“The audience for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey … has always included an unusually large number of people … who felt the need to express their feelings and thoughts about the film in writing.”
This may be the truest statement I have ever read. I’m rolling.
FWIW, I like it.
This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even they might reject it as artsy-fartsy or unintelligible. On the other hand, a number of ordinary proletariat people in the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky to say how his film touched them deeply and felt directly relatable to their own lives.
I happened recently with my girlfriend and I after watching The boy and the Heron, the last Miyazaki.
I was disoriented, trying to make heads or tails of what I just saw, and she was completely happy of all the poetry and symbolism she just saw.
Some art pieces are not meant to be overanalyzed. They are meant to be felt.
I had the same experience with the movie. Even though I knew up front about Isao Takahata’s passing, I struggled to make all the imagery fit into my expectations of a “coherent” story. At one point I just had to let go of my search of any overarching analogy, and just enjoyed the fireworks.
> On the other hand, a number of ordinary proletariat people in the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky (...)
A number of ordinary proletariat, that strikes me as an oddly specific subset of people. Is the implication that "proletariat people" are down to earth people who like simple things and so Mirror was in a sense down to earth, if only you had the right sensibilities? Or what's the implication?
In any case I for one can't imagine anything more fartsy than someone who'd self identify as proletariat. You realize that regular workers didn't call themselves proletariat, right? Communists called workers proletariat. So anyone calling himself proletariat was a communist, not a regular worker who just want to do his job. In other words, supremely fartsy. So you're saying that fartsy people liked a fartsy movie. That actually makes sense.
Edit: just started reading the movie's Wikipedia page
> including newsreel footage of major moments in Soviet history
OF COURSE it was popular with communists. Damn, I'm good.
I’m sorry to interrupt your flight of fancy there, but the word "proletariat" came from me and not the people writing letters to Tarkovsky (as someone from Eastern Europe of a certain generation, I’m as likely to reach for that word to describe people in highly menial jobs as, say, “working class”, but then again nearly everyone in the USSR was working class).
I would suggest watching the film before furthering speculating about it. That newsreel footage and the nonlinear way it is presented is far more likely to challenge viewers than arouse any patriotic or otherwise enthusiastic sentiments.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was working class
For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist.
> I would suggest watching the film
The first few paragraphs on how the movie is about a person remembering important episodes of his life got me curious and gave me Butterfly Effect vibes (good), but reading further down I started getting Mulholland Drives vibes (not good).
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’t checked this thoroughly, divided the proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian селские пролетарии) and urban proletarians (городские пролетарии). In any event, in colloquial contexts the word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial trudging wherever it’s lived.
Of course Lenin had an interest in selling the idea that everyone is actually proletariat. In reality by Marx's definition, proletariat are those who don't own the means of production (and are therefore stuck in earning by selling their labour), whereas farmers at least until the NEP died, mostly owned their own farms which means they did own the means of their production, which is also why farmers, or virtually everyone in the USSR outside the cities hated the communists.
But I got your point.
Your comment is incredibly uninformed (and the third such in a row). Whole rural areas of European Russia went over to the Bolsheviks, and this has been thoroughly documented in countless diaries, letters, memoirs, and literature – it’s something that anyone familiar with, say, Volga–Kama areal studies is well aware of (just as one is well aware that, alas, many of the same rural people ecstatic at new opportunities in the wake of 1917, were shot under Stalin in 1933–1937). In spite of serfdom having been abolished under Alexander II, or having never been enforced at all in some areas, smallholders regularly found themselves falling into debt to powerful rural magnates, and exploited through those magnates’ “company stores”. The Bolsheviks’ depiction of a “rural proletariat” oppressed by a “rural bourgeoisie”, however unorthodox it might have been compared to Marx, proved easy for rural people to sympathize with.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist
This statement has a number of flaws.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer
True during the early years, but after WW2 changed rapidly (in line with the West). [1] shows rural population percentage dropped from 67% in 1939 to 56% in 1956, and it rapidly decreased after that. [2] is female specific but by 1975 under 1/3 were working in agriculture.
In addition, everyone other than the actual owner of the land was considered "The Agricultural Proletariat". Engels wrote [3] about this in 1845 well before the establishment of the Soviet Union.
> so not proletariat
As seen above, this doesn't follow especially after the establishment of collective farming where everyone were considered workers.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1233891
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_working_class#Women
[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-w...
> OF COURSE it was popular with communists
A long story short: it wasn't. Tarkovsky suffered from censorship and lack of support for the production of non propaganda movies, like many others.
> Edit: just started reading the movie's Wikipedia page
Watching movies and reading about them before commenting on them is usually a good starting point.
> “ she had gone to a drive-in cinema with her husband and children to see a double bill of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey”
Bizarre choice - apparently they marketed it as a family movie
She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001
And honestly, thinking back, the end of 2001 is pretty nonsensical to most normal people. I remember watching it when I was young and it was hard to figure out what the trippy stuff meant, let alone the end.
In comparison, 9 years later Star Wars was completely approachable to the entire family.
> She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001
Mr. Kubrick's programming choices are, indeed, bizarre. ;-)
That was normal in the 60s. Scifi was encouraged. They wanted kids to be inspired by space and technology. Star Wars changed things, driving a wedge separating what would eventually be "kids" movies from hard scifi, but that wasnt always so. Movies like 1953's War of the Worlds were very much all-family affairs.
I can’t imagine an atomic family from the 60’s rolling up to this and getting caught off guard like that XD
I can see it easily happening. People were not "tuned in" back then as we are now. People used the newspapers to see what was playing and what times where available. Trailers weren't available 24/7 for instant viewing. You saw previews before the movie you were about to watch. The TV advertising wasn't so prevalent for movies. My parents would go to the movies and see whatever was playing on the one screen the theater had when they were kids, not just go to see a specific movie at the cineplex with 30 different screens. Things were very different back then.
This was still somewhat the case in the late 90s and early 00s before Youtube and IMDB were really big. We'd go watch Star Trek Nemesis because it had Star Trek in the name or watch whatever looked good in the trailers last time we went. What was your alternative? Watch it on your CRT tv a year later, probably with ads? Rental existed, but at least where I lived it was very uncommon. I honestly miss it. Driving to the cinema with a bunch of friends, sometimes not even certain what we'd watch and how it would turn out. Really great! Recently I visited an old friend at his new (to me) apartment and it came up that he had kept all his cinema tickets from back in the day. We went through all of them swimming in nostalgia, a little blurry-eyed, while our wives laughed at us.
> late 90s and early 00s
I remember going to Moulin Rouge without knowing it was a musical!
The ending is one of the scariest moments in cinema for me. I remember watching it in the middle of the night on PBS I think. I was absolutely terrified about what was in that room with him as he was aged and kept looking over his shoulder.
I feel like we all have a “I saw it in middle of the night on PBS and it really screwed with my head” movie.
For me it was being maybe 13 and tuning in to the last half of Lord of the Flies at about 1am. Those kids abandoned on a lonely island, followed by the rescuer showing up, followed by credits, followed by the national anthem and test colour bars will forever be burned into my brain.
My parents had recorded something on our VCR and "to be safe" it recorded the first half hour or so of the following movie. The following movie was the original Alien. It stopped around the dinner scene before it gets really going. I must have watched that part of the movie ~20 times when I was around 10. I'd be constantly afraid about facehuggers hiding under the bed or behind the shower curtain when it was dark.
For me that was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert was not just a movie critic... And it inspired Austin Powers as well!
For me it was the first letterboxed thing I had ever seen on TV and I asked my dad what was wrong with the TV. Feels like it was on A&E? At least 30 years ago.
I watched Bowie's 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' after hearing a very wide range of opinions - love, hate, and "meh".
It's a very interesting film in somewhat the same vein as 2001 - It does not provide a narrative throughline and the conclusion is less than satisfying.
An unsatisfying narrative and conclusion is a double edged sword - it can lead people to think about the film for a longer time and ruminate on it - or it can make people angry and/or say stupid things. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URo66iLNEZw
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I also think about Alex Garland's film 'Civil War'. It is very unsatisfying to never be told which side is the 'right' side, or what the war was about.
That unsatisfaction can make someone hate the movie, or it can be taken as commentary on war - it doesn't matter which side is right or what the fighting is for, no one wins a war. Winning a war is not morally satisfying. I think this is very very hard for Americans to understand, as our military tradition has centered on WWII.
I feel pretty confident in saying that no war that America fought after WWII has had a satisfying conclusion.
After 'Winning WWII' America also won the peace, which is actually why we can feel satisfied now. In no war before or since has America won the peace at anything close to the Post-WWII level.
Dear participations: I can’t find any audience responses in that pdf. Only thoughts about them in a different language.
Thankfully, I read the book before seeing the movie.
Most of the friends I've been with who saw the film first did a good job of following the plot up until the final act, which was pretty much unfilmable at the time.
Decades later, the Jodie Foster movie, Contact, did a much better job of visualizing "a trip through an interstellar mass transit system" than 2001 showing a trippy light show.
The third act is pretty much Jaws after the breakdown of the animatronic shark. There are actual pre-production stills showing aliens [1], but this was found unsatisfactory and the film drifted towards a much more abstract direction. Probably, it's the much better film, because of this. (Personally, I can't think of any solution showing the events in real life that isn't cheesy or even kitschy. It may have been The Abyss of 1960s cinema. As-is, the notion that the first two realistic acts of the film are driving towards an enigmatic, kind of open end, was certainly important for its reception and its long-term relevance.)
[1] Compare https://touringinstability.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/the-alie...
What is wrong with The Abyss? The theatrical release was fine. The extended addition with the 5 minute video montage of the aliens preaching to Bud that humans are destructive seemed like the only bad thing to me but that wasn't in the theatrical release.
Hum, the ending had to be remade after first screenings, and even as-is, it's subject to critique by many, diminishing the value of the entire film. (I recall it even being laughed at. I guess, audiences may have become more tolerant, since.) It may have done better with a more abstract solution, as well.
(There may be specific topics where "show, don't tell" becomes "experience, don't show". And 2001 tried to accomplish this. The Abyss, on the other hand, tried still to show, probably failing in its mission. — There was a time when German media theory, in the wake of F.A. Kittler, was kind of obsessed with the written signifier of the novel giving rise to an immediate, visually representative significant. Observed from this perspective, even Clarke's novel takes a step back into abstraction: we may find it hard to invoke an immediate imaginary representation, while reading, the narrative pretty much falls back to us being told, instead of giving rise to imagination, much until the last, much more "tangible" gesture of the Space Child. But, even then, the perspective of the Space Child, cynical without cynicism, and what may come of this, is very much an open ending. So, why not move this openness forward in the plot?)
The book makes a lot of things clearer than the film.
Interestingly the book and the film were developed together by Kubrick and Clarke as a collaborative process.
Usually the book comes before the film, but occasionally it comes after.
I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are!
> I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are!
Game of Thrones?
That was a television series that should've waited. They needed the books to be finished.
Because it's either:
A) regular Hollywood schlock that ruined the last seasons; or (worse)
B) that was his actual direction for the book series and now he knows that it's not good.
Either way, I believe we will never get the final books in that series due to the television series.
I definitely agree the show influenced the books. Not sure that’s better or worse. I didn’t hate the ending as much as everyone else. It made sense. Maybe it would be more palatable with a subsequent series.
Counterpoint - the books will never be finished, so waiting would make no sense.
However, they should hire writers that can actually write characters and plots other then simplest ones. The writing quality was indeed horrible by the end.
And interestingly Clarke set the destination as Saturn, whereas Kubrick made it Jupiter. In the sequel book, 2010, Clarke used Jupiter as in the movie.
Note though that the movie is not an adaption of the novel. They were written in tandem, and the movie was published slightly before the book.
I thought the movie Contact was very different from the book, and the ending was different -- no?
Both movies had a sequence that was supposed to represent a human being traveling through the equivalent of an intergalactic mass transit system to a distant location.
At the time that 2001 was made, effects were not there yet.
Tangential, but TIL there exists a journal of audience & reception studies.