Word: pod
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...terms of satisfying an audience is that his best work in 2001 is plotless slow-paced material, an always successful creation of often ritualistic behavior of apes, men, and machines with whom we are totally unfamiliar. In the longer version, the opening of Astronaut Poole's (Gary Lockwood) pod scene is shot identically to the preceding pod scene with Astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea), stressing standardized operational method by duplicating camera setups. This laborious preparation may appear initially repetitive until Poole's computer-controlled pod turns on him and murders him in space, thus justifying the prior duplication by undercutting...
...attempting to re-enter the ship from the pod he has used to retrieve Poole's corpse, Bowman must improvise for the first time, ad-lib emergency procedures to break-in against HAL's wishes. His determination is perhaps motivated by the first anger he has shown, and is certainly indicative of a crucial re-assertion of man over machine, again shifting the film's balance concerning the relationship between man and tool. In a brilliant and indescribable sequence, preceded by some stunning low-angle camera gyrations as Bowman makes his way toward HAL's controls, the man performs...
...from the dispensing machine: Poole chooses food with clashing colors and Bowman selects a meal composed entirely within the ochre-to-dark brown range. In a fascinating selection of material, Kubrick omits the actual act of Poole's murder, cutting to his body in space directly after the mechanical pod-hands sever his air hose, thus taking emphasis off any identification we might suddenly feel and turning the murder into cold, further dehumanized abstraction...
Bowman's complex act parallels that of the australopithicus: his use of the pod ejector to re-enter the craft was improvisational, the mechanism undoubtedly designed for a different purpose--this referring to the use of bone as weapon-tool. Finally in committing murder, Bowman has essentially lost his dehumanization and become an archetypal new being: one worthy of the transcendental experience that follows. For the last part of the film, we must assume Bowman an individual by virtue of his improvised triumph over the complex computer...
Senelick's translation captures the three-part style of the play in its diction. The gentry speak standard Chekhov, Victorian dialect. The upwardly mobile Lopakhin (Ken Tigar), sweet, young Anya (Carolyn Firth) and occasional flunkeys speak a slangy, colloquial tongue, fresh and awkward; while a pod of surrounding actors, led by the shlemielesque "perennial student" Trofimov (Lloyd Schwartz), with his utopian panegyrics discoursed of Yepikhodov, talk a well-tuned language of parody and farce. None of the specific lines of the translation is, as they say, memorable--Senelick's staging eye works better than his ear--but they are smooth...