2001: A Space Odyssey

The archive has run four films that are all, in one way or another, stories about people: a Japanese period ensemble, an American crime epic, a small event on the streets of Rome, a Swedish religious allegory. Today the scale changes. 2001 is not about any individual; it is about where the species sits in the universe, and it measures time in millions of years.

It is also the most natural choice for today's main visual. The monolith, the wheel-shaped space station, the ship's corridors, the Star Gate — none of these need subtitles, language, or prior knowledge to be recognised. They are among the most reproduced images of the twentieth century.

The contrast is deliberate. The first twenty-five minutes contain no dialogue at all and the film uses very little of it throughout; emotion is carried by composition, music and editing rather than performance. If everything you have seen so far has been a story film, this one resets what you expect a film to be about.

影片由四个段落组成，段落之间靠剪辑而非台词连接。

第一段叫「人类的黎明」：数百万年前的非洲，一群类人猿在干旱中挣扎，直到一块黑色石碑出现在他们中间。第二段直接跳到片名所指的那一年——人类已经在月球上建起基地，并且在月面之下挖出了同样的东西。第三段是一艘飞向木星的飞船：船上有五名船员，三名在休眠舱中，醒着的只有 David Bowman 与 Frank Poole，以及一台负责操控全船的计算机 HAL 9000。第四段，是飞船抵达目的地之后发生的事。

真正的主角不是任何一个宇航员，而是一件从第一个镜头就在场、却从未被解释过的东西。它出现了三次，每一次都把故事推向更远的地方。影片从不告诉你它是什么——这是设计，不是疏漏。

Director and screenplay

After Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick announced that his next film would be about extraterrestrial life, aiming at what he called the proverbial good science fiction movie. Through a Columbia Pictures employee he reached Arthur C. Clarke, then living in Ceylon, and the two met in New York in April 1964; the collaboration lasted nearly four years. The screenplay is credited to both, drawn mainly from Clarke's 1951 short story The Sentinel and incorporating others such as Encounter in the Dawn. Clarke wrote the novel version in parallel with the film.

The title was Kubrick's, and Clarke said the idea was entirely his. Earlier working titles included Journey Beyond the Stars, Universe, Tunnel to the Stars and Planetfall. The film was shot and cut almost entirely in southern England, using MGM-British Studios and Shepperton Studios.

Cinematography and visual effects

Geoffrey Unsworth was the cinematographer, with John Alcott shooting the Dawn of Man sequence after Unsworth left for another project. The film was shot in Super Panavision 70 — 65mm negative, spherical lenses, 2.20:1 — among the highest-grade commercial formats of its day.

Douglas Trumbull was special effects supervisor. Kubrick wanted the effects achieved in camera where possible, avoiding the image degradation of blue screen and travelling mattes. The rotating centrifuge set used for the ship's interior was built by the engineering firm Vickers-Armstrong: 38 feet in diameter, about 30 short tons, costing roughly $750,000. The Discovery One model was 55 feet long. Weightlessness was achieved by suspending actors on wires from the top of the set with the camera below. The Star Gate was made with slit-scan photography over thousands of high-contrast images — Op art paintings, architectural drawings, moiré patterns, printed circuits and electron micrographs of molecules and crystals — while the nebular effects were shot slowly in a darkroom cloud tank using paint and chemicals.

Kubrick was closely involved in the design too, choosing fabrics and furniture. The film features tableware designed by Arne Jacobsen, Olivier Mourgue's red Djinn chairs and Eero Saarinen's 1956 pedestal tables, with Eurostile Bold Extended and Futura among the typefaces used for interfaces and signage. Those choices became part of the common vocabulary of futuristic design.

Music

The film uses no original score, only existing classical works: Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube, an excerpt from Khachaturian's Gayane ballet suite, and Ligeti's Requiem, Lux Aeterna and Aventures.

Kubrick had commissioned an original score from Alex North, who had written the music for Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove, but dropped it in post-production in favour of the classical recordings that had been used as temporary tracks. North only discovered the substitution when he saw the film at its premiere. The decision changed the grammar of film scoring: music no longer follows emotion but works in counterpoint with the image.

Performance and sound

Keir Dullea plays David Bowman and Gary Lockwood plays Frank Poole, with William Sylvester as Heywood Floyd, Daniel Richter as the man-ape Moonwatcher, and the Canadian actor Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL 9000. In the scene where Bowman shuts HAL down, the pitch and rate of the voice are progressively lowered using an Eltro information rate changer, with the result that the actor's voice passes through the device twice. One of the film's most famous lines belongs to that computer: "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Film language

Two cuts are studied more than any others, and neither depends on dialogue. The first ends the Dawn of Man: a man-ape throws a bone into the air and it is cut, mid-fall, into an orbiting satellite — one edit spanning millions of years. The second is the film's total refusal to explain: what the monolith is, why it exists, what the child at the end means. Kubrick made that absence part of the structure rather than an aesthetic of restraint.

Historical impact

The film premiered at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. on 2 April 1968 at 160 minutes; within days Kubrick cut roughly 20 minutes, leaving a general release version of about 139 minutes. The budget was around $10.5 million against an initial $6 million — $4.5 million over, sixteen months late. Reviews at the time were sharply divided and New York critics were especially hostile; it has since been comprehensively reassessed, and counting re-releases it was the highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada in 1968.

It received four Academy Award nominations and won Best Visual Effects, an award made to Kubrick alone — Trumbull went uncredited and the two did not speak for a decade. It remains Kubrick's only Oscar. In 1991 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In the 2022 Sight & Sound poll it placed in the critics' top ten and was voted first in the directors' poll. The 1984 sequel, 2010, had no involvement from Kubrick.