Kubrick Cut By Cut: ASO001 to ASO120 – 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – 1. Act: THE DAWN OF MAN

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The 1968 motion-picture 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY STANLEY KUBRICK'S WORK

Warning: Spoilers ahead! This post contains furthermore copyrighted material for the purpose of research, commentary and eduction as per fair use provisions.

SPOILER WARNING

The 1968 motion-picture 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY ­ ­ ­ ­

This is first instalment of my "Kubrick Cut By Cut" series for Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this post I will cover the first act with its twenty minutes – the "prehistoric" scenes – plus the short one minute Entr'acte that serves as a bridge to the second act.

Going cut by cut (and making notes as to the time of the cut) allowed me to discover some important hints which helped me to better understand the film, and Kubrick's mode of work.

The first thing I want to highlight is how methodical Kubrick is: A casual viewing of the first act might give the impression that we are simply seeing one long unstructured narrative being played out on the screen. However, after the notes I took so far, I can say that Kubrick has clearly structured the first act:

• 1. Act: THE DAWN OF MAN (Twenty minutes in four settings)
• 1. Setting: The Formation of the Solar System (Five minutes)
• 2. Setting: Huminids: Animals among Animals (Five minutes)
• 3. Setting: The first Monolith (Five minutes)
• 4. Setting: Tools and the first Murder (Five minutes)
• Entr'acte: (SPACE) BOMBS (One Minute) 

Furthermore I suspect that the settings are further structured by the cuts, e.g. that the 1. setting is divided into the time pre Solar System – aka Formation of the Universe – and the actual Formation of the Solar System. For a lack of time I have not investigated this any further, but I may revisit that question once I have noted all cuts in the film.

The second thing I want to highlight is that Kubrick does place his cuts with care. Four individual cuts stand out in the first act, which each cut marking the end of a setting, and the beginning of the next setting or the entra'acte – I will refer to these cuts as "delimiters":

• 1. Delimiter: 0:05:02 (cut ASO009)
• 2. Delimiter: 0:10:00 ("audio-cut" ASO049)
• 3. Delimiter: 0:15:01 (cut ASO073)
• 4. Delimiter: 0:19:53 (cut ASO117)

What immediately stands out: While the ten minute delimiter (an "audio-cut") is "on the mark", the other three delimiters are not. One is 2 seconds "late", the other 1 second late, and the last is 7 seconds "early" (but the cuts are "precise" in so far as they seem to fall exactly on their respective second, as far as I can tell).

What is the meaning of the cut-times? With regards to the last cut-time (ASO117), I have good reason to believe that Kubrick is making a reference to the year 1953.

With regard to the first delimiter and the third, I think Kubrick is highlighting the number "2" and the number "1", which together make the number "3". Later on in the film we will see other examples were Kubrick shows a set of 3, made up of 2 similar and 1 slightly different element – e.g. 3 buttons on a pen, 2 of which are white, and 1 is red (ASO125-01). By the way, this ties in nicely to the title of the film.

The time of other cuts so far may be important as well, however I again lack time to do this now, and would rather first transcribe all cuts in the film.

And the last thing I want to highlight for now is that there is a scene 114 in this film – ASO114 here – which holds special, pivotal meaning, and quite likely that there is a scene 114 in other films by Kubrick as well.

Some notes: I make mistakes – maybe even here. With regards to the number of cuts in this sequence, I found two mistakes before publishing – there may be still mistakes lurking here.

So, let the games begin. (And in my next life I'll rather choose to do Hitchcock's Rope…)

1. Act: THE DAWN OF MAN (Twenty minutes)

1. Setting: The Beginning of the Solar System (Five minutes)

ASO001 (0:00:00) Black screen, music

Extraordinary:

ASO001-01:

And in the beginning there was darkness – we are witnessing the formation of the Solar System.

ASO001-02

Music begins at 0:00:04 and ends at 0:02:52. (Possibly two more cuts to be counted.)

ASO002 (0:02:58/N) MGM logo

Extraordinary:

ASO002-01

The ignorant Renata Adler asserted quite rightly (in what was possibly her only bright remark on the film): EVEN the M-G-M lion is stylized and abstracted in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey.

As we are witnessing the creation of the Solar System, the MGM logo symbolizes either the Sun, or possibly the disc of the entire Solar System. In the beginning there was darkness, now there is light. The beginning of the film symbolizes literally the beginning of time. Stanley Kubrick is giving us an highly artistic allegory about the beginning of the Universe and of the Solar System, and Renata Adler is shouting from the peanut gallery: "BORING!"

ASO003 (0:03:07/FO/~2sec) Fade back to black

Extraordinary:

ASO003-01

Crossfade starts at 0:03:06. 36, 63?

ASO004 (0:03:15) Thus spoke Zarathustra – Moon, Earth, Sun aligned – Title

Extraordinary:

ASO004-01

Black screen from 0:03:15 to 0:03:17 – Moon fades in at about 0:03:17. (Possibly one more cut to count.)

ASO005 (0:04:28/FO/~2sec) Fade to black

ASO006 (0:04:38) Still black screen, sounds from Africa

ASO007 (0:04:42.5/FI/~1sec) Fade to pre-dawn sky – title card THE DAWN OF MAN

ASO008 (0:04:57)

2. Setting: Huminids: Animals among Animals (Five Minutes)

ASO009 (0:05:02) Sun-rise

Extraordinary:

ASO009-01

The cut at the 5 minute mark is an delimiter between the 1. setting and the 2. setting of the 1. act. We will realize that more clearly at the next delimiter, the 10 minutes cut in ASO049-01, and then at the 15 minutes cut (ASO073-01) and the 20 minutes cut (ASO117-01).

In ASO008 the Sun hasn't risen yet – and there was only the Sun, the Moon and the Earth. After the cut, we see in ASO009 the Sun climb over the horizon and start illuminating the steppe/savannah and with its wildlife including the early (pre-Monolith) huminids.

ASO009-02

However, the 5 minute cut is an full 2 seconds late – we will later see why this is of importance.

"… finds her door hacked with an axe …"

I stumbled across something interesting:

Who was Kubrick's co-writer [for The Shining]?

After rejecting King's own efforts at turning his novel into a screenplay Kubrick turned to Diane Johnson, an American novelist and critic who published a number of novels which Kubrick admired, including "The Shadow Knows" which he considered making into a film.

So what is this book about, that Kubrick considered making into a film?

The Shadow Knows by Diane Johnson

The anonymous heroine, N, is a young woman who has broken free of a constricting marriage and is struggling to raise four children alone in a housing project. Coming home one day N finds her door hacked with an axe and smeared with what appears to be a mixture of blood and crankcase oil. A few days later a strangled cat is left outside her apartment door. Everyday, she is plagued by mysterious, disturbing phone calls. Playing detective and attempting to figure out who her enemy may be, N's real fears merge with paranoid fantasy in this fascinating story which rivals the best of Henry James's dark, psychological gothic tales.

I would suspect that one will find more references to The Shadow Knows in Kubrick's The Shining besides the axed door…

A Slight Misdirection

What is a misdirection anyway?

STANLEY KUBRICK

By the way, just to show you how interpretation can sometimes be bewildering: A cryptographer went to see the film, and he said, "Oh. I get it. Each letter of HAL's name is one letter ahead of IBM. The H is one letter in front of I, the A is one letter in front of B, and the L is one letter in front of M." Now this is a pure coincidence, because HAL's name is an acronym of heuristic and algorithmic, the two methods of computer programming… an almost inconceivable coincidence. It would have taken a cryptographer to have noticed that.

Please carefully notice what Kubrick says:

• "Interpretations can sometimes be bewildering" [but "bewildering" interpretations are not necessarily wrong]
• It is "an almost inconceivable coincidence" that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM [yes, it is almost not imaginable to be a coincidence, once someone pointed it out]
• "It would have taken a cryptographer to have noticed that" [because nobody else did notice it before – is Kubrick mocking the rest of us here that we are a bit slow?]
  

With regards to misdirections: What is computer programming? Let's ask Wikipedia for help:

Computer programming is a process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable programs. It involves activities such as analysis, understanding, and generically solving such problems resulting in an algorithm, verification of requirements of the algorithm including its correctness and its resource consumption, implementation (or coding) of the algorithm in a target programming language, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code, implementation of the build system and management of derived artefacts such as machine code of computer programs.

So computer programming is "a process that results in an algorithm" – at least today. However I suspect it was the same when 2001 was made. There might have been a theory back then that implementing AI might need heuristics – but heuristics is a field in its own right (ask your spam-filter), and one would need to implement the heuristics as algorithms.

So either Kubrick is imprecise with his statements, or he is giving us misdirections – both of which is conceivable, as I want to point out. Make up your own mind about Kubrick's films.

One more thing: Of all the words in the English language, would the word "bewildering" come to your mind for the HAL=IBM interpretation? Or is it not rather bewildering (at least from Kubrick's point of view) that it took an cryptographer to come up with such an interpretation rather simple observation?

Council of Astronautics

In our series of coincidental anagrams we bring you today:

Council of Astronautics

A Iconoclastic Fun Tours

A Fascist Colonic Outrun

A Laconic Futurist's Coon

2001: A Transoceanic Gutsy

One of the anagrams for Astronautics Agency is:

A Transoceanic Gutsy

In that summer of 1964, the "movie outline" document evolved to the size of a short story now called Across The Sea Of Stars. The "sea" metaphor was again used by Kennedy in the aforementioned 1962 speech, when he called space "this new ocean":

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.

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)

With The Stroke Of A Pen (ASO123-02)

COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER AND FAIR USE NOTICE

The 1968 motion-picture 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY STANLEY KUBRICK'S WORK

Warning: Spoilers ahead! This post contains furthermore copyrighted material for the purpose of research, commentary and eduction as per fair use provisions.

SPOILER WARNING

The 1968 motion-picture 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY ­ ­ ­ ­

We have arrived in the second act of 2001: A Space Odyssey – the TMA-1 sequence. It is the 1. setting of the act, the Orion III Spaceplane, with which Dr. Heywood R. Floyd travels to his first stop, the Space Station, while on his way to TMA-1, the second Monolith of the film.

What do we see on the very first cut to the interior of the Spaceplane? We become witness of an assassination – an purely symbolical assassination, of course.

First we see Dr. Heywood R. Floyd sleeping in his seat – some movie can be seen on the TV screen in front of him:

The movie we see shows us cars on what resembles an airfield:

His pen floats into view:

The movie zooms in on a car, which seems to be (what I presume) some futuristic version of the Corvette Sting Ray:

The pen's tip is visibly blood-red:

In the car we see a woman and a man. The woman sits on the left side, the man sits on the right, and they talk with each other:

As the pen floats in front of the TV screen, the man in the car is beheaded, he gets his head cut off – symbolically, of course – by the tip of the pen. This is the stroke that orders an assassination:

We see the pen drifting for a little more:

What's interesting to note is (again) the formula 2+1=3: The pen has 3 buttons: 2 white buttons, and 1 red button (ASO125-01):

We see the Stewardess enter …

… with the famous velcro-boots:

The woman on the TV screen, as we can see, looks vaguely like Jacqueline …

… while he looks vaguely like John Fitzgerald:

The stewardess comes by, grabs the pen and safely tucks it away into Dr. Floyd's pocket – how nice if the personnel shows initiative and acts on their own.

Finally she turns the TV off – all is well again.

The very first close-up shot of a modern human in the film, and what do we witness? An (allegorical) assassination – with the stroke of a pen. We have seen a murder before in the film, but the early humans had to use crude weapons to slay one-another, to club each other to death – now humans are civilized, and their murdering has become civilized as well.

The pen's tip is red, symbolically covered in blood – from the look of it we can presume that this wasn't the first assassination ordered with the pen. It is Dr. Floyd's pen – the pen is Dr. Floyd's murder weapon.

However, Dr. Floyd is sleeping, he knows nothing of what his pen does. In the surface narrative Floyd would have known better than to let his pen float freely around at zero-G. In the hidden allegorical narrative Floyd has not openly ordered an hit, it were Dr. Floyd's underlings that acted on their own – but Dr. Floyd need not be concerned. And after all, (to paraphrase) Dr. Floyd knows his men "do things the way Dr. Floyd wants them done", Dr. Floyd doesn't even have to give orders:

FLOYD

Thanks, Ralph. Oh, by the way, I wanted to say to both of you I think you've done a wonderful job. I appreciate the way you've handled this thing.

HALVORSEN

Well, the way we look at it it's our job to do this thing the way you want it done and we're only too happy to be able to oblige.

Dr. Heywood R. Floyd is in the surface narrative of 2001 the head of the "National Council of Aeronautics (NCA)", and for the purpose of the surface narrative he is a mix between Wernher von Braun and McGeorge Bundy. In the hidden allegorical narrative the agency he heads will carry out an "wet operation" without his overt knowledge – but he does not need to worry, as people will step in on their own initiative – without need for orders – and set things straight: the pen is put out of sight, and the TV is switched off. At the end Floyd will be able to plausibly deny any knowledge.

An personal intermission: Let me make it clear while I think that what Kubrick portrays here is not far from reality (the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and the behaviour by Lucien Conein* come to my mind), I however think Kubrick had another specific example in mind, and I think Kubrick might have gotten that specific example wrong.

Kubrick gives us quite striking images at the beginning of the TMA-1 sequence – here the replay:

Zapruder, eat your heart out.

We will see where this leads further in the film – or so I hope.

-- 
* By the way, Lucien Conein has served as Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.'s liaison officer with the coup plotters. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in turn was the first to hold in 1960 a speech for a presidential rally at the University of Illinois – in Urbana, Illinois – before JFK spoke there as well during the same year. Amusing coincidence, but likely not relevant, as it is doubtful whether Kubrick could have known the extent of the role of Lucien Conein.