dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Showing posts with label 2001 a space odyssey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2001 a space odyssey. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
The Briefing
dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Friday, January 25, 2013
The White Room
dir. Ken Russell
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Monday, September 24, 2012
The Lifecycle
dir. Stanley Kubrick
dir. Ridley Scott
from Bugblatter, national hero with a copy of Prometheus.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The Planets Aligned
dir. Stanley Kubrick
dir. Terrence Malick
dir. Ridley Scott
from Bugblatter
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Some Mostly Incoherent Thoughts on Blade Runner
For reasons that'll become apparent, my Blade Runner of choice is the 1991 Director's Cut, not the 2007 Final Cut. So let's use that as the master version here.
In the opening salvo of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, we are invited to "return to link by link along the iron chains of memory" to "the city which used us as its flora." Blade Runner's hauntingly omniscient opening sequence extends much the same invitation.
The credits tick by over otherworldly bursts of percussion that melt into delicate flute melodies that in turn disintegrate into sirens, then back to percussion again. There's a hypnotic cycle in the music - an ebb and flow, an interplay between strong and soft, organic and synthetic, which asserts itself before we are even settled into our seats.
The expository crawl - which wastes no time painting the word "Replicant" in red, a color that, from eye shine to blood, will be associated with them for the duration - rolls up at us like so many others have, but at this moment the music does an interesting thing: it descends, sounding momentarily like a falling bomb and giving us the sensation that the words aren't rising, but instead we are falling down past them and landing on the next image: "LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2019."
We start up where Kubrick's 2001 left off. A huge eye filling with light as it sweeps through a strange city. Eyes abound, disembodied and artificial. Artificial eyes slumped over Chew's shoulders, the hole blown through Leon's eye, the disembodied metal eye of the VK machine. By the end, a demigod is blinded.
And of course there's that famous red eye shine. But what is that, exactly? It's like a wall over the pupil, keeping us from getting in. Like the reflection of the fire in the opening and Tyrell's Coke bottle glasses. Eyes are not windows or magic glasses in Blade Runner, they're one-way glass, mirrors keeping the world out.
In the opening salvo of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, we are invited to "return to link by link along the iron chains of memory" to "the city which used us as its flora." Blade Runner's hauntingly omniscient opening sequence extends much the same invitation.
The credits tick by over otherworldly bursts of percussion that melt into delicate flute melodies that in turn disintegrate into sirens, then back to percussion again. There's a hypnotic cycle in the music - an ebb and flow, an interplay between strong and soft, organic and synthetic, which asserts itself before we are even settled into our seats.
Replicant as a splash of red, the music suggests a tumble down the text
The expository crawl - which wastes no time painting the word "Replicant" in red, a color that, from eye shine to blood, will be associated with them for the duration - rolls up at us like so many others have, but at this moment the music does an interesting thing: it descends, sounding momentarily like a falling bomb and giving us the sensation that the words aren't rising, but instead we are falling down past them and landing on the next image: "LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2019."
Vision is a treacherous thing here.
And of course there's that famous red eye shine. But what is that, exactly? It's like a wall over the pupil, keeping us from getting in. Like the reflection of the fire in the opening and Tyrell's Coke bottle glasses. Eyes are not windows or magic glasses in Blade Runner, they're one-way glass, mirrors keeping the world out.
Hope in the future is tantalizingly out of reach.
But we have that one eye, that one enormous eye taking in the future - we'll never know whose it is. Roy Batty returning to earth? Rick Deckard in a spinner? Dave Bowman, back from Jupiter? At any rate we are beyond the infinite. We have become the star children and entered the next phase of our evolution. A new life awaits us in the off-world colonies, a new Eden in the stars if we can get there.
There's a refrain of rising in the film - Deckard scales the Bradbury, Spinners lurch into the sky, elevators glide up 97 floors. There's hope in the sky, past the fog and gloom on the ground. Tyrell's towers project spotlights optimistically into the air, and the rounded design of the off-world blimp - perhaps the only such design in the film - hints at a softer world beyond.
And so we enter LA from the air, sweeping into the Tyrell Pyramid. We don't enter the building through a fade or a splice, but from a series of violent sutures. Exterior chop interior chop exterior chop interior. It is as though we are forcing ourselves into Holden's room, as though our very presence is invasive.
But for all this soaring, Blade Runner is a film about those who fell, and about those who cannot rise to begin with. "Fiery the angels fell," Roy Batty tells us, his artificial brain mutating Blake's poem America a Prophecy, which in the original said "the angels rose." Later, Roy falls from the stars in Tyrell's elevator, the blood of his maker on his hands. Roy moves among the broken people inhabiting LA who, buffeted between huge plumes of fire and smoke, may as well have been left behind by a rapture.
Roy's misquote is part of an understated motif throughout the film, which little-by-little adds up to something big. Throughout the film, there's a constant background chatter of details that lie. Zhora's Esper Machine photograph is not of her, for example. This a famous "blooper," but it's crucial to the film's themes which go far beyond that literal nonsense. The audio playback of Holden's shooting changes on every listen. Until it was "corrected" in 2007, the microscopic serial number on the snake scale was wrong. Even that close-up of Zhora running through the glass to her death was (again, until it was corrected in the '07 Final Cut, which while technically incredible, makes the film just a bit more prosaic) obviously not Zhora.
Seems to me that each and every instance of someone looking at a printout or through a lens reveals more uncertainty. Even in the little way that the surveillance footage of Leon's interrogation is squashed into the wrong aspect ratio. Everything seen is suspect, everything is tainted by the inherent uncertainty of observation - that treachery of perception in which eyes are walled up private things and we'll never get to know what someone else has seen or done, or even if what we've seen or done is really there.
That's important because Blade Runner is a film that, more than anything, worries about how we depend on the past.
I brought up Durrell's Alexandria Quartet at the beginning here, and that wasn't just idle epigramming. That work, probably the best 20th century British literature has to offer, is a series of four intertwined novels chronicling sex and revolution in Egypt from a series of different perspectives. The idea was to explore Einstein's concept of relative time and Freud's belief that every sexual encounter is a union of four people. It is essentially a sexy temporal Rashomon.
Blade Runner does something similar. It places the future and the past in a holistic moment - robot Kaisers march underfoot, androids hide among mannequins, and at the center of it all is a machine that howls like an animal. It's a startling approach, one which demands a lot from the viewer.
At the heart of this temporal confusion lie the Replicants, who are driven by two impulses: Firstly, a horrible ache for a past they can never have. They are without origin and this drives them to madness. And yet, who among the human characters has any blood ties, any roots? There's not a semblance of familial ties anywhere in the film.
The Replicants' second impulse, obviously, is the need for a future - that most fundamental human need for hopes and goals. And yet again, who among the human characters can make the same claim? Perhaps Gaff's terrifying competitiveness with Deckard, but that's about it. Rick Deckard - what the hell does he want? What does he do?
There's a refrain of rising in the film - Deckard scales the Bradbury, Spinners lurch into the sky, elevators glide up 97 floors. There's hope in the sky, past the fog and gloom on the ground. Tyrell's towers project spotlights optimistically into the air, and the rounded design of the off-world blimp - perhaps the only such design in the film - hints at a softer world beyond.
Scene transition as an invasive act - shades of Batty's return home, Holden prying...
Batty descends
But for all this soaring, Blade Runner is a film about those who fell, and about those who cannot rise to begin with. "Fiery the angels fell," Roy Batty tells us, his artificial brain mutating Blake's poem America a Prophecy, which in the original said "the angels rose." Later, Roy falls from the stars in Tyrell's elevator, the blood of his maker on his hands. Roy moves among the broken people inhabiting LA who, buffeted between huge plumes of fire and smoke, may as well have been left behind by a rapture.
Roy's misquote is part of an understated motif throughout the film, which little-by-little adds up to something big. Throughout the film, there's a constant background chatter of details that lie. Zhora's Esper Machine photograph is not of her, for example. This a famous "blooper," but it's crucial to the film's themes which go far beyond that literal nonsense. The audio playback of Holden's shooting changes on every listen. Until it was "corrected" in 2007, the microscopic serial number on the snake scale was wrong. Even that close-up of Zhora running through the glass to her death was (again, until it was corrected in the '07 Final Cut, which while technically incredible, makes the film just a bit more prosaic) obviously not Zhora.
The 2007 corrected snake scale. I like the old one more.
Seems to me that each and every instance of someone looking at a printout or through a lens reveals more uncertainty. Even in the little way that the surveillance footage of Leon's interrogation is squashed into the wrong aspect ratio. Everything seen is suspect, everything is tainted by the inherent uncertainty of observation - that treachery of perception in which eyes are walled up private things and we'll never get to know what someone else has seen or done, or even if what we've seen or done is really there.
This is because Blade Runner is a film that does not distinguish between memories and dreams.
I brought up Durrell's Alexandria Quartet at the beginning here, and that wasn't just idle epigramming. That work, probably the best 20th century British literature has to offer, is a series of four intertwined novels chronicling sex and revolution in Egypt from a series of different perspectives. The idea was to explore Einstein's concept of relative time and Freud's belief that every sexual encounter is a union of four people. It is essentially a sexy temporal Rashomon.
Blade Runner does something similar. It places the future and the past in a holistic moment - robot Kaisers march underfoot, androids hide among mannequins, and at the center of it all is a machine that howls like an animal. It's a startling approach, one which demands a lot from the viewer.
At the heart of this temporal confusion lie the Replicants, who are driven by two impulses: Firstly, a horrible ache for a past they can never have. They are without origin and this drives them to madness. And yet, who among the human characters has any blood ties, any roots? There's not a semblance of familial ties anywhere in the film.
The Replicants' second impulse, obviously, is the need for a future - that most fundamental human need for hopes and goals. And yet again, who among the human characters can make the same claim? Perhaps Gaff's terrifying competitiveness with Deckard, but that's about it. Rick Deckard - what the hell does he want? What does he do?
Deckard's lonely old memory waltz apartment and Bryant's photos and buffalo hunt lamp.
He lurks on street corners eating fast food, he lives in a strange museum-piece of an apartment which is decorated with antiques and - significantly - unidentified and lonely daguerreotypes. Many other characters have a similar attachment to old photographs. Leon and his "precious photographs," Rachel and her heartbreaking signed picture of her mom, even Bryant has a lampshade decorated with old buffalo hunt pictures. What does anybody in the film do other than strip cars and talk to eyeballs? There is no future left - perhaps in the outer colonies there's a pulse, but here there seems to be nothing to do but wait for death in their crowded hell.
It's unusual to see a film set in the future this enmeshed in the past.
It's unusual to see a film set in the future this enmeshed in the past.
It makes me think of Young Mr. Lincoln, in which events play out with an eerie inevitability*, predicated on something similar to, but not quite, dramatic irony - we are shown pure - downright aggressive - myth making. John Ford, genius as he was, constantly articulated this point visually, framing Abe Lincoln with diegetic Proscenium Arches in nearly every scene.
Other smaller frames, whether diagetic TV screens or carved out of the architecture of the scene
In Blade Runner, Scott is working with a different kind of myth - a pulp rhapsody which reaches back to a few key, diverse elements ranging from the wrath of the Old Testament to the lonely heroes of film noir, and he too uses a few constant visual elements to remind us of our tenuous sense of time and place. Our frame is constantly invaded by other, smaller frames. Little TV screens, neon tongues, windows, small fires, and the omnipresent smog which keep us in a literal haze, the lulling fuzziness of a memory or a dream - a world in which every cubic inch of foggy steamy air has density as though through water, a world in which each rare ray of light makes noise.
This haze overwhelms the film. The smog of LA complements the visual density and overlapping frames. The whole film with the exception of a few piercing close-ups has the dazed, dreamy sense of looking through murky water. The entire film adopts the visual style (long, overlapping fades) of the first few minutes of Scott's earlier Alien, which took place between sleep and consciousness, or possibly, counter-intuitively of Stan Brakhage's childlike present tense in Anticipation of the Night.
There's also a cyclic element (look at how many light sources are intermittent), a jittery repetition in which sights and sounds play out over themselves - like the brief premonition of Deckard saying the phrase "orange body, green legs" (a moment that compliments the child Roy Batty murdering his father); Leon and Pris demonstrating their strength by dipping their hands into first freezing then boiling water; or the ultimate repetition-with-variation of the sentence "time to die," spoken first with hatred, then repeated with love.
It seems like things repeat constantly in this world, flickering back and forth like that dragon's tongue over Deckard's head while he eats. The word "purgatorial" comes to mind. Past begets future begets past, until it all collapses in on itself and this future/past tense speculative-memory-waltz collapses in on itself into the horror of the eternal present.
The past fades in the fog, some untrustworthy memory of a dream or dream of a memory or realization that your cherished family photo is of somebody else. The future has left you behind, spirited off on a blimp to some other world. So you're lost in a constantly repeating meaningless imitation of life until some machine-men, literal imitations of life, fall from the sky and liberate you from the trauma of disconnection.
As usual in Ridley Scott's science fiction, it took artificial life to recognize the wonder that is life, to want to burn brightly - like Tyrell says to Roy Batty, and like Batty's favorite poet William Blake once said to The Tyger.
*"1837 is in context of 1865, of Lincoln’s immolation, of what shall have been. […] A matrix of tenses has spun webs around a Lincoln haunted by his future." - Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Movies (seriously dudes, read Tag Gallagher)
Dazed and dreamy, as if just awakening.
There's also a cyclic element (look at how many light sources are intermittent), a jittery repetition in which sights and sounds play out over themselves - like the brief premonition of Deckard saying the phrase "orange body, green legs" (a moment that compliments the child Roy Batty murdering his father); Leon and Pris demonstrating their strength by dipping their hands into first freezing then boiling water; or the ultimate repetition-with-variation of the sentence "time to die," spoken first with hatred, then repeated with love.
Intimate memories that mean nothing. The photograph briefly comes to life, only reiterating its unreliability.
It seems like things repeat constantly in this world, flickering back and forth like that dragon's tongue over Deckard's head while he eats. The word "purgatorial" comes to mind. Past begets future begets past, until it all collapses in on itself and this future/past tense speculative-memory-waltz collapses in on itself into the horror of the eternal present.
The past fades in the fog, some untrustworthy memory of a dream or dream of a memory or realization that your cherished family photo is of somebody else. The future has left you behind, spirited off on a blimp to some other world. So you're lost in a constantly repeating meaningless imitation of life until some machine-men, literal imitations of life, fall from the sky and liberate you from the trauma of disconnection.
The eternal present.
As usual in Ridley Scott's science fiction, it took artificial life to recognize the wonder that is life, to want to burn brightly - like Tyrell says to Roy Batty, and like Batty's favorite poet William Blake once said to The Tyger.
*"1837 is in context of 1865, of Lincoln’s immolation, of what shall have been. […] A matrix of tenses has spun webs around a Lincoln haunted by his future." - Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Movies (seriously dudes, read Tag Gallagher)
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Some Stray Thoughts About 2001 #2
Part 1
2001 obsesses over a peculiar kind of isolation - compartmentalization. As often as not, characters interact through screens:
2001 obsesses over a peculiar kind of isolation - compartmentalization. As often as not, characters interact through screens:
Even when they're in the same room, their cold professional distance is emphasized by visual compartments, like the white light-boxes separating Dr. Floyd and his colleagues:
We people, in this future, can be face to face and a million miles away, as cleanly divided and rigidly formatted as the astronauts' meals:
Or, even more horrifyingly apt, the inorganic blocks displayed beside (and visually dominated by) HAL 9000. Here we see one of the unseen, unmourned lost astronauts sealed up in a spacesuit/coffin within a bed/coffin within a screen/coffin:
This shot is probably the "warmest" grouping of people in the film:
.tiff)
So it's hard for me to not view this little vignette as a horror scene.
And their very presence is strange, isn't it? They're an odd, dull bunch who seem to exist only to color in the society of 2001. We don't get much explicit information about the social order in this future, but their rigid postures and hawkish eyes reveal a lot. They're the idle rich, and they're as haughty and cold in 2001's future as they were in Barry Lyndon's past. Behind them, a working man is locked away in a glass cubicle that's as remote and joyless as any prison cell.
It seems like social castes are strong in 2001. I've already mentioned that Dr. Floyd's two empty flights speak a lot about the loneliness of life in space, but they also speak to the exclusivity of space travel.
He's bookended by the living dead - those deeply disturbing graves-within-graves spacesuits-within-spaceships sleep pods which seem more and more to be a central image of the film. But Poole doesn't even notice them. They're alive but they're not, they're there but they're not, they're in the same room but they're not. His parents wish him a happy birthday and present a cake he can never eat and burning candles he can never blow out. They speak to each other but they don't.
Poole and Bowman are privileged men, and their relationship with HAL 9000 plays like old money talking to their butler. Bowman speculates on the robot's psychology:
"Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether or not he has real feelings is something I don't think anyone can truthfully answer."It reminds me of that scene in Archer when Sterling reacts with horror when his butler Woodhouse sits at the table - "he thinks he's people!"
The irony here is that HAL has been programmed to affect emotions, while the sedate astronauts have been programmed by training to suppress theirs. The organic beings and the mechanical are thus opposed philosophically, and everything is destroyed because of miscommunication and mistrust. The conflict is between two beings who cannot even begin to relate to one another. It's nice and symmetrical that HAL's plan to discover the fault in the AE-35 unit - let it fail and then run a failure-mode analysis - is basically exactly the plan to deal with HAL itself that Poole and Bowman come up with in the EVA pod.
The final shot of 2001 is one of ultimate loneliness - the loneliness of a God. It's a powerful and important image, but the shot that strikes me most comes when Dave Bowman repairs that plot-critical AE-35 unit. HAL believes it will fail, but it does not. It's a small mistake, a totally trivial error on a small piece of machinery, but it is unforgivable to the astronauts and this rigid refusal to communicate results in the useless deaths of all parties involved.
Bowman, about to remove the unit, floats through the void, presses a button, and shields his eyes from the sun:
This is the essence of 2001: A Space Odyssey - floating alone through the universe, slowly obscuring your face. Shut in and shut out, separated from the world around you and from your own body as well. That black and lifeless helmet is as philosophically disturbing an image as I've ever seen in a film.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Some Stray Thoughts About 2001 #1
Part 2
The first animal life in 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn't appear for 4 and a half minutes - even longer if you count the overture.
A herd of tapirs roots around in a circle, with one individual isolated at the head. It's an image that appears with so little fanfare (in a movie that's practically ALL fanfare), it's easy to miss just how weird it is.
Isolation and circles are key.
One tapir strays, and we meet the first heroes - or probably more accurately: test subjects - of the film. A group of primitive man (or at least ancestors of man (mancestors)), bunched in a circle, suspended between the warmth of the sun and the grit of the earth. The tapir encroaches and is run off with grunts. It's not a major threat, but it's a competitor and its presence seems to highlight the genuine community of our early men and women. A tight bundle without a head, a visual counterpoint to the tapir circle.
It's also a visual counterpoint to the crucial final image, and a core theme of 2001 is curiosity and wonder at how we got from the earthy community here:
to here:
I've heard the film described as technological fetishism (Susan Hayward, for one, has characterized it along these lines), but there's no Star Trek-ish sense of wonder or awe. It's sort of a reverse horror film - I can think of few films which come across so frightened with the state of things. There's a cosmic coldness which man cannot escape or control. It's the social prison of Barry Lyndon combined with the hybrid bureaucratic/technological nightmare of Dr. Strangelove.
When is man FIRST alone in the film?
When he picks up the bone and learns to control his environment.
When is man MOST alone in the film?
At the moment of death, spinning through the void, unable to stop oneself, unable to even TOUCH one's own body. Our meager control has been thrown back in our faces. We're not the masters of our fate, we're not even the masters of ourselves.
Spacesuits in particular seem to horrify Kubrick. There are direct visual parallels between the sarcophagi sleep chambers and the space suits:
Space flight in general is an unnatural experience here. It's a kind of living death, an isolating factor. Look at the pathetic desolation of Dr. Floyd's flights:
Unconscious, limp, and adrift, the film makes no real distinction between the loneliness of life in space and the loneliness of death in space:
The stewardess's ridiculous hat is a nice visual premonition of the EVA pod - and also the Star Child's spacesuit/womb. These flights are all just variations on a theme.
From Paths of Glory on, Kubrick has been afraid of formality and ritual. In his films, it breeds inhumanity. Here, characters seem to drift apart. Our social cocoons become literal:
The first animal life in 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn't appear for 4 and a half minutes - even longer if you count the overture.
A herd of tapirs roots around in a circle, with one individual isolated at the head. It's an image that appears with so little fanfare (in a movie that's practically ALL fanfare), it's easy to miss just how weird it is.
Isolation and circles are key.
One tapir strays, and we meet the first heroes - or probably more accurately: test subjects - of the film. A group of primitive man (or at least ancestors of man (mancestors)), bunched in a circle, suspended between the warmth of the sun and the grit of the earth. The tapir encroaches and is run off with grunts. It's not a major threat, but it's a competitor and its presence seems to highlight the genuine community of our early men and women. A tight bundle without a head, a visual counterpoint to the tapir circle.
It's also a visual counterpoint to the crucial final image, and a core theme of 2001 is curiosity and wonder at how we got from the earthy community here:
I've heard the film described as technological fetishism (Susan Hayward, for one, has characterized it along these lines), but there's no Star Trek-ish sense of wonder or awe. It's sort of a reverse horror film - I can think of few films which come across so frightened with the state of things. There's a cosmic coldness which man cannot escape or control. It's the social prison of Barry Lyndon combined with the hybrid bureaucratic/technological nightmare of Dr. Strangelove.
When is man FIRST alone in the film?
When he picks up the bone and learns to control his environment.
When is man MOST alone in the film?
At the moment of death, spinning through the void, unable to stop oneself, unable to even TOUCH one's own body. Our meager control has been thrown back in our faces. We're not the masters of our fate, we're not even the masters of ourselves.
Spacesuits in particular seem to horrify Kubrick. There are direct visual parallels between the sarcophagi sleep chambers and the space suits:
Space flight in general is an unnatural experience here. It's a kind of living death, an isolating factor. Look at the pathetic desolation of Dr. Floyd's flights:
Unconscious, limp, and adrift, the film makes no real distinction between the loneliness of life in space and the loneliness of death in space:
From Paths of Glory on, Kubrick has been afraid of formality and ritual. In his films, it breeds inhumanity. Here, characters seem to drift apart. Our social cocoons become literal:
And in the end there's not much difference between this sort of isolation:
And this ultimate, grotesque, grand isolation:
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