It's reflection of who we are, rather than who may become. The tech seen in 2001, from Skype calls to iPads to artificial intelligence, is far more reality for us than it is science fiction. It's a byproduct of our media-saturated landscape, a status quo that also brings with it a new understanding of technology.
Viewers today are arguably more attuned to discerning meaning from moving images. To a place – and feeling – seldom expressed in words. Rare is the experience of not only watching a film, but falling into it, allowing it to transport you elsewhere. On the biggest, clearest and brightest canvas, 2001: A Space Odyssey allows one a unique opportunity.
#STAR WARS REVISITED BEN HUT SERIES#
The incorrectly shaded landscapes, like skewed memories, fit uncannily into this montage, a series of sounds and feelings captured as colours, as if unraveling the layers of space and time as we see them. When Dave finally flies through the "star gate" – a sequence that, in 1968, required special effects to be burned into the film's very fabric – he is transported, as if towards some unquantifiable answer about what lies beneath the surface of existence. The cacophony of colours hitting the face of a stranded Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) make his close-ups nightmarish, as his cold, hard stare begs us to search for the fear we're already feeling as Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) tumbles through the void. The red of HAL's solitary eye is more hellish.
The very concept of visual contrast, between light and dark, is distinctly enhanced by the physical medium. There's almost too much light reflecting off them, a contrast against the infinite darkness. The four-armed space pods, which become humanoid avatars for the villainous HAL 9000, float ominously, backed by nothingness as their surfaces become garish. Rather than seeing the images re-created through combinations of red, blue and green pixels – the yellow you see on digital isn't really yellow – this twenty-year-old film print reflected, almost exactly, what was once placed before it and what had since been seen by so many others over the decades. It felt like re-discovering a lost relic. I recently had the pleasure of watching Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together (1997) on 35mm. A battered print, for instance, feels like it's lived a life. While the widespread move to digital has gone uncommented upon by the vast majority of moviegoers, a return to watching movies on film at revival screenings and the likes brings with it a certain set of expectations, especially for older works. As his own recent works have shown, at least for those lucky enough to have watched them on 70mm (or even 35mm, once industry standard), the film medium, when used correctly, tends to be leaps and bounds ahead of digital when it comes to the aesthetics we associate with the "cinematic." The overall comparisons are certainly a longer debate exceptions exist, and digital tech has been fruitful for those not simply trying to imitate film – the likes of Scorsese, Cameron, Soderbergh and even Jean-Luc Godard – but there is perhaps no better sampling of film's continued prowess than Kubrick's space-set masterpiece. Nolan is a known proponent of the continuation of celluloid – he recently assisted with the re-opening of Kodak in India – and his support for the medium is not without reason. Nolan however, whose own Interstellar draws heavily from the film, curated this new copy himself from Kubrick's original camera negatives. The film has played in theatres numerous times over the decades via, among other means, 2K digital scans and touched-up 70mm prints. More pertinently, it's a communal experience, as most great cinema tends to be, eliciting gasps and applause and nervous laughter from even the most familiar viewers, and it recently made its return to theatres on its 50th anniversary.Īt the 2018 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan presented the world with what he called an "unrestored" print of 2001. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a journey through space and time and perception, and it remains the quintessential celluloid experience. His victims, flesh and blood, ought to, but feel distant. A chilling cyclops, made of ones and zeroes, who ought not to feel human. Manmade celestial bodies, waltzing to Johann Strauss II, a flawless union of past and future. Primitive humans, caressing a consummate altar, worshipping, perhaps for the first time.
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