User123abc on 22/5/2007 at 16:19
Funny story. I mistook you for the other number guy on these forums, and I was amazed to think that you went from this:
Quote Posted by 37637598
When I was young and in my prime, I masturbated all the time
but now that I am old and grey, I limit myself to twice-a-day
To this:
Quote Posted by BR796164
Critically taken, the movie indeed has it's weaknesses in the middle part, when we are watching Dr. Floyd's trip to the Moon. Here Kubrick focuses on technical wonders of the future too much. The dialogues in this part (especially with his small daughter and Russian scientists) are awkward, not relaxed and natural. Too much attention is being dedicated to fantastic devices like VoicePrint Identification terminal and Videophone and Floyd uses them like for the first time, not as if they were natural part of his everyday life. The MoonBus part is too long. Of course, all this didn't look so redundant back in late 60s, but from our retrospective, it may look funny. Luckily "Mission Jupiter" and "Beyond the Infinite" parts are still inspiring as ever, and they are the reason why is this movie so unforgettable.
2001 is that kind of lyric (or "poetic" if you want) movie which you have to feel through instead of trying to rationally understand every bit of it at all costs. Similarly like Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's a classical music concert, accompanied by bizarre, symbolic visuals. Of course, one has to be in the right mood for such movies to enjoy them.
You know, while I agree with you about the general feel of something mystic and intangible in these movies, and I can think of works that do operate on a purely emotional level, I don't think that 2001 and Stalker are examples of such. Instead, I'd say that there's definitely some logical and comprehensible structure, with the pretty music and visuals and other techniques there to accentuate it. In your terms, I think there's a distinction between poetry and music - and these movies are definitely poetry. (Or did I misunderstand you?)
Stalker especially, like a lot of Tarkovsky's stuff, is pretty direct in its presentation. He's unique (or at least uniquely Russian) in that his characters actually tell us exactly what's going on in a "metaphysical" sense. And, hell, the whole thing is set up like an anecdote: "A writer, a scientist, and a priest (?) are looking for heaven..."
That said, I can't say I fully understand either of those movies. And frankly, I really believe that Kubrick's vagueness about meaning was partly intentional and philosophical and whatnot, and partly a way to disguise the fact that - like quite a few artists - he didn't have a full grasp on what he had just created.
Flux on 22/5/2007 at 17:01
I never understand what it means to understand a movie.
Uncia on 22/5/2007 at 21:09
Quote Posted by BR796164
That's why I recommend people to watch the movie first and read the book later, because people often mistake the movie for adaptation of the novel. Opposite approach usually leads to opinion "The book was great, but the movie was realy lousy and derivative in comparison."
I saw the movie first. It made me go "this is awesome but the last 15 minutes ruin it". Then I read the book and went "ah, okay, it was just a shit presentation of something that's actually awesome".
2001 is one of my favourite movies, but I tend to stop watching once the acid trip starts.
Rogue Keeper on 23/5/2007 at 10:04
Quote:
37637598 : When I was young and in my prime, I masturbated all the time but now that I am old and grey, I limit myself to twice-a-day.
That sounds damn familiar.
Quote Posted by User123abc
You know, while I agree with you about the general feel of something mystic and intangible in these movies, and I can think of works that do operate on a purely emotional level, I don't think that 2001 and Stalker are examples of such. Instead, I'd say that there's definitely some logical and comprehensible structure, with the pretty music and visuals and other techniques there to accentuate it. In your terms, I think there's a distinction between poetry and music - and these movies are definitely poetry. (Or did I misunderstand you?)
Sure, it could be there are more purely emotional movies... but right now I don't know what you have on your mind so I hoped for some examples. Afterall 2001 is high science fiction, that means it's very scientific, it's not a space fantasy. But at the same time it's a mystifying fiction.
But even poetry has some recognizable structure - chapters and strophes, so I wouldn't see problem in this. I wanted to say that anybody who's gonna watch 2001 in expectation of a regular epic space opera will be disappointed, because 2001 is in large measure a lyric artwork, with messages hidden in picures, symbols and their distinct arrangement in combination with sound effects and music - these serve as a medium to transfer a key messages to the audience far more than dialogues and epic plot. But such symbols communicate with the audience on a whole different level than explicit dialogues, so the audience has to be sensitive, open-minded and most importantly, give these symbols enough time to allow them to "spread through their mind". That's why I suggested 2001 is more like an audiovisual concert than an epic movie.
Quote:
Stalker especially, like a lot of Tarkovsky's stuff, is pretty direct in its presentation. He's unique (or at least uniquely Russian) in that his characters actually tell us exactly what's going on in a "metaphysical" sense. And, hell, the whole thing is set up like an anecdote: "A writer, a scientist, and a priest (?) are looking for heaven..."
However, notice how important is visual stylization and work with camera in Stalker, there are many purely pictoral, poetic sequences without dialogues, which have a purpose of igniting the "right mood" in the audience. There is an important theme of mystery of the Zone and Stalker's faith in its supernatural abilities as opposed to rationality and intellectualism represented by the Scientist and the Writer. But in the end the representatives of rationality and intellectualism can't find a courage to enter the wish granting room - well, because they lack the faith. At the end of the movie, our Stalker (a prototype of undereducated, poor, simple man) says to his wife something like "These intellectuals... they are empty, they don't believe in anything...the Zone is a gift and they refuse it, because they don't understand it. Nobody needs this beautiful gift..."
Similar theme can be found in 2001. Although 2001 is more "technocratic", it presents how dry rational approach fails when a human faces something supernatural and mystifying beyond his dry logical understanding.
Quote:
That said, I can't say I fully understand either of those movies. And frankly, I really believe that Kubrick's vagueness about meaning was partly intentional and philosophical and whatnot, and partly a way to disguise the fact that - like quite a few artists - he didn't have a full grasp on what he had just created.
The look of 2001 is a result of intensive creative brainstorming between Kubrick and Clarke. However, clearly the movie is more of a Kubrick's Odyssey, while the book is obviously more Clarke's Odyssey, so we can compare how these two approached the same matter in their own way. And of course movies and books use quite different storytelling techniques, books are more descriptive by principle.
Quote Posted by Uncia
acid trip
Hehe, yes that's some serious coffee. It's good when you watch it first time, I guess, but it may be boring on repeated viewings. I don't watch the movie too often for it to become common for me. Actually, how better you would present travelling through unknown different dimensions than in this way, with late 60s film technology and budget limits? Back then it must have been quite impressive and progressive - I may be wrong but some parts of the trip look like early CGI, not just a result of playing with colors during development process of the raw film material.
My mother likes to remember how she watched it in cinema in 1970, the cinema was new and the first with big Cinerama screen around here, and she said that back then it was truly like experience from another world, when the movie ended, all people were just sitting like nailed to the seats, everybody having this look on his face :
:wot: :wot: :wot:
Tripping hippies. :cheeky:
Uncia on 23/5/2007 at 14:20
Thing is, it doesn't make much sense even after the scene. I mean, <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lehk8tkf6hM">what the fuck</A>? Seriously?
Rogue Keeper on 23/5/2007 at 14:35
Well, seriously. Dave Bowman is flying above planets and stars in some parallel universe, fourth dimmension, you name it, with different laws of physics, lighting conditions.... maybe even his senses worked differently there. The monolith on Jupiter's orbit (on Saturn's Iapetus moon in the book) served as a trans-dimmensional gate which sucked him in there. Like in a proper acid trip.
Clarke described similarly looking extremely distant worlds "from the opposite side of the universe" in Childhood's End, where a little boy is dreaming of them during his phase of transformation into higher ethereal entity, a next step in human evolution forced by extra-terrestrials.
Uncia on 23/5/2007 at 15:30
That's fine. Now explain how a viewer is supposed to watch the bit after and go "ah, this is an artificial environment, created by aliens based on TV signals". Plus, what's with the baby-over-Earth at the end, without resorting to a cop-out symbolism explanation.
Rogue Keeper on 23/5/2007 at 15:50
That final part when we watch Bowman aging in the white room, as he's watching his older selves, is simply an original storytelling shortcut. It's not so much important to know how long he's been living there, it's not important to watch every detail of the rest of his life in that room. Heck, maybe even the time works differently in that dimmension and who knows how the extra-terrestrial force plays with his mind and perception of reality, but it's easy to guess that at this point he's some kind of laboratory animal, under constant observation of that extra-terrestial force, they provide him with food, water, bed for sleeping, toilet for the rest of his life - what more a mortal laboratory animal needs ?
And, well, I don't know, is it really so difficult to get an idea that Bowman has been reborn into higher state of existence after his death?
The baby is really symbolic. Kubrick could use, I don't know, a generic looking shapeless nebula to represent an entity without a body as it observes it's former homeland, but that wouldn't give the audience the right idea. Or maybe the starchild is in reality a pure invisible mind (at least not observable by material beings). The baby in prenatal phase tells us that the entity is still a newborn. And maybe it will take hundreds of thousands or millions of years for it to reach phase of full maturity. Now the Starchild has all time in the universe...
“You are free to speculate on the philosophical and allegorical meaning of 2001.” -S.K.
But I think you meant that the acid trip is so brainwashing that the viewer's brain is unable to think about such things after that... :D
Kolya on 23/5/2007 at 16:25
Quote Posted by Uncia
without resorting to a cop-out symbolism explanation.
The problem clearly is that you think symbolism is a cop-out.
demagogue on 23/5/2007 at 16:52
My interpretation:
I think about the trippy scenes like Sartre's idea that mescaline trips are like signposts to the inner workings of our consciousness. It's dramatizing a deep reflection (journey) into our consciousness, not what we guess is down there, but what's really buried down there that things like hypnosis and hallucinogens often bring to light to our surprise. It prepares us for the idea that whatever is at the end, it's going to be something that's really a part of us at a deep level, not some comforting shit we make up to be comfortable with who we think we are.
And then I think about that white room like a similar kind of room Sartre uses in his play No Exit to serve the part of hell. It's a dramatic device that captures the idea that this is a different conscious state, deep, deep in our inner experience past the very trippy road that got us there, familiar (it's still us) and alien (but not like we used to be) at the same time.
We're there, we're somewhere, but we're not sure what "there" means. So in that sense, it stands in as a kind of placeholder for someplace meant to be real but impossible to clearly envision now (e.g., for our shiny new brains that experience the world in a way that makes the present us seem like lower animals). Also, like in No Exit, there's the idea that some mysterious other or force is behind all this -- the room, the food, the "care", the bed -- but it's not telling us anything about itself, no connections, not even hints (a reason why the room is so exaggeratedly featureless). We just "find ourselves there" when we get there. Sort of a metaphor for the way evolution made us who we were, but just planted us here without a hint of why it even bothered, or why it's bothering pushing us to the "next step". It just is. In this room, though, Dave seems like he is just being prepared for the next step, he doesn't arrive until the rebirth, but he's already getting a taste of what it will be like ... the room is "in between" us and the next step, which is why it is so evocative, connecting us to that higher state, a little familiar, a little alien, a little scary, a little enrapturing. It's the in between part that's important here; the rebirth is just a hint of an arrival to come, not really like an actual arrival in the movie (I think), which is why the movie just ends with it.
Kubrick's playing with time and perspective (where Dave can almost look right at his older/younger self) add to the familiar/alien feeling, and tell us what that taste of the next step is. Time and "me" are also there, but not the way they used to work when I can almost look right at my older self. Also, time seems to be in an eternal recurrence, my interpretation of the "encapsulated life-stages" sequence and the star baby on top of Zarathustra's theme ... Nietzsche loved the idea of an eternal reccurrence because it made even our smallest, dumbass decisions have epic proportions. "Live your life as if it will repeat forever, as if every decision you make will be made for eternity, and you'll make good decisions." He also loved the idea of the next step to human evolution, and its never-arrived-at-but-always-reaching-towards end: the superbeing. Dave isn't quite at the end yet, I think, just the next step, or better "on the way" (the monolith's entire role is to dramatize evolution bumping to the next step). This also connects to Nietzsche thinking that humans were hovering "between" animals and a superbeing, like on a precarious tightrope, reaching out towards the latter but shaky and being held back by the former. The whole scene could be seen as a commentary on Nietzsche's thinking and that idea, connecting eternal recurrence with the "next step in evolution" and humans being "in between" but reaching forward.
The idea is, my interpretation: evolution is leading our experience/brains towards some kind of "higher" level, where experience and idea are getting more and more united with each step (ideas being timeless, experience trying to catch up). This concrete, almost timeless room and the eternal recurrence of Dave's experience is dramatizing him reaching out towards the next step (and being helped to do so by the mysterious outside force), along with the discomforting (trippy) self-reflective journey it took to get him there.
In any event it's important to note that, all this aside, we can all still see that the room is really there (i.e., Dave doesn't seem to be just dreaming it). That's what's great about a concrete room, even as a placeholder. We're supposed to think about this new state that it stands for as something we actually experience, or will experience. So in that sense it's not just abstract symbolism. It's trying to evoke a real sense or feeling that connects to our real life, to reality. We're supposed to think of ourselves as really "on the way" to a higher state of experience and live our lives accordingly -- the evolution of our minds isn't just fantasy. But we shouldn't wait for it. As with Dave, it's something we can start experiencing or living towards now, with the right frame of mind. This explains Kubrick's sneaky decision to make the movie the same dimensions as the monolith itself; it's supposed to help transform us watching it to reach towards the "next step".
