2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
“A film is, or should be, more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”
-Stanley Kubrick
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Interviewer: Why does 2001 seem so affirmative and religious a film?
Stanley Kubrick: The God concept is at the heart of this film. It’s unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution — chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.
Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.
Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we’re really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill — as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?
-excerpted from The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise)
The latest in 1920’s astronaut style via Woman in the Moon (1929, Fritz Lang)
“You’re looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animals with extremely small heads whose name is Man…Very tiny undeveloped brain; comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself ‘Samuel Conrad’. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat- as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling, “People Are Alike All Over”, The Twilight Zone
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise) (via)
“Number one, it was (for once) an alien from outer space who was not an evil alien. Also, it was a science fiction film set on Earth here, and I thought that was marvelous. I liked the setting, the fact that it was in Washington, the heart of our country. I thought that made it very real, very believable, very mundane. I tried to heighten that with my casting, too. I wanted to make it just as credible and believable as it could possibly be, and I think that is one of its strengths.”
-Robert Wise, quoted in Tom Weaver’s It Came from Weaver Five
Fritz Lang, actress Gerda Maurus & crew on the set of Woman in the Moon (1929, dir. Fritz Lang), which included a giant backdrop painting of a lunar landscape (click to enlarge) (via)
Woman in the Moon, Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent science fiction film about mankind’s first trip to the moon
(via)
The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès)
The explorers crash inside the sun, where they fear they will die from the heat. Good thing the flying space train had a giant ice tank!
In The Impossible Voyage (1904, dir. Georges Méliès), a group of intrepid explorers fly into outer space in a rocket-train hybrid, only to accidentally fly straight into the yawning mouth of the rising sun (this film, like most of Méliès’s color films, was hand painted by a team of women in a production-line method - the coloring was done frame by frame)
Lunar flight plans via Woman in the Moon (1929, dir. Fritz Lang)
‘For the human mind, there is no never – only a not yet.’
Woman in the Moon, Fritz Lang’s 1929 sci-fi film about the first moon landing (via)
A Trip to the Moon (1902, dir. Georges Méliès)
“That same evening everything was ready; the crowd was beginning to arrive, the public was crowding in front of the big moon, but the poster, while it made people laugh, was greeted with all kinds of wisecracks. ‘It’s a joke, it’s trickery! Do they think we’re idiots around here? Do you imagine they could have gone to the moon to photograph it? They’re pulling our legs!’ The audiences of that day imagined that it was impossible to photograph anything but real objects.”
-Méliès, on public reaction to his poster for A Trip to the Moon, which featured the scene from the film in which a rocket ship lands on the moon’s eye (via)
Gort escorts Patricia Neal to his space shuttle in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
“I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. In two hours and twenty minutes of film there are only forty minutes of dialogue.
I think one of the areas where 2001 succeeds is in stimulating thoughts about man’s destiny and role in the universe in the minds of people who in the normal course of their lives would never have considered such matters. Here again, you’ve got the resemblance to music; an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication.
The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play.”
-Kubrick, quoted in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (1970)
