts to negotiate with him, Bowman enters HAL's "Logic Memory Center." Bowman proceeds to disconnect his higher brain functions, leaving the ship's systems automatic and regulatory systems running. With HAL pleading for him to stop, saying that he is much better and he'll stop, Bowman proceeds to slowly disconnect him. HAL describes feeling that "my mind is going ... I can feel it." HAL regresses to an old memory, and sings the song "Daisy Bell" as he slowly deteriorates and finally falls silent.

File:Stargate Sequence.jpg

Dave Bowman's view, traveling through the "Star Gate."

HAL's shut-down triggers a pre-recorded video briefing by Heywood Floyd, explaining the true nature of the mission -- to investigate the signal sent to Jupiter from the mysterious alien artifact on the Moon. In the video, Floyd discloses that the secret mission, and all background information, had been known "only to your on board H-A-L 9000 computer."

The third chapter, entitled "Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite" begins with the revelation of a third monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and of the Discovery One entering the Jupiter system and later rendezvousing with the artifact. As the planet and its moons and the monolith appear to align, Bowman again exits the Discovery One in an EVA pod — again accompanied by the Ligeti "Reqium." Bowman, in the EVA pod, now appears to travel across vast distances of space and time through a tunnel of colorful light and sound, in what is labeled the "Star Gate sequence." Ligeti's Reqium segues to Ligeti’s colossal orchestral essay "Atmosphères."

The "Star Child" looking at the Earth.

After passing over a strangely colored alien landscape, Bowman arrives alone in a Louis XVI-style room (the alien-sounding music of Ligeti's "Adventures" is heard through an echo chamber). As he walks about the room, he is depicted suddenly aging, first in his spacesuit, then in an ornate dressing robe, sitting down to a well appointed meal. He accidentally knocks his glass on the floor, smashing it and breaking the silence. Looking up from the broken glass, he sees himself lying on what appears to be his deathbed, at the foot of which appears a fourth and final monolith. Bowman slowly reaches out to it and is seemingly transformed into a fetus-like being enclosed in a transparent orb of light. Jumping back to Earth, Bowman, now in the form of a "Star Child", approaches the Earth. In the film's final, ambiguous shot, he gazes at his world through new eyes, as "Also Sprach Zarathustra" climaxes once more.

Release

The US premiere was on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC. The original release was in a 70mm projection format with a six-track stereo magnetic soundtrack. The projection aspect ratio was 2.21:1. The film was also released in the 35mm anamorphic format for general release beginning in the fall of 1968; these prints were available with either 4-track magnetic stereo or optical monaural soundtracks.

The original 70mm release was billed as a Cinerama production in theaters (such as the Indian Hills Theater in Omaha, Nebraska) which were equipped with special projection optics and a deeply curved screen. In non-Cinerama theaters the release was simply identified as a "70mm" production.

In 1980, it became the second movie to be released on VHS by MGM/CBS Home Video. MGM also published laserdisc editions (including an updated edition with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound), which were letterboxed. There was also a special edition laserdisc from The Criterion Collection in the CAV format.

It has been released on Region 1 DVD three times, once by MGM Home Entertainment in 1998 and twice by Warner Home Video in 1999 and 2001. The MGM release featured a booklet, the film, theatrical trailer and an interview with Arthur C. Clarke. The soundtrack was remastered in 5.1 surround sound as well. The 1999 release from Warner omitted the booklet and featured a re-release trailer. The 2001 release featured the re-release trailer and the film presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.20:1 and digitally re-mastered from the original 70* mm print, the audio was remixed in 5.1 surround sound. The interview and booklet were omitted from this release as well. A limited edition DVD release included a booklet, 70mm frame, and soundtrack album (including the actual tracks used in the film, previously unavailable together).

It has also been transmitted in an HDTV format on the HDnet movie network. As of 2006, no high definition video disc releases have yet been announced, however.

Reaction

Upon release, 2001 received mostly negative reviews. Critic Pauline Kael said it was "a monumentally unimaginative movie" , and Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic called it "a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull." However, Roger Ebert gave the film four stars in his original review, believing the film "succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale."

2001 earned one Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and was nominated for Best Art Direction, Best Director (Kubrick), and Original Screenplay (Kubrick, Clarke).

Top film lists

2001 is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was number 22 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, number 40 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, included on its 100 Years, 100 Quotes ("Open the pod bay doors, HAL."), is the only science fiction film to make the Sight and Sound poll for ten best movies, and tops the Online Film Critics Society list of "greatest science fiction films of all time." In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Other "top nn" lists the film is listed on include 50 Films to See Before You Die (#6), The Village Voice 100 Best films of the 20th century (#11), The Sight and Sound Top Ten poll (#6), and Roger Ebert's Top Ten (1968) (#2).

Academy Awards

Award	Person
Best Visual Effects	Stanley Kubrick
Nominated:
Best Original Screenplay	Stanley Kubrick Arthur C. Clarke
Best Art Direction	Anthony Masters Harry Lange Ernest Archer
Best Director	Stanley Kubrick

Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards

• Best Film of 1968
• Best Director 1968 -- Stanley Kubrick

Influences

The story of 2001 is based in part on various short stories by co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, most directly "The Sentinel" (1951), and indirectly Clarke's running religious themes of humanity's "ascendence" best summed up in Childhood's End (1953). Kubrick collaborated with Clarke in writing the screenplay, and Clarke's novel was released shortly after the release of the film.

In early conversations, Kubrick and Clarke jokingly called their project How the Solar System Was Won, an allusion to the epic 1962 Cinerama film How the West Was Won, which presents a generation-spanning historical epic told in distinct episodes. Like How the West Was Won, 2001 is divided into distinct episodes.

As Clarke wrote in 1972: "Quite early in the game I went around saying, not very loudly, 'MGM doesn't know this yet, but they're paying for the first $10,000,000 religious movie.'"

For an elaboration of the Clarke/Kubrick collaborative work on the book and film, see The Lost Worlds of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, Signet., 1972.

Interpretation

Main article: Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey

The "Star Gate" sequence.

Since its premiere, 2001: A Space Odyssey has been analyzed and interpreted by multitudes of people ranging from professional movie critics to amateur writers and science fiction fans. Film criticism has existed since the earliest days of the motion picture, but 2001 holds a place unique in film history due to its openness to interpretation by audiences.

Kubrick encouraged people to explore their own interpretations of the film, and refused to offer an explanation of "what really happened" in the movie, preferring instead to let audiences embrace their own ideas and theories. In a 1968 interview with Playboy magazine, Kubrick stated:

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

Scientific accuracy

File:Discovery1b.GIF

Spaceship USSC Discovery XD-1 launching an EVA pod. Note the deliberately non-aerodynamic design of both craft.

Insofar as current known laws of physics are concerned, 2001 is highly realistic compared to some other science fiction films, particularly those preceding it: it is among the few to accurately present outer space as transmitting no sound. The film is also notable for its portrayal of weightlessness in spaceships and outer space. Tracking shots inside the rotating "wheel" that provides artificial gravity is contrasted in the film with the weightlessness outside the wheel during the repair and the scenes of HAL's disconnection. The scenes in the pod bay where the astronauts are walking may be explained by an earlier shot, during which a stewardess walks in Zero-G while wearing shoes labeled "Grip Shoes". This also explains the slow pace of the walk.

Much was made by MGM of this aspect of the film in its promotion, claiming in a 1968 publicity brochure that "Everything in 2001: A Space Odyssey can happen within the next three decades, and... most of the picture will happen by the beginning of the next millennium.". This has proved to be wrong, although some of the film's predictions (see below) have been realized.

The film fails to be scientifically accurate in other minor details, many of which could be explained by the technical difficulty of producing a realistic effect:

• The gravitational force inside the Clavius base appears to be that of Earth rather than the Moon. Simulating reduced gravity is complex but feasible: it requires thinking about many things that people are not used to thinking about.
• The dust blown up by the exhaust of the lunar shuttle is seen to billow up from the landing pad instead of radiating out in straight lines, as would happen (as has happened) in the near-vacuum of the lunar atmosphere.
• The height of lunar mountains and the extent of meteoric erosion were overestimated, as the film was made before the lunar expeditions of the Apollo program.
• The Earth is shown in different phases during the landing maneuvers of the Aries 1B moon ship (an error of continuity as well as science).
• In the sequence where David Bowman blows the hatch on his space pod to make an unprotected entry to Discovery's airlock, there is a shot with Dave rebounding in the airlock chamber, while his space pod is still sitting just outside the airlock door. Since the pod is not fixed to Discovery, the blowing of the pod's hatch should have caused the pod to move away on the thrust of its escaping atmosphere—though rather slowly, given a rough estimation of the mass and speed of ejected air (and Bowman) in relation to the mass of the pod (although the Pod could be designed to be stationary by applying an equal and opposite force.)
• In the above scene, David Bowman is clearly seen holding his breath before being ejected from his capsule. Before being exposed to a vacuum, NASA states that a man should exhale, as holding one's breath in vacuum will rupture a person's lungs.[1] (See also vacuum.) However, although Clarke and Kubrick are wrong in detail, they do understand enough to reject the conventional wisdom "in vacuum, your blood will boil, and you'll die instantly: this view was promulgated by Disney shows of the 1950's, often quoting experts like Willy Ley and Dr Wernher von Braun. Clarke thought about this, as apparently did NASA. (It's curious that their conclusions differed.) This is an aspect of barotrauma that has seen little public discussion. A great deal is known about the risks of diving and of high-altitude flight, but space travel is always discussed with the assumption that astronauts will always stay in a pressurized spaceship or spacesuit. This represents an attempt to "think outside the box," to use a recently-popular cliché.
• When Heywood Floyd is flying to the moon (supposedly in a weightless state), he sips through a straw. But when he lets go of it, the fluid slides back into the container. This shows that the fluid inside the straw is in fact not weightless (although this could also result from air pressure).

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The Centrifuge in Discovery One — as seen here, astronaut Frank Poole jogs around its circumference for exercise.

• Though the crew quarters in the spaceship Discovery are arranged in a rotating wheel to simulate gravity, which is often overlooked in science fiction, the wheel's small radius would require a fairly rapid RPM (five to ten RPM depending on the actual radius) to produce Earth-like gravity. It is suggested that humans become dizzy, nauseated and disoriented under significant Coriolis forces, and few if any humans could become accustomed to fast rotation. Also, the shorter the radius of rotation, the more the force of gravity exerted on the human body would vary between the feet, waist and head.
• In one scene, a flight attendant grabs the pen of a sleeping Heywood Floyd as it floats in zero gravity inside a spaceship cabin. The pen is rotating, but it is not rotating about its own center of mass; instead, it is rotating about a center that is significantly external to the pen. This happens because, in reality, the pen was mounted on a large, transparent, rotating disk from which the actress playing the flight attendant plucked it, and it was not mounted at the center of the disk. Of course, even in zero-G, aerodynamic pressure (an external force) would be acting on the rotating pen.
• In many scenes of the film, the stars appear to be moving past the various spaceships while the camera keeps pace with the ship. This would not be possible unless the ships were going extremely fast, or they were turning (which is clearly not the case in some scenes).

Imagining the future

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Small, portable, flat-screen televisions were indeed available in the year 2001.

The film shows an imagined version of the year 2001. Some of what is seen in the film has come to pass:

• Flat-screen computer monitors (simulated by rear projection in the film).
• Small, portable, flat-screen television sets.
• Television screens with a wide aspect ratio.
• Glass cockpits in spacecraft.
• The proliferation of TV stations (the BBC's channels numbering at least 12).
• Telephone numbers with more digits than in the 1960s. This is a function of having access to much of the human race, rather than one city or country.
• The endurance of corporations like IBM, Aeroflot, and Hilton Hotels to the year 2001.
• The use of credit cards with data stripes. (The card Heywood Floyd inserts into the telephone is of American Express; a close-up photo of the prop reveals that it contained a barcode rather than a magnetic strip, but the principle is the same.)
• Biometric identification. The film shows voice-print identification on arrival at the space station.
• The shape of the 213 ft Orion III Pan Am Orbital Clipper has been echoed in the X-34, a prototype craft which underwent towed flight tests from 1999 to 2001.

File:2001 film Clavius surveyors.jpg

Establishing a permanent colony on the moon is not yet a reality.

However, many things shown in the film differed from the real-life year 2001:

• Good-quality, high-resolution videophones are common.
• Space travel is commonplace by 2000. In the film:
  • At least 2 colonies have been established on the moon.
  • Manned missions to Jupiter are feasible.
  • Hotels in orbit, part of a revolving 2000-ft space station.
  • Commercial space flight is routine.
• Technology is available to put humans in long-term suspended animation.
• Computer artificial intelligence can closely approximate sentience, self-motivation and independent judgement.
• The existence of Pan American Airlines and the unitary Bell System.
• The existence of the Soviet Union.

Soundtrack

Music

Music plays a crucial part in 2001, and not only because of the relatively sparse dialogue. From very early on in production, Kubrick decided that he wanted the film to be a primarily non-verbal experience, one that did not rely on the traditional techniques of narrative cinema, and in which music would play a vital role in evoking particular moods. In this respect, 2001 harks back to the central power that music had in the era of silent film.

The film is remarkable for its innovative use of classical music taken from existing commercial records. Major feature films were (and still are) typically accompanied by elaborate film scores and/or songs written especially for them by professional composers. But although Kubrick started out by commissioning an original orchestral score from composer Alex North, he later abandoned this, opting instead for pre-recorded tracks sourced from existing recordings, becoming one of the first major movie directors to do so, and beginning a trend that has now become commonplace.

In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick explained:

However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you are editing a film, it's very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene...Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary tracks can become the final score.

2001 uses works by several classical composers. It features music by Aram Khachaturian (Gayane's Adagio from the Gayaneh ballet suite) and famously used Johann Strauss II's best known waltz, An der schönen blauen Donau (in English, On The Beautiful Blue Danube), during the space-station rendezvous and lunar landing sequences. 2001 is especially remembered for its use of the opening from Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (or "Thus Spake Zarathustra" in English), which has become inextricably associated with the film and its imagery and themes. The film's soundtrack also did much to introduce the modern classical composer György Ligeti to a wider public, using extracts from his Requiem (the Kyrie), Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna and (in an altered form) Aventures (though without his permission).

In the early stages of production, Kubrick had actually commissioned a score for 2001 from noted Hollywood composer Alex North, who had written the stirring score for Spartacus and also worked on Dr. Strangelove. But on 2001 Kubrick did much of the filming and editing, using as his guides the classical recordings which eventually became the music track. In March of 1966 MGM became concerned about 2001's progress and Kubrick put together a show reel of footage to the ad hoc soundtrack of classical recordings. The studio bosses were delighted with the results and Kubrick decided to use these "guide pieces" as the final musical soundtrack, and he abandoned North's score. Unfortunately Kubrick failed to inform North that his music had not been used, and to his great dismay, North did not discover this until he saw the movie at the première. North's soundtrack has since been recorded commercially and was released shortly before his death. Similarly, Ligeti was unaware that his music was in the film until alerted by friends. He was at first unhappy about some of the music used, and threatened legal action over Kubrick's use of an electronically "treated" recording of Aventures in the "interstellar hotel" scene near the end of the film.

HAL's haunting version of the popular song "Daisy Bell" (referred to by HAL as "Daisy" in the film) was inspired by a computer synthesized arrangement by Max Mathews, which Arthur C. Clarke had heard in 1962 at the Bell Laboratories Murray Hill facility when he was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce. At that time, a remarkable speech synthesis demonstration was being performed by physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr who created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with Max Mathews providing the musical accompaniment. Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed that he later told Kubrick to use it in the film.

Dialogue

Alongside its use of music, the dialogue in 2001 is another notable feature, although the relative lack of dialogue and conventional narrative cues have baffled many viewers. One of the film's most striking features is that there is no dialogue whatsoever for the first twenty minutes or the entire last segment (23 minutes) of the film—the entire narrative of these sections is carried by images, actions, sound effects, and two title cards.

Only when the film moves into the postulated "future" of 2000 and 2001 do we encounter characters who speak. By the time shooting began, Kubrick had deliberately jettisoned much of the intended dialogue and narration, and what remains is notable for its apparently banal nature—an announcement about the lost cashmere sweater, the awkwardly polite chit-chat between Floyd and the Russian scientists, or his comments about the sandwiches en route to the monolith site.

The exchanges between Poole and Bowman on board the Discovery are similarly flat and unemotional, and generally lack any major narrative content. Kubrick clearly intended that the subtext of these exchanges—what is not said, that is—should be the real, meaningful content. At one point during the film, HAL lip-reads a conversation between Poole and Bowman (they have secured themselves in one of the ship's pods for this conversation, wishing HAL not to hear them, his apparent failure being the object of their discussion). This further indicates the centrality of silence and 'subtextual speaking' to the film.

Narrative through ambient sound

Template:Spoiler Kubrick's unique treatment of narrative in 2001 is perhaps best exemplified by the scene in which the HAL-9000 computer murders the three hibernating astronauts while Bowman is outside the ship trying to rescue Poole. The inhuman nature of the murders is conveyed with chilling simplicity, in a scene that contains only three elements.

File:2001-terminated.jpg

Other than the alarm sounds and the constant background hiss of the ship's environmental system, the entire scene is enacted with no dialogue, no music, and no physical movement of any kind.

When HAL disconnects the life support systems, we see a flashing warning sign, "COMPUTER MALFUNCTION", shown full-screen and accompanied only by the sound of a shrill alarm beep; this is intercut with static shots of the hibernating astronauts, encased in their sarcophagus-like pods, and close-up full-screen shots of the life-signs monitor of each astronaut. As the astronauts begin to die, the warning changes to "LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL" and we see the vital signs on the monitors beginning to level out. Finally, when the three sleeping astronauts are dead, there is only silence and the ominously banal flashing sign, "LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED". Template:Endspoiler "The film combines eerie contemporary music with classical waltzes and ballet suites, grunts and snarls with pneumatic hisses and synthesized beeps. One character has a rough, throaty voice but a computer talks with a soft, mellifluous tone (the classic characterization of a smooth-talking villain). Space is accurately depicted as a truly silent vacuum, but Technological Man fills this world with the sound of circulating air systems, humming computers and hissing doors. 2001 is alive with sound, and most of it is environmental - that is, most of it is ambient.

"The legacy of 2001's Ambient music sound design is clear in later films such as George Lucas's THX 1138, Carroll Ballard's Never Cry Wolf, David Lynch's Eraserhead, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Filmmakers became far more conscious of the revolutionary possibilities that effective sound editing offered. Noise, quiet, eclectic effects, all contribute to a scene's power, but treating a film as an extended sonic performance, as well as visual, expanded the art." -- D.B. Spalding [2]

Spoofs and references

Main article: List of cultural references to 2001: A Space Odyssey

Due to its cultural significance, 2001: A Space Odyssey has been heavily referenced and spoofed in various forms of popular media.

Sequels and offshoots

Kubrick did not envisage or plan on a sequel to 2001. Kubrick was afraid of the later exploitation and recycling of his material in other productions (as was done with the props from MGM's Forbidden Planet), so, to the dismay of MGM Studios, he ordered all prints of unused scenes, sets, props, and production blueprints destroyed — and thus lost forever.

Clarke went on to write three sequel novels. The first was subsequently adapted into a film, but there has been no serious discussion of filmmakers adapting the other two for the screen.

• 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
• 2061: Odyssey Three (1987)
• 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)

The sequel film, entitled 2010: The Year We Make Contact, was based on Clarke's 1982 novel and was released in 1984. Kubrick was not involved in the production of this film, which was directed by Peter Hyams in a straightforward style with more dialogues, without Kubrick's religious mysticism. Clarke saw it as a fitting adaptation of his novel.

Beginning in 1976, Marvel Comics published both a Jack Kirby-written and drawn adaptation of the film, and a Kirby-created 10-issue monthly series "expanding" on the ideas of the film and novel.

Further reading

• Agel, Jerome (1970). The Making of Kubrick's 2001. Signet. ISBN 0-451-07139-5.

• Bizony, Piers (2001). 2001 Filming the Future. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. ISBN 1-85410-706-2.

• Castle, Alison (ed.), ed. (2005). "Part 2: The Creative Process / 2001: A Space Odyssey". The Stanley Kubrick Archives. New York: Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-2284-1. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)

• Chion, Michel (2001). Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey. translated by Claudia Gorbman. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 0-85170-840-4. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |other= ignored (|others= suggested) (help)

• Clarke, Arthur C. (1972). The Lost Worlds of 2001. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. ISBN 0-283-97903-8.

• Kolker, Robert (ed.), ed. (2006). Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517453-4. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)

• Richter, Daniel (2002). Moonwatcher's Memoir: A Diary of 2001: A Space Odyssey. foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-1073-X.

• Schwam, Stephanie (ed.), ed. (2000). The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75528-4. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |other= ignored (|others= suggested) (help)

• Wheat, Leonard F. (2000). Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-3796-X.

See also

• List of 2001: A Space Odyssey trivia
• Space colonization in popular culture
• Space exploration
• Poole - HAL 9000, an examination of the human vs. computer chess game seen in the film
• Douglas Trumbull, a visual effects pioneer who contributed to the Stargate sequences in 2001
• Slit-scan photography, an animated effect adapted for 2001 by Douglas Trumbull.

External links

• 2001: A Space Odyssey at IMDb
• 2001: A Space Odyssey at AllMovie
• 2001: A Space Odyssey at Rotten Tomatoes
• Template:Filmsite
• 2001: A Space Odyssey Internet Resource Archive
• The 2001: A Space Odyssey Collectibles Exhibit
• The Kubrick Site including many works on 2001