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Not so impressive to me

Posted by orejones on November 6, 2001 at 05:54:48

In Reply to: ... with all the sophistication of Vicomte de Valvert from the well known Rostrand play. posted by Audiophilander on November 6, 2001 at 02:03:24:

Dear AuPh,

I´ve just come to see this thread, after Bruce´s rec in Outside, and found it pretty interesting, as it certainly has some fire!

Re Mr. Wise, well, that list is not bad, but leaving "West Side Story" aside, the other films were just correct (I haven´t included the co-Welles ones, as Welles himself is such a heavy weight that everyone working with him best stays in the shade: I mean, Wise may have signed, but they are Welles´s films; as happened to "The Third Man", which is clearly Welles, no matter Karel Reisz´s name appearing as its director). So, I´ve always found Wise a decent director, but not much more than that. And "Charley" (or "Charlie", I can´t remember its title now, was only so so, bland and pretty poor).

And now, to "2001": that´s a milestone film, not only as a "SciFi" film, what in fact it isn´t, but regarding its language, and its use of exceptional technical resources. Maybe not so much as "Citizen Kane", but exceptional, too. It´s a journey of discovery and wonder, wrapped up in a SciFi disguise, and narrated in a pristine filmic language, with an extremely well measured sense of timing, and using very advanced resources.

Most people have looked at this film from outside, as if Kubrick was trying to tell some kind of SciFi story, and in so doing they look for a conventional plot, with good guys and bad guys, and a clear ending; and they are disappointed at not finding any of these. But, if you look at it from a different point of view, within a frame of temporal suspension of disbelief towards some minor details, like the absence of delay when talking from so far, and the "small" detail of the Monolith, which clearly was intended to be taken as a symbol, not as an actual "Thinking enhancer device", you´ll find out how Kubrick was exposing Clarke´s vision on Mankind´s progress, from apish to Homo faber, later to Homo cogitans (with ludic aspects shown simply by his use of "The Blue Danube" in the transition from the skull-crashing bone to the spaceship flying to the moon) and, in the end, as Homo trascendens, staring at the unknown borders of the Universe, and looking at something so much bigger than himself that there are no known words to describe it: it´s ineffable, thus why he use those whirling images of light in so many shapes, and why there´s no clear ending in this film.

Kubrick didn´t just take Clarke´s story and elaborate his film on it, but he worked very closely with Clarke himself when preparing it, and not much, if anything, was free in it (even the name "HAL", given to the computer, was the result of taking the letters preceding the ones in "IBM" [International Business Machines], thus suggesting some other use for computers than just being business machines...). And Clarke´s story was not just a SciFi story, but his exposure of his feeling of awe and admiration about our evolution, and of what he felt would be our next step in evolution.

Perfect? Of course not, as nothing alive can be. But a masterwork it was, and it still is. And it has not dated, but maybe in some formal aspects: it is still fresh, for anyone who is able to see it with new eyes everytime, not letting the "it´s just..." impression veil the perception of a true piece of art.

Hope not to have bored you.

Regards

BF

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