Life... in Pictures

I don't think I can ever adequately express the feeling I had the first time I saw '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Tenth grade, 1982. My English Lit teacher showed us a horrid, non-letter boxed, pan&scan version on a twenty-four inch TV to kill the last few days before Christmas break. Despite the lousy format, I was floored.

I remember having seen a few photo stills of 2001 in my various scifi/special effects genre books, but they never engaged me, flat as they were. Without music, I guess, and motion, they had no depth.

Our teacher couldn't stuff the whole film into a fifty minute class. But on first viewing he managed to get to the flying bone transition before the lunch buzzer rang. I was hooked. I couldn't wait to get to school the next day.

I've seen it a hundred times since. But strangely, when thinking back on my first few viewings, I had the distinct impression of having seen the film in black and white. Maybe my brain misinterpreting its starkness, and desaturated my memory. When I watch it now I am often surprised by the amount of color it contains.

I don't ever remember feeling a lot of empathy for a Kubrick character (Spartacus aside). Kubrick doesn't do that. I am always very interested in what they're doing. But how they're feeling doesn't leap off the screen and into the audience. It stays up there. 

There's an imaginary narrative at the beginning of each chapter of the book 'Galaxies,' by Timothy Ferris. It describes a relativistic, near-light speed spaceship journey across the universe. The explorers outlive the Earth and Sun, not to mention their loved ones, by trillions of years as they plow through intergalactic space toward the edge of the ever expanding visible universe. That's how 2001 made me feel. Lost in the void... in a good way. 

After we finished the movie I went to the school library and found the book upon which it was based. I tore through it, and everything else I could find by Arthur C. Clarke. I didn't realize it at the time, but while Clarke certainly contributed, he wasn't actually the person responsible for the visual mind trip that was the movie. It was Stanley Kubrick who made this thing possible. Watch, 'A Life in Pictures,' which beautifully details his technique.