Word: relationship
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even compromised in order to placate audiences, Kubrick's handling of the visual relationship between time and space is more than impressive. He has discovered that slow movement (of space crafts, for example) is as impressive on a Cinerama screen as fast movement (the famous Cinerama roller-coaster approach), also that properly timed sequences of slow movement actually appear more real--sometimes even faster--than equally long long sequences of fast motion shots. No film in history achieves the degree of three-dimensional depth maintained consistently in 2001 (and climaxed rhapsodically in a shot of a pulsating stellar galaxy); Kubrick...
...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 a lobotomy on the computer, dismantling all but its mechanical functions. Symbolically, it is the murder of an equal...
...assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in 2001. The central portion of 2001, the trip to Jupiter, can, as an odyssey toward a final progression of man, concern itself largely with Kubrick's persistent preoccupation of the relationship between man and his tools...
...only human in the film is HAL 9000, the super-computer that runs the ship and exhibits all the emotional traits lacking in Bowman and Poole. The script development is, again, linear: the accepted relationship of man using machine is presented initially, then discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two (HAL, for example, asks Bowman to show him some sketches, then comments on them). This equilibrium where men and machine perversely share characteristics shatters only when HAL mistakenly detects a fault in the communications system. The HAL computers cannot make mistakes and a confirmation of the error...
...Kubrick's superb film has a problem, it may simply be that great philosophical-metaphysical films about human progress and man's relationship to the cosmos have one strike against them when they attempt to be literally just that. Rossellini's radiant religious films or Bresson's meditative ascetiscism ultimately say far more, I think, than Kubrick's far-more-ambitious attempt at synthesizing genre and meaning...