TCM tomorrow at 5:15pm: Stanley Kubricks 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) beautifully modulates in four symphonic sections a speculative meditation in which Darwinian evolution takes a messianic leap into the stars. Even though Arthur C. Clarkes sci-fi infrastructure is concerned primarily with evolutionary metaphysics, psychologically the film is filled with Kubricks inner fears about man as he contemplates infinity. One can make a convincing case, on the basis of Kubricks other films, that his altar ego in 2001 is the see-all, hear-all, control-all sentient computer HAL, with its implanted flaw causing it to mistrust any idealized opportunity for the human race to advance. (There is a conflict in the film between its open, sparsely philosophically construction and its ultimate narrative of god-like string-pullers dictating mans birth, death, and rebirth.) The greatness of the film-with the delightful irony of the lowly genre of science fiction setting the 60s cinema community on its head-resides more in its expressively slow movement (plastic) through a distended universe (visual) than in its parable about redemptive transcendence (literary). Truly, the film on the big screen still grips audiences more as an experience than as an entertainment. Kubricks most bravura achievement, even more than his daring cuts, is the manner in which he assaults the sometimes bewildered viewer with monumental chunks of Western culture and technology from the sensibility of the past and the imagination of the future.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 00:13:10 +0000
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