Last night, while the 'Fesser was working late, I decided to redress an oversight in my film education and took in a glorious widescreen presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd never seen. As a rule, I'm on the fence about Kubrick's fearful symmetry and dark humor: I don't seek out his films, necessarily, but I usually find something to enjoy when I do see one. And I think I've only seen Strangelove, Lolita, and Spartacus projected. ["I love you, Spartacus."]
In 2003, I feel a little foolish writing about 2001. A few brief impressions, a notion I have yet to tease out, and a segue will have to suffice.
First off, and not surprising, is just how well the film holds up technologically, as a piece of filmmaking and a set of problems to be solved. Somehow the film feels like a collaboration between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Kubrick's special effects are fully and oppressively realized and startlingly beautiful. But what a control freak. Even in the vast screen acreage of Cinerama, he is never not directing the viewer's eye and attention. And I can't remember the last time I've been to a film with an overture and an intermission. Overall, I did find it a bit shiny, though, and on balance prefer Andrei Tarkovsky's equally eerie on a much smaller budget sci-fi epic Stalker.
But does 2001 still deserve its many accolades? Hell, yeah. The essentialism of the many long sequences without language, and without actors in some cases, is almost ambiotically lulling and primal. [Also, I now have a greater appreciation for the failure of the first 20 minutes of the infamous "Star Wars Holiday Special," which shows home life among the Wookies in a no-subtitle sequence clearly modeled after the "Dawn of Man" segment of 2001. Nice try, CBS.]
The closest I can come to locating the sensation of watching those long stretches of pure cinema, in which narrative both does and does not unspool in a way we've been trained to expect as viewers, is--and I think this is weird, too--reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, specifically the ten years in 20 pages "Time Passes" section in the middle. There's a similiar meditative quality--a recognition of humanity's place in nature, time, and space--as well as the comfort that comes from surrendering to a master at the top of her or his game. Woolf's stream of consciousness fluidity and Kubrick's seamless suturing of millenia, separated at birth? I'm going to have to think about this.
While I do, let's talk about the music. As it turns out, 2003 is the 70th anniversary of the film score. The November/December issue of Film Comment examines what makes a composed instrumental film score so essential in its listener's guide, "Soundtracks 101." The introduction lays out some ground rules:
[S]oundtrack music... helps tell or interpret a story onscreen and can quicken the relationship between a film and its audience. Some scores stay in the memory longer than the movies themselves. Others have gone beyond the screen to become among the most recognizable music of our time (think Gone with the Wind, The Pink Panther, and Star Wars).
To some, the marriage of music and image is cinema's most exciting aspect. To others, scores that tell us how to feel are inherently redundant and unwelcome--emotional brainwashing. Akira Kurosawa once said, "Ever since the silent film gave way to the talkie, sound has interfered with the image." A score that is too obvious and overbearing can smother a movie. But styles and expectations change. With early film scores, music was generally used as a narrator, scrupulously imitating every movement onscreen. Later, as films grew more complex, equally valid experiments began using music as a counterpoint to the action.
In a sense, true film composing is like scoring a ballet--trying to evoke a story and match certain movements--only in this case the choreography comes first and the composer responds to it.
That master manipulator Kubrick understood how to subvert and harness the innate power of the classical music he chose for 2001's in many ways quite traditional score [OK, except for that atonal monolith screeching.] He knew that his silences became more powerful and portentous in the context of "The Blue Danube" or even "Daisy, Daisy." Yet 2001 doesn't actually make it into the top 101.
Not to worry, there are plenty of argument-starters on the list, from Max Steiner's score for King Kong through the Rozsa-Tiomkin-Hermann-Bernstein stretch of European emigres to the Williams epoch and straight on to Glover Gill's gorgeous dreamlike compositions for Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Nothing like a list or two to stir the pot...
Daisy, daisy: Give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you.
