Resources for Kubrick's 2001

In this post I collect some of the resources I found worthwhile – by no mean complete, I hope I will expand this a bit over time…

A Transcript of 2001

Sundry: 2001 Transcript

Leonard F. Wheat (Triple Allegory)

 "Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory" by Leonard F. Wheat

Excerpts available here, and here.
Additional material here, here, and here/here.

Todd Alcott (What Does the Protagonist Want?)

Viewers sometimes find 2001 to be opaque, baffling, boring, slow, tedious and pointless. I find it the opposite — it’s fascinating, suspenseful and, when one considers the wealth of narrative packed into its running time, quite fast-paced indeed, almost humorously so. What baffles people about 2001 is not in the nature or purpose of its collective scenes, but in the choices Kubrick made early on in the devising of the screenplay.

Depending on the way you approach narrative, Kubrick has done one of two extraordinary, innovative things in the narrative of 2001. One, my personal belief, is that he’s created a narrative in which the protagonist never appears. The other, a slightly more conventional way of looking at it, is that he’s created a narrative with three protagonists, three protagonists who never meet but are related thematically and whose motivations all revolve around the same item, the maguffin of the piece, the mysterious black monolith.

"Prequel", Part 1, part 2, and part 3. (He has also put other Kubrick films through his treatment.)

Hans Morgenstern (Independent Ethos)

How Stanley Kubrick broke the rules of Classical Hollywood cinema and made a better film with ’2001: A Space Odyssey’: My MA thesis redux

Part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

From the Internet to followers in my hometown Miami, I have long been asked to share my MA thesis that capped off my studies in American Literature at Florida International University, something I titled “the Sublimation Of The Classical Hollywood Cinema Form In 2001: A Space Odyssey.” This was a 76-page paper based on the work of eminent film scholar David Bordwell’s theory of classical Hollywood cinema. I contrasted the seven rules of his theory with criticism both scholarly and popular on the film as well as published interviews with both the film’s director Stanley Kubrick and its co-writer Arthur C. Clarke. The point was to reveal how the director achieved a more profound film— philosophically, spiritually and artistically—  by breaking the rules of classical Hollywood cinema.

2001Italia (blog by Simone Odino)