August 25, 2007
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick
SIFF Cinema is currently doing a daily run of a bunch of Kubrick movies, kicking off last night with a presentation off 2001: A Space Odyssey and continuing on into the next couple of weeks with various other classics. I caught 2001 and was again floored at how excellently it continues to stand and rise above the test of time.
Even with the somewhat raucous, chatty audience, and my inability to sit still through standard Kubrick-lengthed movies, it never once failed to continue to completely floor me. Every second of the movie is just jaw-droppingly gorgeous in so many ways, far beyond just visual. I've seen the 70mm Cinerama version, and no the SIFF Cinema experience didn't really compare, but it was hard not to again appreciate every element of this movie's production.
I'm sure my comments on the movie have been made dozens of times by people far more qualified to do an analysis, but I did have some observations watching this again, especially after spending time studying some of the finer details on filmmaking.
The audio in the movie, and lack of it, is one of those things that I only now have had a far greater appreciation for. There are the initial scenes that I assume were done completely in ADR using natural sound clips and voiceovers, which then progress into a buildup of powerful orchestration over very grand establishing scenes, then dialogue, and then just at the height of each dramatic scene, there is complete and total silence. This deliberate sensory removal is effective in a large part because of all the prior build-up, forcing you to take notice because of how jarring the change is. It reminds me of something I had read about Ozu's movies where simply because of establishing a particular scene length and content style early on, he could manipulate later scenes by exploiting the movie's already comfortable rhythm in a way that left the viewer no choice but to interpret them in a completely different way.
The other major thing that stands out to me is how the effects still to this day look so real, even better than the best CGI. A large chunk of that probably stems from the fact that CGI is always so polished looking. Kubrick's space is gritty, shadowy, detailed and even dated. But it all still continues to look so real, partly I think because the images we have seen from space match up. Kubrick expands on this shared visual knowledge instead of completely reinventing what space is, and lets us inside a fairly reasonable looking space vessel (which frankly though dated looking, still seems completely realistic). And to establish where we are, as well as to pander to our need to know what would really happen if it were really real, Kubrick fills in all the little details about life in space. From the grippy shoes worn by the stumbling stewardess, to the on-board bathroom with the 10+ step instruction card, and even the hat worn by the stewardess to prevent her hair from going in every direction -- these details were amusing and fun, but also seemed entirely plausible given what we know, and not completely over the top. That realism to me is one of the many great strengths of the movie that make it still so accessible today.
The last observation I had was how amazingly small the crew list was. I don't remember seeing any set design artists or anything listed in the credits, so I have a feeling these were uncredited rather than nonexistent.