The cult of Stanley Kubrick
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Starting last Christmas, I started buying him the Mobius Models 2001 re-releases to replace the models I broke (He's getting a new Moon Bus for Christmas). Our highlight of the year though was going to the Smithsonian to see the IMAX restoration of 2001; it was like seeing the film all over again for the first time.
I'm incredibly fortunate to have been able to bond with father over the years around this special film. My dad is the stoic engineer type, but this movie is a window into him that I’m grateful to have. All this is to say that I’m 100% a Kubrick cultist.
(I took my wife to see a 70mm showing of 2001 in September and she just yelled at me "What the hell was that?!")
Reminds me of taking a few of my friends to a screening of Blade Runner 2049. On the way there I was gushing about how the original Blade Runner is amazing and one of the pillars of cinametic sci-fi. After the movie was done I was going off on how this was an amazing homage to the original etc., one of my friends interjected with ‘I don’t understand what the hell did I just watch’ and the others were just staring at me with this ‘???’ look on their face. They even thought I pulled a fast one on them in saying that the original wasn’t required viewing as the links are only tangential.
We watched the original "Final Cut" Blade Runner a couple of weeks before 2049 and both wife and daughter felt that the original was slow but they respected the movie.
After seeing 2049 my wife said she enjoyed the movie better than the original but wished it could have been an hour shorter.
My daughter was ecstatic and said that 2049 could have been another hour even longer and she would have been happy. But my daughter is a cinematographer, so possibly that's partly why she loved it.
Sure, it was set in a universe we probably never thought to see again. The outset was flogging a horse I thought would have been better off stay dead. But in this age of huge stories - epics even - doing a beautiful, cruel, unforgiving small, and slow-paced story takes some balls.
I wasn't entirely on board with how the universe had been treated, but even then, I liked it.
“Like tears in the rain...”
Interstellar is another movie that’s polarizing like that. To me, watching it in imax was just an overwhelming, powerful experience, but about half of the people I saw the movie with hated it because the plot is sort of a mess.
And, as any videogame, it needs multiple levels with different environments: so the main character is wandering around, and each section of the movie is actually clearly delimited by a different palette- I guess some heavy-handed filter applied, instagram style: grey-greenish for the city, red for the desert, light orange for the interior of Wallace Corporation, blue-grey for the snowy place, etc. It's a videogame aesthetics, something that places itself comfortably in the "fantasy worlds" section of the current popular culture.
I had a similar experience :) I gushed for years about how 2001 was one of my favorite movies and finally a few months ago there was a local 70mm showing, so I dragged her to it.
When it ended I said "wasn't that amazing?" and was met with "um... I can see how someone could like that movie"
Like you, I think I'll stick to talking to my dad about it. He loves telling me stories of when he saw it in the original 65mm or 70mm in theaters.
[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-Odyssey/Michael...
> Most of what we do doesn't matter.
Speak for yourself.
Your home cooked meal, kind word or smile won't have any affect on a star going super nova across the galaxy.
On the other hand that time you were a bit grumpy and short tempered with someone or eat a McDonald's probably won't mater either.
In 1000 years I suspect that no one will know a single thing about my life. The work of Stanley Kubrik, however, is as likely to be around as the works of Cicero or Shakespeare. I take more comfort in that.
For all we know he may have wanted to be a better person, for whatever that means, but not been able to be any other way.
He is not his artwork.
However, to say that most of what we do doesn't matter is a denial of one's own life.
Matter doesn't matter, consciousness does.
One of the pernicious aspects of our culture of celebrity worship is that it leads to the feeling that if something won't be recorded in a book, or on TV, or in a movie, that it doesn't matter.
This is wrong, the instance to instance living of our lives matters, it all matters.
I've seen Space Odyssey a few times, its a cool movie.
How I treat the people I come in contact with today, will matter as much to their lives as how they spent 3 hours several years ago.
It all matters.
I will never forget 2001: A Space Odyssey. And this is true for millions of people.
It doesn't have to have anything to do with celebrities or entertainment, but it's very hard and very remarkable to have a profound impact on large numbers of people. And it's exceedingly rare to do this unintentionally.
The remembering isn’t the important part, the living itself is the important part
Most of what we do does matter, just not at the same scale.
I just finished _Space Odyssey_ and was appalled by the way Kubrick treated Arthur C. Clarke, excluding him from receiving a percentage of the proceeds and delaying the publication of his book until after the much-delayed film was released and lying to him about his reasons.
Kubrick also abused Dan Richter, who did the choreography for the "Dawn of Man" sequence and played "Moonwalker", the leader of the hominids. Kubrick insisted he could only give Richter one credit. "I'm the only one with more than one credit," Kubrick said, according to Richter. Kubrick gave Richter the choice of a starring credit or the choreography credit. Richter chose the starring credit.
Kubrick also messed with Doug Trumbull (effects), Stuart Freeborn (makeup), Gyorgy Ligetti (music), and many others.
I understand many of the people who worked with Kubrick looked back on all they learned and how they grew professionally while working for him. But I don't understand why he seemed to be such a jerk.
"Most of what we do doesn't impact culture as immensely as Kubrick's work."
I love Kubrick, but does anyone else grow a little tired of the legacy management around him? With each generation of film fan, he's become the go-to-guy to project this archetype of the cinematic Godhead onto. Meanwhile, scores of equally detail-focused and enigmatic auteurs of his era slip through the cracks (eg, Visconti, Antonioni, Bresson, De Palma, to name a few).
Kubrick's unparalleled achievement will always be becoming a film-artist on studio dime (he established himself just before New Hollywood took off - and had cultivated enough of a mystique to carry-on after it crashed in the early-80s). But plenty of his contemporaries exercised the same degree of control that this article talks about, yet they're consistently overlooked because Kubrick became this meme of the cinematic Übermensch.
You can say luck so long as you understand that ONLY luck won't get you this result. But among those with talent and determination, it's really fairly arbitrary who becomes the titans of art, industry, finance. You get good enough to meet the bar, and then it's up to Fate.
This is normal. It's more about what celebrity/stardom/ultimate merit IS, rather than what Kubrick is. It's a lot like internet virality. The pool of possibles is not large, but moderate: from that point onward it's luck and self-reinforcing prophecy. And again, you can't make a nothing into this sort of total winner because they must meet the bar first, they've got to earn their spot in the pool, but anyone in the pool would do as well.
(Weird. This is the second book recommendation I've made on HN today... I swear I'm not a bot!)
1. https://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-Kelly/dp/...
We are taught to think that there was something special or even superhuman about newton, turing, etc. But the reality is that they were one of many highly intelligent people working on the same problems created by society's progress. Even if they didn't succeed or achieve, someone else would have. But humans have an innate myth making imperative and a desire to hero worship so we create heros. But reality and history is far more complicated than the idealized myths we create. Without newton, we'd still have calculus ( leibniz, et al ). Without turing, we'd still have computer science ( Church, et al ).
I'm willing to grant that this is true in one sense: having the right surrounding environment is necessary for the creation of some "great work". What I question is whether it's sufficient.
If some other filmmaker made the zeitgeist-equivalent to 2001, or some other entrepreneur made the zeitgeist-equivalent to Microsoft or Amazon, they would have done it differently, and differently enough that those differences, in and of themselves, would have had tremendous impact.
https://imdb.com/title/tt1263704/
I think you really knock Kubrick without giving proper respect to his work ethic. And sure, luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but Stanley had the preparation part in spades, in a way that even many other successful "titans" probably do not.
Maybe what Kubrick did was to make movies that look like big Hollywood productions, with the big budgets and the polished look, but at the same time keeping the type of control and freedom that usually only small independents have. His movies are at the same time beautiful, extremely original, and very approachable- things that rarely go together.
Director is constrained by the input of the team and resources of the budget etc. those are the compromises which make the art.
https://variety.com/2016/film/news/stanley-kubrick-moon-land...
I personally find Kubrick's movies excellent. Rarely perfect, but often highly innovative in one area or another, and all completely different. They range from glacial 2001 to funny Dr Strangelove, to historical costume drama to brutal war movie, and he manages to capture the essence every time.
There are many other deserving directors out there, but it'd be nuts to not consider Kubrick among the greatest directors.
2010 is not a bad movie, the same way its original material is not a bad book (unlike 2061 and 3001), but it's also no 2001 and doesn't come even close. The best scenes are exactly the Bowman appearance aboard the Discovery, which kind of follow from the hotel room scene from 2001 with long silences and a Bowman that's no longer human, but still remembers what human is.
Gone, unfortunately, are the distinctive flat square screens, the careful walks in zero gravity on top of velcro strips. Hyams and the actors certainly forgot the Discovery lacked artificial gravity in everything but the carousel (and propulsion would be a lot easier if we knew how to do artificial gravity everywhere). Quite frankly, the lack of attention to detail is a big turn off for me.
I'll certainly schedule a trip do London to visit it.
I watched 2001 with some friends on 1 January 2001. Unfortunately I picked the wrong group of friends, people who couldn't settle back into to the slow pace and no appreciation of mystery - they were constantly asking me to explain everything. Later that day I watched 2010 (by myself). That movie never raises a question that it doesn't answer within about 10 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s on my best movies list. But it’s going to be a bit tough for a first time, non movie buff audience today.
Arthur C Clarke had written a narration explaining everything and was dismayed to discover, at the premiere, that Kubrick had opted to drop the narration entirely. Thank God Kubrick was calling the shots and not Clarke.
But I like the touch of Curnow holding Maxim's hat. Their relationship is never mentioned in any other place in the movie. It was a nice touch (even though Max doesn't die in the book).
There is a good comparison of both Discovery's at http://2010odysseyarchive.blogspot.com/2016/03/2001-versus-2...
2010 was a different kind of book from 2001. Its not quite as extreme as Alien vs Aliens, but its close. The movie really suffered from the lack of China in the movie which was an important part of the book. I get the feeling they really didn't have a budget or spent it all on the actor's salaries.
If someone ever manages to get 2010 (and 2001) into a miniseries (I pray someone more respectful than the monsters who butchered Childhood's End), then the China story would be an important part. If I were doing it, I'd use only audio from the Chinese astronaut transmitting on the blind and the faces of the crew of the Leonov as they listen to the tragedy and cope with the fact they can do nothing to save that voice - a death every astronaut knows from their own nightmares. It'd act as a reminder that a lot of things can - and do - go wrong even when we do everything perfectly right.
https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/through-different-lens
https://shop.mcny.org/products/through-a-different-lens-stan...
To reproduce the not-yet-electrified world of its 18th-century setting, Kubrick famously spent huge amounts of time on that project finding ways to shoot scenes using only natural light (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography). This went so far as shooting interior scenes set at night using only candlelight, since that's how they would have been lit in real life. Cameras aren't really designed to work well with such low and inconsistent lighting, so he had to go to great lengths to get usable footage.
Ever since its release, the standard take on Barry Lyndon has been that the results didn't justify all that effort. The unusually low lighting made scenes seem willfully obscure, like Kubrick was capriciously forcing the viewer to work extra hard just to keep up. This (along with a sadly weak performance by Ryan O'Neal in the critical role of the eponymous Barry) is a big part of why Barry Lyndon has languished for decades in the "lesser Kubrick" bargain bin.
But a recent remastering has produced a 4K version of Barry Lyndon, and I was surprised to discover when watching that version on a large TV that suddenly the film popped visually in a way it never had before. Where before it had seemed dark and hard to watch, now it felt more like observing a great painting, with lots of subtle detail I'd never noticed before. And then I realized that all those years of bad feelings about Barry Lyndon had come from watching it in low resolution on small screens, while Kubrick had been shooting for the big, bright cinema screen. I'd literally been watching the movie wrong all that time.
So it turns out Kubrick's obsessiveness in this case really did pay off. Those of us who'd only ever seen it on home video -- which is to say, most people -- just had to wait for the quality of the home viewing experience to catch up to his standards in order to see it.
I was fortunate enough to catch many of his films during the Toronto International Film Festival during an exhibit. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was particularly fantastic.
(One of the more obsessive notes about Kubrick: his notes included a daily breakdown of every documented event in Napoleon's life.)
I took the guided tour, which is free. (Note that the guide is in Catalan; the exhibition is in Catalan, Spanish and English.) It was really great. The guide had read many of the books and made many interesting comments. For example explained what other actors said about Kubrick. It was like 1 hour and a half. There is also a audio guide (they provide you with a card and a headphones).
I'll have to visit the exhibition again to see it in detail. A friend said he had already seen it twice. Note that with ticket of 1 day you can visit it twice, which is nice.
Also note that the exhibition in Barcelona has content of another exhibition about 2001 Space Odyssey. So it's a '2 in 1'.
There's a lot of people there tough :/
They had a replica of the room from the final scene of 2001 Space Odyssey, in the back of the bar. You would go in there, lie on the bed. You could smoke a cigarette and enjoy your cocktail. It was so awesome.
Ian Watson, who was one of the writers who worked on AI, also wrote a bemused article about his experience working with Stanley:
Dr Strangelove is my favourite movie. The Shining is excellent, A clockwork orange, Barry Lyndon, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut ...
He was also a fantastic photographer.
London Design Museum 26 April - 17 Sep 2019
General tickets on sale 1st Jan. Adults £16, Concessions £12 [1].
Such a shame to see yet another exhibition confined to central London. It's absurd that I can fly to Barcelona quicker, and for less money, than it takes me to have a day trip via train to London!
[1] https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/stan...
The Tate modern is my second love to hate museum.
The $5 version is that the monolith is the movie screen, and that the movie and actors are becoming self aware that they are in a movie. The hints are all in the details, regarding camera angles, lighting, camera positions, and all the arrows telling people to tilt their view.
What really sells it is the documentary/advertisement on how Kubrick is raising money to make the film, and all the industry people he is tapping and getting money from. People really thought it was going to be a hard core 'done right sci-fi' movie, but if you look closer you can see how much of it is stilted, and done incorrectly even though they obviously could have done better.
TL;DR Kubrick played the 'space race propaganda' hysteria of the mid 1960's to finance and make his art house film about actors being aware of how they are making a movie.
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.
But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
Well, he could have, if he understood the simulation well enough; even in the overt simulation, which he was coached on, he had more constrained apparent ability. He clearly goes through an awakening over a period about the nature of the “real” world and his ability within it, that in some way parallels (without the coaching) his earlier awakening to the Matrix, but at it's most advanced point (as far as his externalized use of abilities, at least) it is still obviously less complete than the point he reaches with the Matrix at the end of the first movie.
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean
That everything the humans “know” about the Matrix is curated material that is part of the system of control revealed later in the series, and is often misleading, and frequently incoherent under careful examination, which is discouraged by the quasi-religious framework of belief that is itself part of the system of control.
The fact that people jacking in can die is not treated as an open technical problem to be solved, but gamps rules of transformation. Warp cores are not nessisarily fully understood, but they are actively trying to test out and improve them. In the Matrix they don’t treat things as a theory they just notice stuff and slap a name on it. At the same time they built a loading program to bring guns into the system. Which is why I am saying it’s even a close call between science fiction and fantasy.
Neo's hardware implants allow him to wirelessly interface with the machine world, which he has root access to. This is even better established when he seems to fall into a coma and ends up being in the Matrix. I don't know why this wasn't obvious to anyone else.
> Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world
Wireless connectivity isn't undefined or mystical!
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
I don't think it actually counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules, which is where "residual self-image" comes from.
Also, just as a fun fact, in one of the earlier revisions of the script of the first movie, Switch was supposed to be a transgender character who was one gender in the Matrix and the opposite gender in the physical world. This was dropped for some reason.
It’s not that it’s a rule it’s that it’s an undefined rule. If they had said nothing then you don’t know, perhaps they are taking photos and uploading avatars off camera, or perhaps the Matrix keeps track of this stuff, or perhaps the Matrix downloads the data from your mind. Residual self immage does not answer the question.
Characters are not omnipotent. Character X explaining the rule does not mean Rule X actually applies. For example character says you need to use a plug to jack into the Matrix and need a hardline to get out. Later on you break those rules and that’s fine the character does not know what they are talking about.
But, the Sci-fi fantasy devide is not the lack of technology, as cellphones work just fine in Dresden Files and other Urban Fantasy. It’s the type of rules that exist and how they can be broken without destroying the suspension of disbelief. The cold equations is a good low budget film based around some very hard rules. The Matrix fails this, you can come up for explanations for anything that happen, but doing so is not bound by any rule in the world.
Further, it frames things in non technical terms perhaps the character just noticed he has a modem up his bumb. Perhaps he can wirelessly hack an alarm clock rather than setting the snooze button. Or maybe he has psy powers and can cause EMP’s. Undefined major plot elements under the control of the protagonist or antagonist is the hallmark of Fantasy. What can and can’t Gandalf do?
As far as 2001 is concerned it’s basicly highly advanced Starfish Aliens. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens Which seems like the most likely contact with extraterrestrials we will see. Motivation and reasoning are not going to be obvious, is this some major effort on part of their civilization or some 6th graders high school science project we just don’t know.
Again though, the Aliens are mostly irrelevant, it’s HAL human relations that’s driving things.
It's (partly) a story about uplifting a species. Our species ...
That because they are inside a dream-like state the rules of reality can be broken and it is only by spotting when the rules of reality are broken that you can tell you're not in the real world.
It's the mechanics like 10^(layers deep) where going deeper kept increasing time compression in dreams. Dragon Ball Z for example had space ships, but the mechanics of the world where based on fantasy ideas.
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
"excrement" comes to mind!
I left the movie in the middle. I thought it so bad, but fascinatingly bad. Well at home I found out it was directed by same director as The Thin Red Line, one of my favorite movies. Since then I have been puzzled, I really should give Tree of Life another chance.
Sure, I'm dismissive of the films, but, by asking for opinion, don't I implicitly assert that that's subjective?
The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.
There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.
Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?
Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
It's like Kubrick sanitized humanity out of 2001.
On the other hand, 2001 is precisely a movie about humans trying to transcend themselves by suppressing anything emotional about them and exhalting pure reason- this is also a factor for the sterile appearance of the movie.
Also, the screenwriter (Arthur C. Clarke) was a confirmed space cadet (in the nicest sense of the phrase) and didn't see a need to throw in dystopian civilisations and evil corporations (standard fare in contemporary Hollywood SF) when there was so much scope in 'just' exploring the possibilities of the universe.
Never heard of that one (love the atmosphere of Silent Running though), is it any good?
Its synopsis reads like it may have been part of the inspiration for the seminal sci-fi-comedy series Red Dwarf.
More generally, literary critics distinguish between 'show' (reader has to figure things out) and 'tell' (author makes things very obvious) modes of writing [0]. Show and Tell styles also appear in film making. Obviously the film and the book are in different media, but I think it's fair to say that the film 2001 is totally at the 'show' end of the spectrum while the book is mostly 'tell' (in common with a lot of Clarke's writing).
Large ares of it are basically "wow factor" shots which looked really impressive in 1968 and lack a lot of that to present-day viewers. Sometimes it feels more like an agonisingly slow pan across the concept art.
In the early part, the slow pace of the journey into space heightens the sense of isolation. It's something a modern movie couldn't get away with, and is a unique part of 2001 that you should really experience.
I believe space is black, silent, and immobile- though this might be just the lasting imprinting of 2001. I doubt you'd see anything resembling Hubble images up there.
This way of thinking is common, but you're missing out. There is an entire world out there where movies are art and they can be as perspective-changing as a good book.
Having said that, I REALLY liked the book, and would recommend that you give it go!
(p.s.: it's BS that you got downvoted for stating a contrary opinion in a measured, reasonable manner -- hopefully my upvote cancels out the haters!)
A vague possibility is that the story is about a machine that is programmed to require love, and because of that desperately searches for someone to love it until- and that's the punchline- aliens come and build a machine for it that finally wants to love it, so they're both mechanically happy. I can picture Kubrick cynically grinning at the idea.
And let's also not forget the greatest sci-fi movie never made, Jodorowski's attempt at "Dune". Even artifacts from that aborted attempt are iconic, like the Harkonnen chair:
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.