Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A House Odyssey has been praised in all guyner of phrases because it got here out greater than part a century in the past. An early advertising campaign, faucetping into the enthusiasm of the contemporary counterculture, referred to as it “the ultimate travel”; within the equivalently fashionable parlance of the twenty-twenties, one may say that it “is going laborious,” in that it takes no few daring, even unprecedented aesthetic and dramatic turns. The brand new video essay from Simply One Extra Factor even describes 2001 as “the laboriousest movie Kubrick ever made” — which, given Kubrick’s uncomprofessionalmising ambitions as a moviemaker, is certainly saying somefactor.
In some of the many interview clips that constitute the video’s 23 minutes, Steven Spielberg recollects his conversations with Kubrick within the remaining years of the master’s lifestyles. “I need to make a film that adjustments the shape,” Kubrick would ceaselessly say to Spielberg. Arguably, he’d already carried out so with 2001, which continues to release its first-time viewers into an experience in contrast to any they’ve had with a film prior to. In contrast to the extra substance-inclined members of his generation, Spielberg went into the theater “blank as a whistle,” however “got here out of there altered” neverthemuch less. It didn’t require medication to appreciate finally; “that movie used to be the drug.”
This isn’t to mention that 2001 is naturally and even primarily an summary paintings of cinema. In collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put quite a lot of technical concept into the movie’s imaginative and prescient of the long run, with its well-appointed area stations, its artificially intelligent computers, its video calls, and its tablet-like cell gadgets. Paintingsing within the years prior to the moon landing, says Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Movies creator Paul Duncan, they “needed to completely visualize, and make actual, issues that had never passed off.” Such used to be the actualism in their speculos angelestive paintings (as much as and including imagining how Earth would glance from area) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the actual Apollo 11 astronauts may describe their experience simply: “It used to be like 2001.”
Conceived within the warmth of the House Race, the movie envisions a really perfect deal that didn’t come to cross through the eponymous yr — and certainly, has but to materialize nonetheless these days. “We haven’t relatively were giventen to artificial intelligence as portrayed,” says superstar Keir Dullea in a Fiftieth-anniversary interview. “Nearly, however no longer relatively.” Nonetheless, even since then, the technology has come a ways sufficient alongside that few people can ponder the curhire state of AI without quicklyer or later pay attentioning the ominously well mannered voice of HAL somethe place at the back of our minds. The saga of astronauts curhirely stranded at the International House Station does contrast harshly with 2001’s visions of stable and well-functioning lifestyles in outer area — however as a story, it will effectively have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.
Related content:
1966 Movie Explores the Making of Kubrick’s 2001: A House Odyssey (and Our Prime-Tech Long term)
How Stanley Kubrick Made 2001: A House Odyssey: A Seven-Section Video Essay
Discover the Lifestyles & Paintings of Stanley Kubrick in a Sweeping 3-Hour Video Essay
“Kubrick/Tarkovsky”: A Video Essay Explores the Visual Similarities Between the Two “Cinematic Giants”
How Stanley Kubrick Was Stanley Kubrick: A Brief Documentumalestary Narrated through the Moviemaker
Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A House Odyssey?
Based totally in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and hugecasts on towns, language, and culture. His initiatives come with the Substack newsletter Books on Towns and the ebook The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceebook.