2001: A Space Odyssey

Peter Krämer
BFI Film Classics

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2001: A Space Odyssey
Peter Krämer

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

© Peter Krämer 2010

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First published in 2010 by

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ISBN 978–1–84457–286–1
Contents

Introduction 7

1 The Novel 13

2 Origins 18

3 Development 24

4 Trends 32

5 Transformation 41

6 The Film 55

7 Impact 86

8 Influence 94

Conclusion 99

Acknowledgments 104

Notes 105

Credits 115
6 BFI FILM CLASSICS
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 7

Introduction

In the final images of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a very old man
raises his arm to point at a black rectangular slab in front of his bed.
The next moment he is gone, and instead a giant foetus with wide-
open eyes hovers in a luminous, transparent bubble above the bed.
There is music, and the camera moves towards the black monolith
and through it into the blackness of space. The Moon can be seen
and then also the Earth. The foetus floats towards the Earth before it
turns around to look at – us. Image and music fade out to leave us in
total darkness and silence. Thus ends a story which has moved from
the origins of humanity millions of years ago to the exploration of
space in the twenty-first century, tracing the transformative impact of
several monoliths – appearing on Earth, on the Moon, near Jupiter
and in front of that very old man – on pre-human, ape-like creatures
and on human beings.
From the first moment it was presented to the public in spring
1968, the film has generated a passionate debate about its qualities
and meanings among regular cinemagoers and professional critics.1
Many people sent letters to Kubrick to tell him about their responses
to 2001, most of them regarding the film – in particular its ending –
as an optimistic statement about humanity, which is seen to be born
and reborn.2 The film’s reviewers and academic critics, by contrast,
have tended to understand the film as a pessimistic account of human
nature and humanity’s future.3 The most extreme of these
interpretations state that the foetus floating above Earth will destroy
it.4 This understanding is derived from a particular interpretation of
the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published a few months
after the film’s release.
Both the novel and the film are the result of an unusual
collaboration between the film-maker Stanley Kubrick and the
8 BFI FILM CLASSICS

science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke that started with a letter

Kubrick sent to Clarke in March 1964. Together they wrote the film’s
story in the form of a long, novelistic treatment, which they then
developed into a screenplay for a big-budget movie and also into a
bestselling novel published under Clarke’s name. The novel offers
explanations for many of the film’s mysteries, but also raises new
questions about the intentions of the extra-terrestrial beings behind
the monoliths and of the foetus they create at the end. The fact that
the novel closes with the foetus exploding nuclear weapons in Earth’s
orbit allowed for a deeply pessimistic reading of the story, which was
not, however, what Clarke and Kubrick intended.
Thus, when, in July 1968, the science writer Jeremy Bernstein,
who had been one of the film’s greatest supporters, sent the page
proofs of his book review to Kubrick, it contained the claim that
Clarke’s novel ‘comes to a Strangelovian close’ as the foetus ‘watches
over the nuclear destruction of the Earth’.5 This refers to Kubrick’s
previous film, the nuclear comedy Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which ends with the
explosion of a nuclear ‘doomsday device’ that will destroy all life
on the Earth’s surface. Kubrick left a note on Bernstein’s proofs:
‘The book does not end with the destruction of the earth.’ Kubrick
pointed out that the foetus destroys nuclear weapons, not humanity.
In his 1972 book about the writing of 2001, Clarke commented:

Many readers have interpreted the final paragraph to mean that he [the
foetus] destroyed Earth, perhaps in order to create a new Heaven. This idea
never occurred to me; it seems clear that he triggered the orbiting nuclear
bombs harmlessly … But now, I am not so sure … We have wasted and defiled
… the beautiful planet Earth. Why should we expect any mercy from a
returning Star Child?6

Clarke’s comment is clearly informed by the environmental

movement gathering momentum in the early 1970s, and it thus
indicates how open his novel is to divergent interpretations arising
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 9

from changing historical circumstances. This applies even more to the

film, which is constructed with little regard for the conventions of
Hollywood storytelling. Instead of following the actions of a single
protagonist or group of protagonists, pursuing a well-defined set of
goals, the film tells three different stories, each with its own
protagonist(s) whose goals are not always obvious: ape-like creatures
– or hominids – who are difficult to tell apart from each other and
whose behaviour can therefore be puzzling; a scientist travelling to
the Moon, whose motives for doing so are revealed only at the end of
his journey; two astronauts on a spaceship to Jupiter, one of whom
goes on a further, utterly mysterious journey after reaching the
planet. Instead of outlining clearly how one thing leads to another,
2001 breaks down the cause-and-effect chain of events, both at the
level of the film as a whole – it is, for example, difficult to determine
how its three stories are connected to each other – and at the level of
individual scenes, such as the ending. It is often unclear how the
action depicted in one shot is causally linked to the actions shown in
earlier shots, or how the events of one scene arise from those shown
in earlier scenes. What is more, instead of selecting only those parts
of an action that might be deemed relevant for the ongoing story (or

The ending of Dr Strangelove

10 BFI FILM CLASSICS

stories), much of the film consists of shots leisurely and meticulously

depicting earthly landscapes or celestial formations as well as the
often very slow movement of people and spacecraft through these,
with little or no concern for narrative progression.
It is astonishing that a big-budget science-fiction film would take
this shape, and even more so that it could become one of the biggest
hits of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. It is much
less surprising, though, that over the last four decades, critics have
responded to the challenge posed by the film with a wealth of
analyses, producing more writing about 2001 than about almost any
other movie.7 In the process, they have by no means settled their
disagreements about the meaning of 2001; instead, the film’s very
ability to provoke and sustain countless interpretations is seen to be
one of the markers of its outstanding quality.
Indeed, 2001 is now widely regarded as one of the best films ever
made. This is evident in the most comprehensive survey of international
critical opinion conducted every ten years since 1952 by the British film
magazine Sight & Sound. In September 2002, the results of the latest
survey were announced.8 Almost one hundred and fifty critics from
around the world were asked to identify the ten best films of all time,
and the ten most frequently mentioned films were then ranked
according to the number of votes they received. As in every Sight &
Sound survey since 1962, Citizen Kane (1941) came out on top, having
been listed by forty-six critics. 2001 was at number six with twenty-one
listings, two places behind the first two Godfather films (The
Godfather, 1972, and The Godfather Part II, 1974), which together
received twenty-three votes. Apart from the unusual joint ranking of the
Godfather films, 2001 was the only film in the top ten which had been
made after 1963. In 1992, when it had first appeared in the top ten,
at number ten, 2001 had been the only film in this elite group made
after 1958, and in 1982, when it had been at number eleven, the top ten
had included no film made after 1963.9 In other words, since the 1980s,
2001 has been perceived as the very best film of recent decades, and its
status appears to be growing as the years pass.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 11

We could easily find more evidence for the film’s important

place in contemporary culture, ranging from its high ratings on the
Internet Movie Database which place the film in the top 100 of the
IMDb’s users’ chart,10 to its climb up the American Film Institute’s
‘100 Years … 100 Movies’ listing (from number twenty-two in 1997
to number fifteen in 2007).11 References to particular elements of the
film can be found everywhere, including countless, often comical,
appearances of mysterious monoliths in print or on television; the
presentation of celestial and other events to the accompaniment of
Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is the music played over the film’s
ending (as well as two earlier scenes); and Buzz Lightyear’s
memorable rallying battle cry ‘To infinity and beyond!’ (a play, no
doubt, on the title of the final segment of 2001, ‘Jupiter and Beyond
the Infinite’) in the Toy Story movies. More generally, the film’s
influence can be felt in the proliferation of science-fiction
blockbusters in recent times, because the enormous success of 2001
helped to raise the genre’s profile in Hollywood, while its spectacular
visuals and thematic richness inspired a wide range of film-makers to
work along similar lines.
How, then, did this remarkable film come about? What were
Kubrick and Clarke’s original plans for 2001, and what motivated
MGM to fund this unusual project? How did the project’s shape
change over time, and why? How can we best describe the resulting
film? How successful was its initial release with critics and audiences,
and what was the film’s long-term impact? These are some of the
questions this book tries to answer, by drawing on a wide range of
published materials and archival sources, including many that have
only recently become available at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the
University of the Arts London.
My answers will surprise some readers, because they often
depart from the received wisdom about 2001. I argue that, first and
foremost, despite persistent claims about the film-maker’s pervasive
pessimism, Kubrick developed 2001 as an optimistic antidote to the
apocalyptic conclusion of Dr Strangelove, and that the film’s basic
12 BFI FILM CLASSICS

story was largely derived from Clarke’s previously published work.

I also show that both Kubrick and MGM conceived of 2001 as a
family-oriented blockbuster deeply rooted in the dominant box-office
trends of the 1950s and 1960s; only at the last minute did Kubrick
decide to transform the film into a highly unconventional cinematic
experience, which was nevertheless aimed at, and largely positively
received by, an all-inclusive mass audience. Thus, I go against what is
perhaps the most widespread legend surrounding 2001, namely that
it initially flopped at the American box office (while also first being
rejected by many critics), before it was resurrected by young and
often countercultural audiences, who returned again and again to
experience the film – frequently under the influence of mind-altering
drugs – as a psychedelic trip.12 Instead I show that Kubrick’s attempt
to provide cinemagoers with a transformative and hopeful cinematic
experience was a big success with mainstream audiences right from
the beginning, and that the film’s hopefulness was also crucial for its
long-term impact on science-fiction blockbusters.
I start my discussion of the origins, development and impact of
2001 with an account of the novel – which was a huge hit in its own
right13 – because so much of the writing about the film is informed by
it. Although the novel was, as mentioned earlier, written in parallel to
the screenplay, in many ways it stayed much closer to the film’s
original treatment than the finished movie. In particular, like that
treatment, it developed important themes and offered explanations
which are never made explicit in the film. It is helpful to outline what
these themes and explanations are before embarking on an account
of the project’s development.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 13

1 The Novel

The beginning is ominous: ‘The drought had lasted now for ten
million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since
ended.’14 This is the first sentence of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey. The chapter in which it appears is entitled ‘The
Road to Extinction’, referring to the ‘man-apes of the [African] veldt’
who are ‘already far down’ this road and about to join the ‘terrible
lizards’ (i.e. dinosaurs) in oblivion when the story begins three million
years ago.15 The fate of the ‘man-apes’ – or hominids – is changed
when one band, headed by a male called ‘Moon-Watcher’, encounters
a ‘completely transparent’, ‘rectangular slab’, a ‘crystal monolith’,
which turns out to be a technological device created by explorers from
outerspace with the intention of transforming the hominids – through
sounds and images and the direct manipulation of their brains – into
users of tools.16 Because Moon-Watcher and his band learn how to
use stones, sticks and bones as weapons with which to kill animals
and members of rival bands, they are able to survive and prosper,
laying the foundation for their descendants to evolve into ‘Man’, who,
by the second half of the twentieth century, has long ‘conquered his
[sic] world’, yet lives ‘on borrowed time’ because weapons have
evolved as well, gaining ‘all but infinite power’.17 Thus concludes the
first part of the novel, entitled ‘Primeval Night’.
The remainder of the novel tells the story of how, at the turn of
the twenty-first century, three further encounters with monoliths left
by the ancient extra-terrestrial explorers lead to the transformation
of one human descendant of Moon-Watcher’s band into a ‘Star-
Child’.18 The second part of the novel opens with scientist and
presidential adviser Dr Heywood Floyd’s reflections on the
‘excitement’ of leaving Earth and on the imminent danger of its
nuclear devastation: ‘he wondered if it would still be there when the
14 BFI FILM CLASSICS

time came to return’.19 Floyd visits the American Moon colony to

discuss a three-million-year-old black monolith which has been
excavated in the crater Tycho, yet has been kept a secret due to the
‘immense’ ‘political and social implications’ of the discovery.20
While Floyd examines the monolith, it is triggered by its first
exposure to sunlight and sends a signal ‘towards the stars’.21
Parts three to five deal with the spaceship Discovery’s journey
to Saturn, which turns out to be the target of the alien device’s signal.
Because ‘the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 15

nervous system of the ship’, commonly referred to as ‘Hal’, has to

keep the true goal of the mission secret from the two astronauts
David Bowman and Frank Poole, it suffers a mental ‘breakdown’,
killing Poole and three hibernating astronauts, before in turn being
disconnected by Bowman.22 On the Saturn moon Japetus, Bowman
then discovers a giant monolith, which functions as a ‘Star Gate’,
installed three million years earlier by the extra-terrestrials, who in
the meantime have ‘become creatures of radiation, free … from the
tyranny of matter’, yet who ‘still watched over the experiments their
ancestors had started’.23
The novel’s sixth and final part, ‘Through the Star Gate’,
describes Bowman’s journey across the galaxy to an ‘elegant,
anonymous hotel suite’ constructed by alien intelligence ‘twenty
thousand light-years from Earth’, where he is reborn as an ‘immortal’
‘baby’.24 Following the appearance of another monolith, the Star-
Child, comforted by the certainty that ‘[w]hen he needed guidance in
his first faltering steps, it would be there’, is transported back to the
vicinity of Earth where he (it?) decides to detonate the nuclear
weapons orbiting the planet – ‘because he preferred a cleaner sky’.25
The Star-Child is now ‘master of the world’ and ‘history as men knew
it would be drawing to a close’.26 Humanity’s future depends on what
the new master decides ‘to do next’, but instead of outlining this
future, the novel comes to an abrupt end; its last sentence merely
announces that the Star-Child will ‘think of something’.27
As readers, we cannot be sure whether the Star-Child’s
detonation of nuclear weapons in Earth’s orbit is the beginning of a
nuclear holocaust, or, on the contrary, the first step of a campaign to
remove the threat of such weapons. The book’s ending refers back to
an earlier chapter, which relates how Moon-Watcher first uses a
weapon to kill another hominid and concludes almost exactly like the
book as a whole: ‘Now he was master of the world, and he was not
quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.’28
The following chapter is entitled ‘Ascent of Man’. This suggests that
the book’s conclusion also marks the beginning of a new evolutionary
16 BFI FILM CLASSICS

development, now characterised by the ascent of beings that are post-

or superhuman. In this context, Moon-Watcher’s murderous violence
could be seen to serve as a contrast to the peaceful means and
intentions of the much more highly evolved Star-Child, or, on the
contrary, to prefigure its even greater murderousness.
The ambiguity of the book’s ending can hardly be resolved this
way, nor does the description of the extra-terrestrial beings whose
monoliths are responsible for both evolutionary leaps provide a clear-
cut answer. Having ‘found nothing more precious than Mind’, they
have used ‘godlike powers’ to nurture and protect the emergence of
intelligence and consciousness on Earth and elsewhere in the
universe: ‘They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and
sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to
weed.’29 Indeed, when Bowman arrives in the alien hotel room, he
suspects that he is being subjected to ‘some kind of test’, the outcome
of which could determine ‘not only his fate but that of the human
race’.30 Does his subsequent transformation into the Star-Child mean
that he and humanity have passed the test, or is it the Star-Child’s
task to decide, on behalf of the extra-terrestrials, whether humanity
has to be weeded out? As we saw earlier, despite his original intention
to offer an optimistic ending, Clarke later acknowledged the validity
of a pessimistic reading as well, thus affirming the fundamental
ambiguity of the ending.
In novel form, then, 2001 deals with ultimate questions arising
from evolutionary biology, historiography, current affairs, futurology
and religion, questions about the ever-present threat of extinction
each species has to confront in nature, about the (natural and not-so-
natural) forces at work in human evolution, about the origins and
future of humankind and its potential for nuclear self-destruction,
about the judgment that may one day be passed on humanity and the
consequences of such judgment. The film, by contrast, does not
include any explicit references to nuclear weapons or to the
environmental plight of the hominids, which lessens the expectation
of imminent extinction so pervasive in the novel. Nor does the film
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 17

offer any explanation for the origins and function of the monoliths,
and it never even mentions their almost godlike builders, which
means that their potentially negative judgment of humanity never
becomes an issue – except, as we have seen, for those who approach
the film with knowledge of the novel.
Now that we have a good sense of how the project turned out
in the end, let’s look at its very beginnings.
18 BFI FILM CLASSICS

2 Origins

On 31 March 1964, two months after the release of his latest film
Dr Strangelove, which consolidated his reputation, at the age of only
thirty-five, as one of Hollywood’s most controversial and most
successful film-makers, Stanley Kubrick wrote to Arthur C. Clarke
about ‘the possibility of doing the proverbial “really good” science-
fiction movie’.31 He suggested a meeting ‘to determine whether an
idea might exist or arise which would sufficiently interest both of us
enough to want to collaborate on a screenplay’. The scripts of all of
Kubrick’s previous seven features had been the result of his close
collaboration with other people, mostly novelists rather than
established scriptwriters,32 and the last five had been based on novels.
It is therefore not so surprising that Kubrick approached a novelist
about a possible joint project. But why did he want to make a
science-fiction movie?
With this last film, Kubrick had already entered the realm of
science fiction, insofar as Dr Strangelove extrapolated from the
technology and politics of the present to depict possible
developments in the near future, building up towards the explosion
of a ‘doomsday device’. In addition to this extrapolation, during the
writing of the script Kubrick had considered a science-fiction framing
device, whereby the film would begin and end with voice-over
narration which represented the point of view of an extra-terrestrial
civilisation in the distant future, looking back on a decisive moment
in the history of the long-dead planet Earth.33 The opening voice-
over, accompanied by images of outer space, was to point out that the
‘odd story’ about to be told had unfolded on Earth because ‘the full
consequences of nuclear weapons seemed to escape all governments
and their people’.34 The film was to end with the camera pulling
away from the Earth into space and the narrator commenting that
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 19

Stanley Kubrick
during the making of
Dr Strangelove

the events of this ‘quaint comedy’ took place at a time ‘when the
primitive organisation of sovereign nation states still flourished, and
the archaic institution of War had not yet been forbidden by Law’.35
The script thus provided – through the example of a much wiser
extra-terrestrial civilisation – an alternative to humanity’s nuclear
self-destruction, in which the true horror of nuclear war could be
recognised, the division into nations overcome and military conflict
abandoned.
These references to extra-terrestrials provided a direct link to
Kubrick’s next project, because, in his letter to Clarke, he identified
20 BFI FILM CLASSICS

as his own ‘main interest’ – ‘naturally assuming great plot and

character’ – the following three themes:

1. The reason for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial

life.
2. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such
discovery would have on Earth in the near future.
3. A space-probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.

The abandoned framing device of Dr Strangelove thus gave rise to

the serious investigation of humanity’s relationship to other
intelligent life in the universe. This investigation would allow
Kubrick to develop the idea from the Dr Strangelove script that
extra-terrestrials could offer an alternative to humanity’s self-
destruction. If, rather than having its ruins examined by aliens
thousands of years from now, humanity made contact with extra-
terrestrials ‘in the near future’, might this help to unify it and thus to
prevent earthly conflict? Also, might there be lessons to be learned
about the pitfalls of using hugely destructive technologies from an
advanced civilisation that had long mastered such use without
destroying itself?
By the early 1960s, questions like these were being frequently
addressed in science fiction, in the widespread discussion of
unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and in scientific debates about
extra-terrestrial life, all of which Kubrick had probably come across
during the initial research for his new project in the months, perhaps
even years, before he first wrote to Clarke.36 In science-fiction films
and literature, for example in Clarke’s work, humanity’s divisions
and conflicts were often overcome through its first encounters with
extra-terrestrials – who attack the Earth and thus unite its nations,
or come in peace and warn humanity that it should cease its military
build-up and fighting before it either destroys itself or provokes
catastrophic preventive measures by alien observers worried about
eventually becoming targets of human aggression.37 When reports of
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 21

UFO sightings and also of communication with their extra-

terrestrial crews became a fixture of public discourse in the United
States from the late 1940s onwards, press reports and books about
these phenomena sometimes suggested that the aliens had come in
response to the explosion of nuclear bombs in the United States and
Japan in 1945, either to help humanity before it self-destructed or to
monitor its progress closely in case it began to take its weapons into
outer space.38 Finally, when scientists making use of radio telescopes
embarked on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) in
the late 1950s, they tried to estimate the number of highly
developed civilisations in the Milky Way which might be able and
willing to engage in interstellar communication.39 In doing so,
they considered the likely number of habitable planets in the galaxy,
the fraction of such planets on which intelligent life had emerged
and the average lifespan of technologically advanced civilisations.
With regards to this last point, the ability of such civilisations to
destroy themselves with advanced weaponry was a main concern,
which in turn implied that actual contact with an extra-terrestrial
civilisation might lead to important insights into how humanity
could avoid this fate.40
In this context, the project Kubrick initiated with his letter to
Clarke appears to have been an attempt to find a hopeful response to
the pessimistic conclusion of Dr Strangelove. We cannot be sure that
this was Kubrick’s conscious intention, but there are good reasons for
assuming at least an emotional link between the two projects.
To begin with, Kubrick was convinced that nuclear war was almost
unavoidable. In a November 1963 interview with Cosmopolitan,
he had stated:

The catch is that the inadvertent use of the bomb is, and will always be the
greatest risk – a nuclear Sword of Damocles, which, in the words of President
Kennedy, ‘can be cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness’.
… If the system was safe for 99.99 per cent of the days of the year, given
average luck, it would fail in thirty years.41
22 BFI FILM CLASSICS

An intimate connection between Kubrick’s pessimistic views on

the nuclear situation and his hopes for extra-terrestrial contact is
suggested in a second letter he composed on the same day that he first
wrote to Clarke, concerning a potential film project about the nuclear
scientist and peace campaigner Leo Szilard, who in 1950 had first
publicly discussed the terrifying prospect of a ‘doomsday’ machine.42
In this letter, Kubrick reflected on the research he had done for
Dr Strangelove, in particular on the confrontation between the
United States and the Soviet Union over the stationing of nuclear
missiles on Cuba in October 1962 which had brought the world to
the brink of nuclear war:

one of the most alarming features of the Cuban crisis, to my eyes anyway,
was the lack of concern on the part of most of the people … an incredible
number of people thought of it either as a bluff which they could not take
seriously or else they had an incredible kind of denial-resignation which
allowed them to say if it happens it happens.43

If people refused to acknowledge the threat of nuclear war, Kubrick’s

letter implied, there was not much hope that anything could be done
to remove it.
Intriguingly, the phrase ‘lack of concern’ echoes the reference to
‘lack of impact’ in the letter to Clarke. Why was Kubrick specifically
interested in the possibility that the discovery of extra-terrestrial
intelligence would have no impact ‘in some quarters’? Perhaps it was
because he felt that this discovery needed to impress everyone on
Earth in order to exert its redemptive power. In line with their
response to the nuclear threat, if many people failed to acknowledge
the significance of alien contact, then human politics would not be
transformed, nothing would be learned and nuclear self-destruction
would remain a near certainty.
With regards to the ‘nuclear nightmare’, Kubrick had written in
an article published in June 1963 that filmic dramatisations such as
Dr Strangelove had a particularly important role to play in public
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 23

debate because ‘it’s the only social problem where there’s absolutely
no chance for people to learn anything from experience. If it ever
happens, there may be very little of the world left to profit by the
experience.’44 One could only hope, then, that people might learn
something from a film about this experience. Along similar lines, one
might say that the (implicit) purpose of the proposed film about
extra-terrestrials was to teach an important lesson about the unity of
humankind, because, given the imminent threat of nuclear war, there
was no time to wait for an actual alien encounter to do the job.
Thus, Kubrick’s plans for a ‘proverbial “really good” science-
fiction movie’ were at least partly motivated by a desire, responding
to his own expectation of nuclear war, to offer an alternative, more
hopeful vision of the future of humanity. While one is inclined to
interpret his ambition to make a ‘really good’ film in terms of the
scientific rigour and aesthetic quality which, in his view, most
previous science-fiction movies had been lacking, Kubrick’s phrase
could also be understood as referring to the ‘proverbial’ optimism of
much science fiction. Indeed, the partner he was courting for his
project was a leading representative of optimistic science fiction.
24 BFI FILM CLASSICS

3 Development

Arthur C. Clarke had first been recommended to Stanley Kubrick by

Roger Caras, who was Columbia Pictures’ publicist for Dr
Strangelove (and would soon be employed by Kubrick in a similar
role for 2001). In February 1964, Kubrick had told Caras that he was
doing research for his next film, which would deal with extra-
terrestrials, to which Caras had responded with the suggestion that
he contact his friend Arthur C. Clarke, who was ‘the best’ writer in
the field.45 The forty-six-year-old Clarke was perhaps best known as
the ‘father of satellite communication’ for a technical paper entitled
‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’, which had first been published in 1945 and
proposed a network of geostationary satellites facilitating instant
communication around the globe – a proposal that was becoming a
reality in the early 1960s.46 In 1945, Clarke had also written a
prescient essay on the future of warfare in the nuclear age.47 As a
member of the British Interplanetary Society since 1934, Clarke had
long been an avid promoter of space flight.48 His numerous
publications were equally divided between, on the one hand, science-
fiction short stories and novels, often dealing with space exploration,
alien encounters or the future evolution of humanity, and, on the
other, non-fiction articles and books mainly focused on space
exploration and the development and largely beneficient impact of
technology.49 For his achievements as a science populariser, Clarke
had been awarded UNESCO’s prestigious Kalinga Prize for Science
Writing in 1962.50
When he received Kubrick’s letter of 31 March 1964, Clarke
responded enthusiastically.51 On 8 April 1964, he wrote to Kubrick
that the ‘ “really good” science-fiction movie is a great many years
overdue’, and suggested that they meet during his visit to New York
later that month.52 Clarke’s first letter referenced a wide range of
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 25

films – some chosen because they were ‘the only ones that came
anywhere near qualifying’ as good science fiction, others because
they ‘had their moments catastrophe-wise’ – and several of his own
publications, both non-fiction and fiction, most notably his novel
Childhood’s End (1953), ‘which everybody agrees is my best book’.
Clarke emphasised that he had written extensively on space
exploration and enclosed a letter he had recently sent to Scientific
American expressing his support for research on interstellar space
flight and the search for extra-terrestrial life. In this letter, he
26 BFI FILM CLASSICS

speculated that ‘we may have been visited [by extra-terrestrials]

innumerable times in the past’, yet admitted that ‘the chance of
finding evidence for such visits is minute’.53
Having thought about Kubrick’s suggested film project some
more, the very next day he wrote to him again with detailed ideas.54
Clarke included a copy of the most recent article he had written on
the topic he was most famously associated with, entitled ‘The World
of the Communications Satellite’: ‘This may give you some ideas –
esp. the marked passages.’ These passages include statements about
the ‘coming of the communications satellite [which] will make it
impossible for any human group – indeed, any individual – to be
more than a few milliseconds from any other’, with vast ‘social
consequences’, ‘for good or evil’, for a ‘still divided’ world.55
Starting from such concern about the future unification of
humankind, Clarke presented Kubrick with ‘a nice opening for a
space movie’, the overall narrative of which would combine his short
story ‘The Sentinel’ (originally published as ‘Sentinel of Eternity’ in
1951) with the epic sweep of, but not necessarily the actual events
depicted in, Childhood’s End.56 Indeed, in his first letter to Kubrick,
Clarke had stated that he was already in the process of ‘developing’
the basic theme of Childhood’s End – ‘the impact of a superior race
on humanity’ – for another novel, an effort that, presumably, he was
willing to divert into their joint film project.
Clarke envisioned the film beginning in the near future with a
sunrise on the Moon and the discovery by a lunar ‘survey team’ of
something highly unusual.57 This opening was then meant to blend
into ‘The Sentinel’, in which a geologist remembers how he first found
‘a glittering, roughly pyramidical structure, twice as high as a man’ on
a lunar mountain, which ‘has taken us twenty years’ to open up so as
‘to reach the machine inside those crystal walls’.58 The geologist
concludes that, ‘[w]hen our world was half its present age’, this
machine had been left by an extra-terrestrial civilisation, which had
been ‘masters of a universe’ as yet empty of other intelligent life.59
Motivated by ‘the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 27

finding none to share their thoughts’, they had left sentinels ‘watching
over all worlds with the promise of life’ so as to alert them to the
emergence of civilisations which met the ‘double challenge’ of surviving
their ‘conquest of atomic energy’ and ‘crossing space’.60 Now that the
‘alarm’ has gone off, the extra-terrestrials ‘will be turning their minds
upon Earth. Perhaps they wish to help our infant civilisation. But they
must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the
young.’61 From this, Clarke suggested in his letter, a story about
humanity’s direct interaction with the extra-terrestrials could be
developed, along similar lines to what happens in Childhood’s End.
Childhood’s End tells the story of human interaction with an
extra-terrestrial species, the ‘Overlords’, who arrive on Earth in giant
spaceships some time in the near future. While there is a lot of
distrust and some rebellion, eventually humans accept the benevolent
rule of the technologically far superior Overlords ‘who had brought
peace to all the world for the first time in history’, creating a ‘united
world’, a ‘World State’.62 For decades, the Overlords remain unseen,
and then they reveal themselves, looking like devils: ‘The leathery
wings, the little horns, the barbed tail – all were there.’63
This indicates that they have visited Earth ‘before the dawn of human
history’, have ‘come into conflict with ancient man’ and entered ‘the
myths and legends of the world’.64 It turns out that the Overlords are
mere servants of the inconceivably more powerful, immaterial
‘Overmind’, and their role is to be ‘midwives at a difficult birth’,
guiding humanity towards the next stage in its evolution.65 This is
achieved when children with extraordinary mental powers are born,
who are soon able to leave their material existence behind, merging
into a vast mental entity which in turn will one day become part of
the Overmind, whereas regular humans die out and the Overlords
prepare to move on to guide another species towards transcendence.
Why did humanity need guidance in the first place? One of the
Overlords explains: ‘you were on the point of destroying yourselves
with the powers that science had rashly given you. Without our
intervention, the Earth today would be a radioactive wilderness.’66
28 BFI FILM CLASSICS

It is easy to see that the novel Clarke eventually produced with

Kubrick is indeed the result of ‘developing’ the ideas presented in
Childhood’s End: alien encounters in the distant past leaving their mark
on human history; a twentieth-century humanity headed for nuclear
self-destruction; further alien encounters facilitating global peace and
the next stage in humanity’s evolution; the end point of all evolution
being an immaterial, purely mental existence, which – given the explicit
references to religion in both books – one might call spiritual. There is
also a fundamental tension at the conclusion of Childhood’s End
between the children who achieve spiritual transcendence and older
generations who simply die, prefiguring the opposition between the
Star-Child and humanity at the end of 2001. Despite all these
similarities, it took Clarke a long time to get from the story outline
suggested in his letter of 9 April 1964 to his 2001 novel, the manuscript
of which did not win Kubrick’s final approval until spring 1968.67
When Clarke and Kubrick first met in New York in April 1964,
they decided to write up the story of the planned film in the form of a
novel-length treatment, which could be used to get funding for the
production, and would then provide the basis for the screenplay and
for a novel to be published in conjunction with the film’s release.
Some of the earliest drafts emphasised the necessity to neutralise the
threat of nuclear weapons.68 For example, an ‘outline’ from July
1964 explains that the ‘skills’ used to build an underground base on
the Moon had originally been developed for the construction of
‘hardened missile site[s]’ on Earth.69 Thus ‘Cold War’ technology
‘had been turned to the purposes of peace’, which indicated that
space exploration had finally, ‘[a]fter ten thousand years’, managed
to provide ‘Man’ with ‘something as exciting as war’. That the two
writers were developing their joint project with the possibility of
imminent nuclear war in mind is also humorously demonstrated by
Clarke’s diary entry for 26 July 1964: ‘Stanley’s birthday. Went to the
Village and found a card showing the Earth coming apart at the
seams and bearing the inscription: “How can you have a Happy
Birthday when the whole world may blow up any minute?”’70
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 29

Arthur C. Clarke
(centre) and Stanley
Kubrick (right)

By February 1965, the two collaborators were able to submit a

‘film story’ entitled Journey Beyond the Stars to MGM; it had
probably been completed in December 1964.71 The manuscript had
over 250 pages and was divided into two parts – one set millions of
years ago, the other at the turn of the twenty-first century – and thirty-
eight chapters, the fictional story being preceded by a ‘foreword’
taken from a New York Times article by a NASA scientist about the
vastness of the universe and the near certainty of the existence of
extra-terrestrial intelligence somewhere in it. The most important
addition to Clarke’s initial outline of 9 April 1964 was the prehistoric
sequence of Part I, which was inspired by Clarke’s story ‘Expedition to
Earth’ (1951, also known as ‘Encounter in the Dawn’) about human-
like extra-terrestrials visiting the Earth 100,000 years ago and
interacting with a human male, to whom they appear as ‘gods’.72 It is
30 BFI FILM CLASSICS

also worth pointing out that Part II of Journey Beyond the Stars
ended before any substantial interaction between humans and extra-
terrestrials – as originally envisioned by Clarke’s reference to
Childhood’s End – could take place. Finally, with Journey Beyond the
Stars, Kubrick and Clarke settled, for the time being, on an
unambiguously optimistic story, although they had considered a
much more pessimistic view of human–alien interaction as well.
For example, Clarke had proposed at the end of May 1964 that the
extra-terrestrials ‘might be machines who regard organic life as a
hideous disease’, noting in his diary that Kubrick ‘thinks this is cute
and feels we’ve got something’.73 Although this idea was soon
abandoned, it indicates that the optimism of Journey Beyond the
Stars was haunted by a much darker vision.
What, then, is the story of Journey Beyond the Stars? Part I, in
which hominids are manipulated by an alien device (here depicted as
a transparent cube rather than a slab), and the first section of Part II,
which narrates Dr Heywood Floyd’s trip to the Moon and the
triggering of the alien device that was found there (here depicted as a
pyramid), are already fairly close to the corresponding segments of
the novel that Clarke would publish in 1968. The remainder of the
manuscript, however, develops quite differently. After it has sent a
signal to Jupiter, the alien device’s existence is made public and is
widely perceived as a potential menace: ‘for the first time in history,
there might be a reason for all the nations of the world to combine
against a common threat’.74 After extensive preparations, a spaceship
is sent to Jupiter manned by a crew of six astronauts, five of whom
are soon put in hibernation so as to save resources. The only
companion of the remaining astronaut, David Bowman, is the
female-voiced computer, whose ‘nickname’ is ‘Athena, the Goddess
of Wisdom’, and with whose ‘psychological’ quirks Bowman is
gradually becoming familiar.75 On finally reaching Jupiter, Bowman
is confronted with technical problems, including a lethal malfunction
during his attempt to wake up the first of his fellow astronauts and a
broken antenna. Eventually, however, these problems are solved,
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 31

and the five surviving astronauts find a mysterious opening on one of

Jupiter’s moons. When Bowman enters into it, he is transported to
another planet where he moves through a futuristic city full of
humanoid aliens and ends up in a room modelled on television
programmes from Earth. After he receives a phone call telling him
that he will be sent home soon and asking him to leave the room,
he steps into complete darkness. Then he becomes aware of a
glimmering light: ‘Suddenly he is looking at a cube about fifteen feet
on a side made of some completely transparent material; indeed it is
not easy to see except when the light glints at its edge.’76 With this
encounter, which echoes the initial confrontation between hominids
and alien technology and thus implies that another evolutionary leap
is about to take place, the film ends.
A few days after a ‘reader’s report’ on the above manuscript
was submitted on 15 February 1965, MGM agreed to fund the
production of Journey Beyond the Stars with several million dollars
(the figure usually given in the literature is $6 million).77 This was a
very substantial financial commitment, especially when we consider
that the average budget of a Hollywood movie at that time was only
around $1.5 million.78 What is more, all the noteworthy science-
fiction films that Clarke had mentioned in his first letter to Kubrick –
ranging from Things to Come (1936) to Forbidden Planet (1956) –
had earned less than $3 million in rentals in the United States.79
Why, then, did MGM consider that its huge investment in Journey
Beyond the Stars was commercially viable? In the absence of sources
directly documenting the studio’s decision-making, we can turn to its
public announcement of the project, which indicates what MGM
perceived to be its most important marketable elements.
32 BFI FILM CLASSICS

4 Trends

On 23 February 1965, MGM sent out a press release with the

headline ‘Stanley Kubrick to Film Journey Beyond the Stars in
Cinerama for MGM’.80 More than half of the document consisted of
a long statement by Kubrick, who was introduced in the opening
sentence as ‘the director of Lolita and most recently Dr Strangelove’,
for both of which he had ‘received world-wide acclaim’. Thus, above
all else MGM was making an investment in Kubrick, whose track
record could be seen as a promise of future success.81
Indeed, after a commercially undistinguished career in the
1950s, with the release of the $12 million Roman epic Spartacus in
1960, Kubrick had become one of Hollywood’s top hit-makers,
whose films also garnered tremendous critical acclaim.82 At the
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 33

beginning of 1965, Variety ranked Spartacus fourteenth in its list of

‘All-Time Top Film Grossers’ in North America with rentals of $14
million.83 The film had been nominated for six Academy Awards (but
not in the main categories), winning four.84 It had also won the
Golden Globe for Best Drama from the Hollywood Foreign Press
Association and been selected by Time as one of the eight best
American films of 1960.85 While much less successful than Spartacus
(and also much less expensive at about $2 million each),86 both the
bestseller adaptation Lolita (1962) and Dr Strangelove had been
substantial hits. Lolita’s rentals of about $4 million had placed it
among the twenty top-grossing films of 1962 in the United States.87
With rentals of $5 million, Dr Strangelove had been among the
fifteen top-grossing films of 1964. It had received four Oscar
nominations (for Best Picture, Director, Actor and Adapted
Screenplay), had been declared the year’s best film by the New York
Times and the year’s Best-Written American Comedy by the Writers
Guild of America, while also winning Best Direction from the New
York Film Critics Association.88 By any measure, then, by 1965
Kubrick was at the top in Hollywood, and therefore also at the
forefront of MGM’s thinking about, and press announcement for,
Journey Beyond the Stars.
Another prominent item in that announcement was Cinerama.
By 1965, the Cinerama company had ceased producing films in its
original three-strip process which had launched the widescreen
revolution of the early 1950s, using three cameras and three
projectors.89 Instead, the company now licensed the major studios to
use the Cinerama label for particular single-strip 70mm productions
which were guaranteed a release in Cinerama theatres with their huge
curved screens. Cinerama releases had an impressive commercial
track record. The original three-strip process had been launched with
the travelogue This Is Cinerama in 1952, which, after a run of several
years, eventually earned rentals of $15 million, thus becoming the
highest-grossing film released in 1952.90 The next two Cinerama
travelogues, Cinerama Holiday ($12m, the top-grossing film released
34 BFI FILM CLASSICS

in 1955) and Seven Wonders of the World ($13m, the 4th highest-
grossing film released in 1956), were also very successful, as were the
first Cinerama feature (the epic Western How the West Was Won,
$21m, 1st/1962) and the slapstick extravaganza It’s a Mad, Mad,
Mad, Mad World ($21m, 2nd/1963), the first single-strip 70mm film
to be released in Cinerama theatres. Despite the abandonment of the
three-strip process in 1963, then, the excellent track record of
Cinerama releases appeared to continue with single-strip films.
Whether they were three-strip or single-strip, documentary
travelogues or fictional stories, Cinerama releases foregrounded
sequences displaying natural scenery, which gave spectators the
impression of being located within the landscape, and/or shots taken
from fast-moving vehicles, giving audiences the dizzying sensation of
actual movement. Instead of, or in addition to, telling a story,
Cinerama films presented themselves as a form of virtual tourism and
as virtual amusement-park rides, bringing the cinema closer to those

Privately, Kubrick and Clarke referred to their project as ‘How the solar system was
won’
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 35

leisure-time activities which, unlike cinemagoing, experienced a

tremendous boom in the post-war period.91 As was already signalled
by its title, Journey Beyond the Stars had great potential in this
respect. The opening sequence set in prehistoric Africa promised to
provide ample opportunity for spectacular landscape displays.
Curiously, this sequence is never explicitly mentioned in the press
release (it is only implied in the question: ‘has anyone already visited
Earth?’), which instead focuses on Kubrick’s statement that the film
would be ‘an epic story of adventure and exploration, encompassing
the Earth, the planets of our Solar System, and a journey light-years
away to another part of the Galaxy’, allowing audiences to go where
no one had gone before. In other words, MGM recognised that the
film could be marketed as the ultimate (virtual) tourist experience.
It could also be understood as the ultimate epic. Historical epics
set their often intimate stories of personal struggle and love against
the backdrop of important events and developments in (usually
western) history, and stage these momentous episodes in a most
spectacular fashion.92 Ever since D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a
Nation (1915), epics had been Hollywood’s most prestigious and
most expensive production category, and from the late 1940s
onwards they had completely dominated the American box office in
their various guises, ranging from biblical spectacles such as Samson
and Delilah ($12m, 1st/1949) to epic World War II movies such as
The Longest Day ($18m, 2nd/1962).93 Many of these epics had a
truly international outlook, as they were often based on non-
American source material and used both foreign personnel and
locations.
MGM’s press release explicitly linked Journey Beyond the Stars
to this tradition by declaring, somewhat misleadingly as it turned out,
that the film would have ‘a cast of international importance’ and ‘be
filmed on locations in Britain, Switzerland, Africa, Germany and the
United States’. The announcement also contained Kubrick’s claim
that the exploration of space and ‘the electrifying discovery of extra-
terrestrial intelligence’ depicted in the film ‘will transform our
36 BFI FILM CLASSICS

civilization, as the voyages of the Renaissance brought about the end

of the Dark Ages’. MGM could have gone even further by pointing
out that the film would transcend the usual chronological framework
of historical epics by going back to the very origins of humanity and
setting up a fundamental break in human history in the near future.
Once again, Journey Beyond the Stars must have appeared to the
studio as an expansion and intensification of existing box-office
trends.
In addition to the project’s general connection to the historical
epic, there are several hints in the press release (and, of course, in
Kubrick and Clarke’s ‘film story’) at specific links to its biblical
variant,94 and also to the presence of supernatural, mostly divinely
inspired, events in so many of Hollywood’s hit movies (more than 10
per cent according to one quantitative content analysis) across a
range of genres in the two decades after World War II.95
MGM’s announcement promised that Journey Beyond the Stars
would depict encounters with ‘extra-terrestrial’, that is heavenly,
beings, ‘explore the infinite possibilities’ and ‘wonder’ of ‘space’,
that is the heavens, and contemplate the vastness and mystery of the
universe. The inclusion of a quotation from ‘the great biologist’
J. B. S. Haldane – ‘The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine;
it is stranger than we can imagine’ – suggests the limits of scientific
knowledge and thus perhaps the need for a more spiritual approach.
Apart from highlighting Kubrick, Cinerama and Journey
Beyond the Stars’ epicness (and spiritual potential), the MGM press
release foregrounded Kubrick’s collaboration with Clarke, whose
scientific credentials it listed. Together with the serious tone of
Kubrick’s long statement, Clarke’s expertise was seen to ensure that
the film would address questions about space exploration and extra-
terrestrial life which ‘[d]uring the last few years, some of the world’s
best minds have applied themselves to’. In doing so, the film would
‘break away from the clichés of Monsters and Madmen’ of much
previous science-fiction cinema, which raises the possibility that
MGM conceived of Journey Beyond the Stars as suitable only for
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 37

more informed and refined audiences rather than for the great mass
of potential cinemagoers. This is, however, unlikely given the
following clause which Cinerama Inc. inserted into all its contracts
with distributors and producers: the company had to be ‘satisfied
that the photoplay does and will constitute a “road-show” photoplay
suitable for “family entertainment”’.96
The term ‘road-show’ referred to Hollywood’s dominant release
strategy for big-budget movies in the 1950s and 1960s, whereby a
film would first be shown at premium prices only in a few showcase
cinemas (which, in the case of a Cinerama release, were mostly
Cinerama theatres equipped with their special screens).97 A roadshow
release aimed to have very long runs in its showcase cinemas, where it
was presented with all the trappings of a night out at the ‘legitimate’
theatre: separate performances (instead of the normal practice of
running films continuously throughout the day), advance bookings,
an orchestral overture and an intermission. In this way, the initial
presentation of the film became a special cultural event, which was,
however, addressed not to the discerning few but to everybody who
was willing and able to pay the higher ticket price. Later on, the film
also received a general release at regular prices in regular cinemas,
often while the initial roadshow engagements were still running.
Across their two stages, roadshow releases tried to appeal to all
segments of the population, not least by being presented as
entertainment for the whole family. So, how could Journey Beyond
the Stars be understood as family entertainment?
To answer this question, it is useful to take a look at the output
of the Disney company. Disney’s first CinemaScope production,
20,000 Leagues under the Sea ($9m, 3rd/1954), paved the way for
high-profile Jules Verne adaptations by other studios, which, like the
Disney film, depicted fantastic journeys, albeit in historical rather
than futuristic settings. The most successful of these was Around the
World in Eighty Days ($23m, 2nd/1956). Disney also produced
successful comedies about scientific discovery and technological
innovation, notably The Absent-Minded Professor ($9m, 5th/1961)
38 BFI FILM CLASSICS

and its sequel (Son of Flubber, $7m, 5th/1963). What is more, from
1955 to 1957, Disney made three episodes on space exploration,
partly based on a series of articles published in the hugely popular
magazine Collier’s, for its Disneyland show, which was one of the
highest-rated programmes on American television; the show
continued to deal with future technological developments into the
early 1960s.98 This suggests that family entertainment and scientific
as well as technological themes were by no means at odds with each
other.
MGM appears to have perceived the portrayal of space
exploration as the key marketable feature of Journey Beyond the
Stars. No doubt this had a lot to do with the fact that a real-life space
race was in full swing in 1965. As Kubrick put it in the press release:
‘the first man-carrying spaceships are actually being built, and the
United States is spending over $10,000,000 a day to reach the Moon,
and robot probes have already been launched to Mars and Venus’.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 39

MGM could count on the increased level of public interest in the

American space programme ever since President Kennedy had
declared in a speech to Congress on 25 May 1961 that ‘this nation
should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth’.99
Indeed, this goal neatly dovetailed with the opening sequence of the
second part of Journey Beyond the Stars, which depicts a trip from
Earth to a lunar base, and with the phone call Bowman receives at
the end of the story assuring him that he will be returned home.
MGM could count on lots of free publicity for this project every time
a major new development in the space race took place – another great
achievement by the Americans or the Soviets, or perhaps a tragic
accident. By 1965, several unmanned spacecraft had already gone to
the Moon (but none had yet achieved a soft landing), and both Soviet
and American astronauts had orbited the Earth (but none had yet left
the orbit, finally escaping the Earth’s gravity); during their missions,
some of the astronauts had to deal with life-threatening accidents.100
The popular appeal of space travel was evidenced by the fact
that, ever since Alan Shepard had become the first American in space
on 5 May 1961, broadcasts of American space missions had attracted
huge television audiences, although only the rocket launch could be
seen live on television, while during their time in space the astronauts
could be heard but not yet seen.101 At the same time, it is important
to note that the space race was by no means uncontroversial.
A Gallup poll from July 1965 revealed ambiguous attitudes among
Americans.102 Intriguingly, the very same factors that made the space
programme controversial – the gigantic expenditure of taxpayers’
money, the possibility of national humiliation should the Soviets win
the race, the enormous risk for astronauts – made Journey Beyond
the Stars look even more attractive as a virtual alternative: only
MGM’s money would be spent, the Soviet film industry could never
rival Hollywood and no one would die. Whatever happened in the
real space race, Journey Beyond the Stars would ensure that the
Americans got there (the Moon, Jupiter, another planet light-years
40 BFI FILM CLASSICS

away) first. Furthermore, the film would deliver moving pictures

from space which television broadcasts of space missions had so far
been unable to present.
We can conclude, then, that, judging by MGM’s February 1965
press announcement, the studio’s investment in Journey Beyond the
Stars was based on the perception that what Kubrick and Clarke had
outlined in their ‘film story’ was an innovative movie that was
nevertheless firmly grounded in recent trends in Hollywood
entertainment. Journey Beyond the Stars was going to be a roadshow
attraction for the whole family; a big-budget historical epic and
futuristic Cinerama travelogue which promised to take audiences on
the most spectacular journey of their lifetime while also dealing with
crucial developments in human history; a spiritual film which raised
questions about humankind’s relationship to higher powers in the
universe; a speculative, yet scientifically based and thus educational
docudrama which extrapolated from the current state of knowledge
and exploited the intense public interest in the space race; a science-
fiction film featuring futuristic hardware and exotic, yet humanoid,
aliens; the latest work of a young director who was increasingly
perceived as one of the great masters of Hollywood cinema.
In the press release, MGM stated that Clarke’s novel would be
published ‘this winter’ and shooting would start in August 1965 so
that the film could be released by the end of 1966.103 The studio
probably did not expect that the release date would be missed by
more than a year, and that, during this time, Kubrick would take the
project into a radically new direction (while also raising the
production budget to almost $11 million).104
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 41

5 Transformation

After MGM had committed to Journey Beyond the Stars in February

1965, Kubrick and Clarke continued their collaboration in New
York. By July that year, they had adapted their ‘film story’ of
December 1964 into a screenplay, which included extensive voice-
over narration and was now entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey.105
During the summer, Kubrick and the production team he had
assembled relocated to England where the film was shot from 17
December 1965 to 14 July 1966, mainly at MGM’s studios in
Borehamwood near London. Additional material for the prehistoric
and Star Gate sequences was shot by a second unit in Africa and the
United States. Kubrick himself shot material for the film as late as the
autumn of 1967, notably scenes featuring the hominids and screen

MGM’s Borehamwood studios

42 BFI FILM CLASSICS

tests for various ways to represent the aliens. Furthermore, across

1966, Roger Caras (by now an employee of Kubrick’s) filmed
interviews with leading scientists and thinkers in the UK and the
United States, including a priest and a rabbi, for a planned ten-
minute prologue to the film. The interviews dealt with the existence
of extra-terrestrial intelligence, the possibility of communication with
it and the likely impact of such communication, but also with related
questions about the origins of life, the future evolution of humankind
and the development of machine intelligence.
By the summer of 1966, Clarke had revised the ‘film story’ for
publication as a novel, yet Kubrick demanded further changes and in
any case wanted to delay the novel’s publication until after the film’s
release, which was now scheduled for late 1967 or early 1968.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 43

In addition to revising the novel, Clarke continued to supply material

for the film’s dialogue and voice-over narration, which remained in a
state of flux until early 1968. Clarke also was involved in pre-release
publicity activities for the film and composed various texts to be used
in promotional materials. This was part of the major publicity
campaign launched by MGM with the official announcement of the
project in February 1965; for this campaign, the studio was working
closely with Kubrick through Roger Caras. The film’s immensely
complex post-production, involving numerous special-effects shots,
dragged on until March 1968, with Kubrick making key decisions, in
particular about editing, music and voice-over narration, very late in
the process. Post-production was completed only a few days before
the film’s first screening for the press at the end of March, and
Kubrick made further cuts a few days after the film’s premiere in
selected American cities at the beginning of April. Clarke’s novel was
finally published in July 1968.
During the period of more than three years that it took to turn
Kubrick and Clarke’s ‘film story’ into Kubrick’s film and Clarke’s
novel, the project was constantly evolving.106 This evolution can be
understood in terms of two overlapping movements of, on the one
hand, narrative and thematic elaboration (predominant in the early
stages and applying to both novel and film), and, on the other, formal
contraction, accelerating towards the end of the production process,
but only with regards to the film.107 Kubrick and Clarke’s first
screenplay of 6 July 1965 demonstrates that the film was initially
meant to stay very close to their ‘film story’. The manuscript is 108
pages long, and, like other Kubrick screenplays, it does not always
follow the stylistic and layout conventions for scripts. Many of the
scenes are presented in novelistic prose, rather than being broken
down into dialogue (or other spoken material) and brief descriptions
of the action. The scenes which are presented conventionally make
extensive use of voice-over narration similar in tone to the novelistic
prose used elsewhere in the script. Hence, it is likely that some of this
prose was meant to be used as voice-over narration. In general, the
44 BFI FILM CLASSICS

function of the voice-over was to provide background information,

to make sure that the action could be followed easily, to indicate
what its wider significance might be and to tie the different parts of
the story together.
For example, after the first twenty-five pages of prehistoric
scenes written much like a chapter in a novel, the second part of the
script starts with a brief description of a spacecraft orbiting Earth
accompanied by an extensive voice-over which identifies this object
as a nuclear bomb, explains the danger that nuclear weapons pose for
humanity, relates this danger back to the drought which threatened
the survival of the hominids and introduces an additional global
problem: ‘By the year 2001, overpopulation had replaced the
problem of starvation but this was ominously offset by the absolute
and utter perfection of the bomb.’108 When Heywood Floyd is briefed
about the discovery of a pyramid left by extra-terrestrial beings on
the Moon millions of years ago, the voice-over adds: ‘There was

A design sketch
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 45

triumph and yet melancholy in this discovery … what might we have

learned from [the extra-terrestrials].’109 This comment implicitly
refers back to earlier scenes showing how an ancient extra-terrestrial
cube saved the hominids from starvation, and looks forward to the
possible impact of future encounters, which may save humanity from
nuclear self-destruction.
Another voice-over, used in a scene depicting life on the Moon
base, provides a lot of information on space exploration and then
comments: ‘the time was fast approaching when Earth, like all
mothers, must say farewell to her children’.110 This resonates with
statements at the very beginning and end of the script, which, while
not marked as such, were probably intended to be used as voice-over
narration. In the opening scene, Moon-Watcher is handling the
corpse of a fellow hominid, who, the script tells us, was his father:
‘such a relationship was beyond his understanding … [yet] he feels
something, something akin to sadness’.111 Mirroring this opening,
the script’s final scene concerns one of the ‘unbelievably graceful and
beautiful humanoid creatures’ inhabiting the distant planet to which
Bowman has been taken; after Bowman is told that he will be
returned home, the extra-terrestrial ‘carefully takes the Earth-man’s
hand, and leads him forward into the void, looking not unlike a
parent leading its child’.112 Thus, the father that Moon-Watcher lost
at the beginning, and also Mother Earth which has been left behind
by the inhabitants of the Moon, is replaced by a benevolent, parental
alien who can guide humanity through its difficult and potentially
self-destructive childhood. In this way, the otherwise disconnected
parts of the script were integrated into an overarching narrative,
with voice-over narration doing most of the work of integration,
much like the narrator would do in a novel or the commentary in a
documentary.
Clarke and Kubrick were not satisfied with certain aspects of
the script. Kubrick, whose initial letter to Clarke in March 1964 had
highlighted ‘great plot and character’ as key elements of the project
he envisioned,113 wanted to increase dramatic conflict and character
46 BFI FILM CLASSICS

development in the story, and he eventually did so in a highly unusual

manner. In the July script (as in the earlier ‘film story’), the Jupiter
mission is marred by technical problems, and one of the two non-
hibernating astronauts – a change from the ‘film story’ where only
one astronaut stays out of hibernation – hurtles into space when his
space pod malfunctions and eventually dies, while another astronaut
dies during a failed attempt to get him out of hibernation. These are
merely accidents; there is no antagonist here and hence no conflict
and also little character development. Kubrick came up with the idea
that the astronauts have not been told about the true objective of
their mission (nor has the rest of the world), whereas their board
computer is fully informed. Building on references to the computer’s
‘psychological’ quirks in the ‘film story’ and on the statement that it
was ‘quasi-conscious’ in the July 1965 script, Kubrick saw a way of
giving it a character arc and turning it into the much-needed
antagonist. The burden of having to keep a secret interferes with
Athena’s smooth functioning so that it starts to make mistakes, which
in turn give rise to increasingly desperate attempts to cover up these
mistakes, eventually leading to multiple murder. While Clarke
thought that it was unrealistic for the astronauts to be left in the dark
about their real mission, he appreciated the conflict arising from this
plot device.114 Instead of being ‘just an episode invented for
excitement’, the escalating technical problems and climactic lethal
accidents now became more ‘integral’ to the film’s story and ‘our
theme’: ‘After all, our story is a quest for truth. Athenas’ [sic] action
shows what happens when this truth is concealed.’115
In the revised script, which Kubrick and Clarke completed in
December 1965 just before shooting started, much emphasis is placed
on the battle between the board computer (now called Hal) and the
two astronauts, culminating in the killing of all astronauts but one,
who then disconnects Hal.116 There is plenty of dialogue – involving
mission control on Earth, the astronauts and Hal – exploring the
conflicted feelings and faulty reasoning behind Hal’s increasingly
destructive behaviour. In another revision of the script from February
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 47

1966, completed while shooting was already under way, Hal even
has a schizophrenic breakdown, fragmenting into two personalities,
with one explaining and condemning the actions of the other.117
For subsequent script revisions, Kubrick suggested the use of voice-
over narration to further explore Hal’s psychology.118 In addition to
the development of Hal’s character, script revisions were aimed at
giving the human characters – notably Floyd and the two astronauts
Bowman and Poole – more depth, mainly through long-distance
conversations with, or dialogue references to, family members. As we
have seen, this was also crucial for the portrayal of Moon-Watcher,
who mourns his father in the opening scene of the July 1965 script,
and, figuratively, it applied to humankind as a whole, which was
defined through its relationship to Mother Earth and to aliens acting
in a parental capacity.
In this way, Kubrick and Clarke worked hard throughout 1965
and the early months of 1966 at introducing more conflict into the
story, and expanding the use of spoken words in voice-over narration
and dialogue. At the same time, Kubrick expressed doubts about the
wisdom of this approach. For example, in a letter from August 1965,
Clarke was critical of the ending of the July script (the alien taking
Bowman by the hand to lead him into the void): ‘we never explained
what happened to Bowman, but left it entirely to the imagination’.119
He suggested that instead of this open ending, the alien should give
Bowman a spaceship, which is ‘man’s new tool – the equivalent of
Moonwatcher’s weapons’, yet is much more feminine (‘beautiful’,
‘soft’, ‘warm’) than the phallic bones. According to Clarke, who
wanted to ‘push all sorts of subconscious and even Freudian buttons’,
the final voice-over should be: ‘Now he was master of the world.’
Kubrick commented simply: ‘I prefer present non-specific result for
film. Maybe this can work in a book but it wont [sic] on film.’120
Over the next two and a half years, the idea that the novel might be
suitable for presenting explanations, while the film would work better
through a more open-ended narrative and ambiguous images, became
ever more central for Kubrick’s conception of the project. A kind of
48 BFI FILM CLASSICS

division of labour was slowly emerging whereby the film could afford
to be mysterious because the novel would explain everything.
An important turning point was a letter Kubrick sent to Clarke
in April 1966, roughly halfway through the film’s principal
photography, and also halfway between the project’s inception in
March 1964 and the film’s release in April 1968. By this stage, the
film’s ending had changed dramatically. In the February 1966 script,
there are no more humanoid aliens; instead an extensive voice-over
explains that the aliens are immaterial beings still watching over the
experiment on Earth which their ancestors had started millions of
years ago by leaving behind a cube designed to change the lives
of hominids. At the end of the script, Bowman is transformed into a
baby and then transported back to Earth, all of this facilitated by
another cube. Kubrick was not happy about the different ways in
which the script showed the workings of the cube in each case. In the
prehistoric sequence, the transparent cube affects Moon-Watcher’s
band by showing them three-dimensional scenes of a group of
hominids using bones as weapons, eating meat, etc.; Moon-Watcher
and his group learn by copying these little educational movies.
By contrast, the end of the movie does not explain exactly how the
cube brings about Bowman’s transformation. Kubrick was concerned
that ‘[i]f we show the literal images of what the lessons are for
Moonwatcher, we are adding to the risk of frustration at the end by
not showing what the lesson is for Bowman’.121 His solution was to
concentrate, in both instances, on the ‘spellbound faces’ of those
confronting the cube, on the ‘hypnotic’ quality of what they are
staring at and on the transformative impact it has on them, without
ever showing ‘the contents of the lesson’. This also had the advantage
of adding mystery and complexity to the proceedings: ‘Aside from
possibly better narrative construction, it seems to me that not
showing the visions in the Cube helps prevent a kind of silly
simplicity of which I think we are presently in danger.’
Kubrick also proposed that the cube’s impact on the hominids
should be made more dramatic. In the February 1966 script, even
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 49

before the arrival of the cube, Moon-Watcher is drawn into actual

fighting when his band is challenged by a rival group of hominids.
According to Kubrick, it would be ‘much better to make the point
that though they are strongly territorial, fighting and killing has not
entered significantly into their lives’; it is the cube which introduces
both weapons and murder into the hominid way of life, thus making
a ‘much more significant’ impact. As a consequence of Kubrick’s
proposal, the prehistoric part of the film would ultimately be
structured around a fundamental change in Moon-Watcher’s outlook
and behaviour – from helpless posturing to efficient killing.
This parallels the character development Kubrick had previously
introduced for Hal. During the Jupiter mission, the computer’s
outlook on the astronauts and its own role is changed so drastically
by the requirement to keep a secret that it, too, becomes an efficient
killer.
By spring 1966, then, Kubrick and Clarke had come up with
the narrative that they would largely stick to for both novel and film.
However, after principal photography was completed in July, the
long-drawn-out process of post-production saw a shift in Kubrick’s
conception of the movie, which built on the preference he had earlier
expressed for a ‘non-specific’ ending and for the avoidance of ‘literal
images’ in the lessons taught by the alien cube. More specifically, in
rejecting the ‘silly simplicity’ of the cube showing educational movies
to hominids, Kubrick seems to have become aware of uncomfortable
parallels between those educational movies and certain aspects of the
very film that he wanted to present to cinema audiences. With its
planned prologue featuring interviews with scientists and its
abundance of explanatory voice-overs and dialogue, 2001 was
shaping up to be, among other things, a very ‘literal’ film designed to
teach viewers lessons about human evolution, extra-terrestrial
intelligence, space exploration and artificial intelligence.
Indeed, when Kubrick mentioned the ‘silly simplicity of which I
think we are presently in danger’, he appeared to refer both to the
specific scene in question and to the current state of the overall
50 BFI FILM CLASSICS

project. In this context, his proposal to Clarke about how to deal with
the cube’s lessons offered a model for revising the film as a whole –
and also a daring vision of what 2001 might be able to achieve as a
new kind of cinematic experience. Kubrick’s proposal to replace the
‘contents’ of the cube’s lessons with a focus on ‘hypnotic’ images and
the ‘spellbound faces’ of the hominids was clearly applicable to 2001
and its prospective audience, as was the idea that the aim of these
hypnotic images was to utterly transform their spellbound viewers.
From this, a new conception of 2001 could be derived which
focused not on what was in the film but on the effect it was meant to
have on its viewers. It became possible to imagine that cinema
audiences in front of huge Cinerama screens, like the hominids in
front of the alien cube, would be ‘spellbound’ and transformed by the
experience of 2001, and that such an effect might best be achieved
precisely by emptying the film of its ‘contents’ and instead
concentrating on the creation of ‘hypnotic’ images (arguably a
strategy which had been employed successfully by Cinerama
travelogues). Of course, this would constitute a dramatic departure
from the conventions of mainstream narrative film-making, going
against most of the expectations audiences would bring to a
roadshow epic, but this was precisely the point. Within the film,
hominids were transformed by their encounter with an alien artifact,
something way beyond their horizon of expectations; if there was any
chance that 2001 could have a similarly transformative effect on its
viewers, then it, too, had to become wholly alien.
It is impossible to know whether this is how Kubrick arrived at
the decision to fundamentally reshape his movie, but the fact is that
he did reshape it. By November 1967, he had come to the conclusion
that the voice-over narration could largely be dropped. He sent a
telegram to Clarke: ‘As more film cut together it became apparent
narration was not needed.’122 Clarke replied that he was ‘rather
upset’ and sceptical, yet also expressed his basic agreement with
Kubrick’s approach: ‘I’ll be v[ery] interested to see how you can
possibly dispense with much of the narrative material while at the
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 51

same time I feel it’s a good thing if you can.’123 Kubrick was still
interested in using some narration, and Clarke continued to send him
new drafts for bits of voice-over until well into the new year.124
At some point, probably in late January or February 1968, only
a few weeks before the film’s scheduled release date, Kubrick decided
to drop the voice-over narration altogether. At the same time, he
informed the film composer Alex North that he would make little,
if any, use of the score he had composed and recorded for 2001.125
In the end, Kubrick replaced North’s score with a selection of pre-
recorded nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical and avant-garde
music, which was unprecedented in mainstream film-making. He had
also decided to reduce the dialogue drastically. By this time, the
planned ten-minute prologue of interviews, the opening scene with
Moon-Watcher and his dead father, and all attempts to include
images of the aliens in the film’s finale (with test footage having been
shot in September 1967)126 had been abandoned as well.
All of these changes meant that, while the underlying story
basically remained in place, it would be almost impossible for viewers
to understand what this story was and how the various parts of the
film fit together. After Kubrick’s last-minute changes, the film no
longer shows or even mentions the intelligent extra-terrestrial beings
whose grand experiment with life on Earth motivates much of what
happens on screen, especially the operations of the ancient artifacts
they have left behind. Nor does the film provide an obvious causal
connection between the prehistoric scenes and the events at the turn
of the twenty-first century; and even the connection between events
on the Moon and the Jupiter mission is only explained towards the
end of that mission. No explicit reason is given for Hal’s initial
mistakes and later murderous actions. Everything that happens after
Bowman has disconnected Hal remains completely unexplained.
In addition to reducing the comprehensibility of the story,
Kubrick’s changes also removed what had been one of the project’s
most important themes, namely that extra-terrestrial intervention
was needed to counter the threat of extinction, both in the distant
52 BFI FILM CLASSICS

past (featuring starving hominids unable to deal with a long drought)

and at the turn of the twenty-first century. As we have seen, in the mid-
1960s, Kubrick was convinced that nuclear war was going to take
place within the next few decades; yet, in response to this conviction,
he was able, with Clarke’s help, to imagine an alternative future in
which space exploration and an encounter with extra-terrestrial
intelligence unified and transformed humanity so much that nuclear
self-destruction could be avoided – although, on Clarke’s side, this
optimistic scenario had long been haunted by a darker vision of the
aliens themselves posing a potential threat to humanity. In Kubrick’s
film released into movie theatres in April 1968, none of this was any
longer stated explicitly, but, as we saw earlier, Clarke’s novel,
published a few months later, continued to hint at the potential extra-
terrestrial threat and to foreground the theme of nuclear destruction.
In interviews following the film’s release, Kubrick offered a
complex rationale for the unconventional shape the film had taken.
2001 was primarily meant to be a purely visual experience rather
than a story conveyed with the help of the spoken word. The film
was designed to be open to a wide range of intellectual and emotional
responses, with different people being able to respond in very
different ways. Beyond such differences, however, the film was meant
to touch on deep-rooted, perhaps universally shared human needs
and longings, which across human history have traditionally been
served by myth and religion. Finally, the film’s unconventional shape
was in fact in the service of its pursuit of scientific accuracy: since the
immense superiority and otherness of extra-terrestrial intelligence
and its technology would make it totally incomprehensible to
humans, it could most accurately be represented through
incomprehensible images.127
This is a perfectly good rationale for many of the unique formal
features of 2001, yet it was provided retrospectively, and does not
explain how Kubrick came to prefer those features to the overly
explicit, literal and indeed educational film, so heavily dependent on
the spoken word in its prologue, voice-over and extensive dialogue,
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 53

which he and Clarke had been working towards for at least two
years. What I want to suggest is that the drastic changes Kubrick
made late in the production were, directly or indirectly, derived from
his critique of the film’s leaning towards ‘silly simplicity’ in April
1966, and from the general emphasis on transformative experiences
brought about by encounters with extra-terrestrial intelligence which
had been at the heart of this project from its inception. From spring
1964 to spring 1966, Kubrick and Clarke had developed a story
about mysterious artifacts precipitating the transition from hominid
to human being and from astronaut to Star-Child. Kubrick’s letter
from April 1966 challenged the simplistic way in which the
operations of one of these artifacts were represented. This in turn
provided him with a possible model for thinking about the operations
of his own movie and its intended impact on audiences. As a result,
he eventually decided to turn his film into a mysterious artifact as
well, hoping perhaps that its very alienness, itself the result of a
radical transformation of a long-standing project, might in turn
provide audiences with the opportunity for a transformative
experience.
At some point in 1966, Kubrick, who had until then been
toying with various shapes for the alien artifacts on Earth, on the
Moon, near Jupiter and in the alien hotel room, decided that all of
them would be thin, narrow, tall, rectangular slabs, geometrically
perfect, sharp-edged, shiny and utterly opaque. It is tempting to relate
the film’s own perfect design and opacity back to that of the
monolith, and to see this object as a playfully inverted (black instead
of white, standing up instead of lying sideways) geometric reminder
of the rectangular, extremely wide screen for which the film was
made. In other words, consciously or not, Kubrick turned 2001 into
a filmic monolith, which meant that viewers encountering this
monolith in the cinema would find themselves in a position similar to
that of the hominids and David Bowman in the film: on the verge of a
transformative experience lifting them to a higher level of
consciousness, which is exemplified in the film by the birth of the
54 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Star-Child at the very end. As we will see later, when examining

letters written to Kubrick after the film’s release, many viewers did in
fact experience 2001 very much on these terms.
Let’s first take a closer look, though, at this monolithic movie as
it was initially widely seen by audiences in 1968.128 Fortunately,
recent DVD releases of the film replicate its roadshow presentation,
complete with an overture, a music-filled intermission and a musical
endpiece. My analysis of 2001 concentrates on the guidance provided
by the film itself, especially its opening sequence, for how we might
be able to process its spectacular images and haunting sounds, and its
cryptic narrative. As I demonstrate, an important aspect of such
processing is the willingness to leave much of the film’s mystery
intact, rather than explaining it away.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 55

6 The Film

The beginning is ominous: Against the backdrop of total blackness,

strings and then winds and brass can be heard, their eery,
disharmonious sound slowly welling up, then receding again before
another brief build-up and, finally, silence. After this three-minute
overture (from György Ligeti’s Atmospheres) – which would have
been played in movie theatres against closed curtains, while the
audience was still in the process of filling up the auditorium – a
bright blue and yellow MGM logo appears, soon to be replaced by a
black screen.129 This in turn gives way to a very dark image of the
Moon’s surface, above which the Earth, and behind it the sun, begins
to rise, with most of the Earth shrouded in darkness, only a curved
sliver of its surface visible. Already starting with the appearance of
the logo, the music of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
builds up from almost imperceptible beginnings towards its loud and
triumphant climaxes, while the camera tilts up from the Moon so as
to focus only on the Earth and sun, beneath which the credits appear:
‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents/A Stanley Kubrick Production/2001:
A Space Odyssey’. At the end of this almost two-minute credit
sequence, the image fades to black, while several seconds later the
music also fades away to complete silence. Against the black screen,
insects and birds can then be heard, before a landscape dowsed in the
reddish light of daybreak appears, the title ‘The Dawn of Man’
superimposed on it.
What is one to make of this beginning? The overture is
unsettling, combining a sense of mystery with an element of threat,
but also the promise of peace. After the brightly coloured and highly
stylised MGM logo, the film returns viewers to darkness and then
places them on – or rather, just above – the Moon, looking out over a
desolate landscape. In a surprising and disorienting and also perhaps
56 BFI FILM CLASSICS
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 57

– in the light of Strauss’s music – triumphant reversal of their real-life

experiences, viewers then witness the rise of the Earth on the Moon
rather than seeing the Moon rising in the night sky above Earth.
As soon as viewers get accustomed to their unusual lunar position,
the camera’s tilt removes the lunar surface, leaving them, as it were,
hanging in empty space. The sunrise they witness once again
references familiar experiences, yet offers a radically new perspective
on them, with the full sun topping a sliver of Earth seen from afar.
Placed beneath this image, the film’s title suggests frameworks
for making sense of what has been presented so far. ‘2001’ indicates
that the camera’s position in space is due to the fact that the film’s
action takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
by which time, viewers in the late 1960s could speculate, seeing the
Earth rise above the Moon may have become a commonplace
experience for space travellers. ‘A Space Odyssey’, however, promises
something beyond the commonplace: like Odysseus, a space traveller
may be forced to take a long detour, may even get lost for a while and
separated from his mates, before finally returning home.130 The first
shot after the credit sequence suggests that the starting point – and
also, presumably, the end point – of this odyssey is the Earth: that is,
the very place where the film’s viewers find themselves. The opening
of the film’s story explicitly references the mundane and familiar.
Echoing both the Earth rising on the Moon and the sun rising above
the distant Earth in the credit sequence, the film’s story begins with
views of what is literally an everyday event: daybreak and sunrise on
Earth. The title ‘The Dawn of Man’ plays on the time of day depicted
in the images, yet once again promises something far beyond the
everyday – the emergence or awakening of humanity.131
More generally, the tension between the ordinary and the
extraordinary set up in the credit sequence and the opening of the
story suggests how this film is going to engage its viewers, offering
them familiar images, situations and actions which are, however,
presented from unusual perspectives and surrounded by mystery. As a
result of this, viewers can expect occasionally to find themselves
58 BFI FILM CLASSICS

without a ground to stand on, lost in cinematic space, as it were.

Thus, it is the viewers – as much as any travellers within the film’s
story – that the second part of the film’s title promises to take on an
odyssey across the unfamiliar space depicted in the credit sequence;
they are warned that they may feel disoriented for a while, yet
assured that eventually they will return home safely.
If one were to respond to the film’s beginning in the manner
described above, one would be well prepared for the story that then
unfolds, and also for the unsettling and disorienting way in which
this story is presented. The film can be divided into five major
narrative segments, varying in length from fifteen to thirty-five
minutes, with three of them being shown before the intermission and
two afterwards:

Segment 1 (c. 15 minutes): prehistoric times on Earth

Segment 2 (c. 35 minutes): a trip to the Moon at the turn of the
twenty-first century
Segment 3 (c. 33 minutes): a trip to Jupiter at the turn of the twenty-
first century
Intermission
Segment 4 (c. 27 minutes): continuation of the trip to Jupiter
Segment 5 (c. 23.5 minutes): a trip from Jupiter to an unknown
destination and back to Earth, starting at
the turn of the twenty-first century

The transition from the first to the second segment is marked by a

huge spatio-temporal shift in the story (moving millions of years
ahead to the turn of the twenty-first century and thousands of miles
away from Earth into space), while the beginnings of the third and the
fifth segment are marked, just like the beginning of the first segment,
by titles (‘Jupiter Mission: 18 Months Later’, ‘Jupiter and Beyond the
Infinite’) which are accompanied by further spatio-temporal shifts (of
several months and millions of miles in both cases). Whereas the story
develops continuously across the third and fourth segment (with only
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 59

a tiny spatio-temporal shift from the inside to the outside of a

spacecraft while a few hours pass), their separation is marked by the
intermission. Let’s take a closer look, then, at these five narrative
segments, paying particular attention to the ways in which they relate
to the expectations raised by the film’s credit sequence and by the title
presented at the beginning of the first segment, ‘The Dawn of Man’.
This first segment presents spectacular views of a landscape of
rocky hills and dusty plains with little vegetation. One might want to
call this landscape desolate, yet it is positively brimming with life
when compared to the lunar landscape shown earlier. The segment
shows how the life of a band of herbivorous and rather peaceful but
also quite helpless ape-like creatures – who share their living space
with tapirs, get attacked by a leopard (with one fatality) and respond
to a rival band which challenges their access to a waterhole with
ineffectual posturing rather than actual violence – is transformed by
the brief appearance of a monolith. This appearance is preceded and
accompanied by a cacophony of otherworldly voices (from Ligeti’s
Requiem), which intermingle with the shrieks and grunts of the apes
who are initially afraid, yet then approach, touch and huddle around
the monolith. The only other piece of music in this segment comes in
the next scene, in which Thus Spake Zarathustra can be heard while
the band’s leader (who we can call ‘Moon-Watcher’, although he is
never referred to as such in the film or in the credits) picks up a bone
and toys with it. After a brief flashback to a shot from the preceding
sequence – showing the monolith from an extremely low angle, with
the sun rising at its top (and a sliver of Moon visible above the sun),
echoing the sunrise both in the credit sequence and at the beginning
of this segment – Moon-Watcher starts using the bone to smash other
bones, including a skull, while further cut-aways show tapirs falling
to the ground, thus indicating Moon-Watcher’s thought process.
Somehow inspired by the memory of his encounter with the
monolith, he learns that the bone can be used to kill tapirs. Next he
and his band are shown eagerly devouring meat, and then
confronting the rival group once more, this time going on the attack
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and beating their leader to death. The segment concludes with shots
of the lethal bone that Moon-Watcher has triumphantly thrown into
the air; against the backdrop of a few clouds in a blue sky and
accompanied by the sound of wind, the bone is seen falling down –
and the camera, and thus the viewer, appears to be falling with it.
As far as the space odyssey in the year 2001 promised by the
film’s title is concerned, these prehistoric scenes clearly have to be
understood as a prologue (although one might wonder whether the
monolith has arrived on Earth during an odyssey of its own).
More immediately pertinent for making sense of this segment is its
opening title, which has rich resonances across its imagery and
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action. As noted earlier, at the most literal level, ‘dawn’ refers simply
to the beginning of the day, and much of what follows depicts the
daily routine of hominids – foraging and eating, going to the
waterhole and drinking, grooming and jostling, posturing and
evading enemies, sleeping and waking up. Yet, during one such literal
dawn, their encounter with the monolith changes certain aspects of
their daily routine for ever, because it dawns on them (this dawning
being represented by a shot of the sun rising above the monolith) that
bones can be used as weapons, animals can be eaten and enemies can
be killed. This in turn implies that the scenes following the
appearance of the monolith give us a first glimpse of ‘man’, whose
‘dawn’ the opening title announced. Yet, this dawn must surely be
followed by the rise of man, just like daybreak is followed by sunrise.
The next segment begins with a (not quite perfect) match-cut
from the falling bone to a vaguely bone-shaped spacecraft silently
floating in blackness punctured only by the light of distant stars, thus
returning viewers to space, where they had been located in the credit
sequence. Accompanied by the beginnings of Johann Strauss’s Blue
Danube waltz, a pan reveals that the spacecraft, which exits the frame
in the left foreground, is situated above the Earth. Both the match-cut
and the fact that ‘man’ and ‘his’ tools have literally risen into space
indicate that the dawning of humanity shown in the first segment has
given way to its rise to predominance by the beginning of the second.
Presumably having conquered the Earth (although we never see how
life on Earth is organised now, except for brief glimpses of house
interiors), humanity has moved on to explore the heavens.
It is tempting to think that the story has moved forward to the
year 2001 of the film’s title. The action depicted in this segment
could thus be understood as the beginning of the ‘space odyssey’
viewers have been promised. Dr Heywood Floyd is on a trip to the
Moon, transferring from the spaceship Orion to a space station and
from there taking another spaceship (the Aries) to his destination,
once again to the accompaniment of the Blue Danube waltz.
He gives a short presentation at the Clavius base before taking a
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Moon bus to the crater Tycho, where he is shown a four-million-

year-old monolith which has recently been excavated. His journey to
Tycho is punctuated by another of Ligeti’s choral pieces (Lux
aeterna), while his Requiem returns when Floyd visits and inspects
the monolith, the music being disrupted when the mysterious object
starts to emit a signal at the very moment it is first hit by sunlight.
The segment ends with an extremely low-angle shot of the sun rising
above the lunar monolith while also illuminating the Earth at the top
of the frame (see p. 64), accompanied by an almost unbearable
piercing sound. Thus, in addition to echoing the credit sequence
(where the sun is rising above the Earth and both are rising above
the Moon) and the two extremely low-angle shots of the monolith
(with the sun rising above it, and a sliver of Moon visible above the
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sun) in the first segment, the second segment ends like the first one
begins – with the start of a new day.
Together with the absence of a separate title for the second
segment, this formal bracketing suggests that the first two segments
are closely linked. Perhaps the ‘dawn of man’ is not yet completed
when Floyd encounters the monolith. Indeed, if the encounter shown
in the first segment enables ape-like creatures to become more like
human beings – carnivorous and murderous tool-users – then this
second encounter might lead to another transformation, which is
necessary for ‘man’ to fully awaken from, and rise above, ‘his’
animalistic prehistory. One might expect that this second
transformation will be the result of the promised odyssey across
space, which appears to have started with Floyd’s trip to Tycho and
could now be given a new direction by the monolith’s signal.
At the same time, the bracketing of the two segments highlights
the significant changes that have already taken place across human
and prehuman history, and not only at the level of technology (with
the transition from bone to spacecraft). The second segment is just as
concerned with everyday routines as the first, only now they take
place in wholly man-made rather than natural environments. Floyd is
asleep when we first see him, and later on he drinks and eats (on
several occasions), and considers the instructions for use of a zero-
gravity toilet. In sharp contrast to Moon-Watcher’s band, Floyd’s
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everyday activities involve little physical contact with others; in fact,

during his flight he is mostly all alone. When, on the space station,
he calls his daughter back on Earth to talk about her forthcoming
birthday, this merely emphasises his separation from those who he is
emotionally closest to (and also his daughter’s temporary physical
separation from her mother). This is echoed in comments made by a
female Russian scientist, an old friend he runs into after his phone
call, who complains that work keeps her apart from her husband,
and again in the speech he gives at the American base about the
necessity to restrict communication between the base and colleagues,
friends and family members back on Earth. Thus, the second segment
emphasises that, unlike their hominid ancestors, modern humans are
very much on their own.
What is more, Floyd’s aloneness is a bit of a mystery right from
the beginning of this segment. The Orion and also the Aries, which
appear to operate much like airplanes in earlier times, with
stewardesses taking care of passengers who are so used to long-
distance travel that they catch up on some sleep rather than admiring
the view, are designed to accommodate dozens of people, and yet
Floyd is the only passenger. This suggests that he is not taking an
ordinary flight but is on a special mission. The conversation with the
Russian scientists on the space station increases the sense of mystery
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surrounding his trip, because the Moon base he is travelling to is said

to have been cut off from the rest of the world, and rumours circulate
about the outbreak of an epidemic. By stating that he cannot
comment on these rumours, Floyd strongly implies that they are true,
which would also explain the special nature of his trip. Once he is on
the base, it is revealed, however, that the deeply troubling story about
the epidemic is a cover for an even more troubling discovery that has
been made on the Moon, a discovery so momentous that humankind
may not be able to handle it. It is only during the journey to Tycho
that the film reveals what this discovery is: an ancient alien artifact.
With this revelation, the mystery surrounding Floyd’s mission, and
how it might be connected to the events depicted in the film’s first
segment, is finally solved for the viewer.
Unlike the first segment, which revolves around the
transformative impact of a monolith, the second segment slowly
builds up tension towards the final revelation of, and encounter with,
such a monolith. Just when this encounter appears to play out
somewhat anti-climactically, with scientists in space suits gathering
around it and having their picture taken, a piercing sound serves as a
wake-up call, signalling further change. In the first segment, we saw
how such change resulted in the hominids’ deadly violence.
Throughout this second segment, violence is noticeably absent, and
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Floyd’s encounter with the Russians, which hints at superpower

rivalry, is very civilised, when compared with the previous two
encounters of rival bands of hominids at the waterhole. To a large
extent, physical posturing and violence seem to have been replaced
with the subtle deployment of language. Yet, it is made abundantly
clear that language is used for the purpose of deception. Importantly,
viewers move from being initially puzzled and deceived by what is
being said into the privileged position of knowing the truth about the
discovery on the Moon. This in turn raises the question of what will
happen to them and to Floyd’s group now that they have confronted
the monolith, given that knowledge of its existence is deemed to be so
dangerous, and also given that an earlier version of this monolith
brought about so much change.
We can expect that the third segment will answer this question.
It starts with a shot that both replays and varies the opening of the
second segment. In silence and against a blackness punctured only by
the light of distant stars, the title ‘Jupiter Mission: 18 Months Later’
appears, while the spaceship Discovery enters the frame slowly from
the left foreground and a string section plays a yearning melody
(taken from Aram Khachaturian’s Gayaneh ballet suite). The title
clearly states that the action depicted from now on does not take
place in the same year as Floyd’s trip to the Moon. So which of the
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two takes place in the year 2001? The segment depicts life on board
the Discovery millions of miles from Earth, focusing once more on
everyday activities – sleeping, eating, drinking, exercising, playing
games, grooming, executing routine work procedures – and on the
increasingly problematic relationship between the two astronauts
(David Bowman and Frank Poole) and the board computer Hal.
The astronauts’ enormous distance from home (once again
emphasised by long-distance conversations, including another
birthday greeting, which foregrounds separation rather than
connection), combined with the fact that Hal reports technical
problems with the antenna that provides the spaceship’s only link to
Earth, vastly intensifies the sense of being separate and alone that
characterises the modern humans in the second segment (when
compared to the hominids of the first). The astronauts’ situation also
clearly has the potential – much more so than Floyd’s rather mundane
trip to the Moon – to develop into the kind of adventure associated
with the idea of a ‘space odyssey’. Hence, Bowman or Poole rather
than Floyd seems destined to become the lone traveller who will take a
long detour before returning home. This in turn suggests that it is only
in the third segment that the film reaches the title year, whereas the
action of the second segment occurs in 2000 or 1999.132
However, for the promised odyssey to begin, something has to
deflect the astronauts off course. Such an event is suggested by the
final scene of this segment, in which Hal studies the lip movements of
the two astronauts who, having made sure that ‘he’ cannot hear
them, discuss the possibility of disconnecting the computer if its error
messages about a faulty antenna component turn out to be wrong,
which they will find out once they have returned the component to
the antenna. The scene ends with an extreme close-up moving back
and forth between the astronauts’ mouths, with a diffuse iris and
distortions of the image marking this as Hal’s optical, indeed
‘subjective’, point of view. At this crucial point in the story, a title
card announces the intermission. Accompanied by the same low-level
roaring sound that could be heard over the preceding shots of Hal
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observing the astronauts, ‘Intermission’ remains on the black screen

for almost half a minute. During this time, the cinema audience
would have started leaving the auditorium for a ten- to fifteen-minute
break, encouraged to speculate on the likely course of action to be
taken by Hal and how it might lead to the promised odyssey and
also, perhaps, to the completion of the ‘dawn of man’ and hence the
rise of that which is fully human.
The intermission also gives viewers an opportunity to reflect on
their experience of the film so far, to ponder the nature and function
of the monoliths and perhaps to articulate their disorientation and
confusion, their sense of being somewhat lost in this movie. In other
words, they may come to see their experience of the film – or at least
of the previous two segments – in terms of the second part of its title:
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that is, as their own odyssey across the space so realistically presented
to them, and across the very film in which this space is being
presented. Indeed, the shot of bone and camera falling in the skies at
the conclusion of the first segment, and the disorienting match-cut
providing the transition from the first to the second segment, as well
as the subsequent image of a spacecraft in near nothingness, have
confirmed that viewers themselves will be as much on a journey in
space as any characters within its story. The remainder of the second
and the third segments are very much concerned with depicting
movement (as will be the rest of the film), including the movement of
spacecraft in relation to each other and to celestial bodies such as
Earth and Moon, as well as the movement of human beings within
spacecraft, on the Moon and in empty space. Such movement is often
depicted in full, rather than being edited with an emphasis on merely
getting characters or vehicles from one point to another so that the
story can proceed; instead, many minutes go by during which careful
attention is paid to movement itself, and to the often disorienting
spatial context in which it takes place, where categories such as up
and down become meaningless (see pp. 72–3). In this way, viewers
are given the opportunity to enter into an unusual cinematic space,
rather than merely following a story.
Another reference point for viewers’ reflections on their
experience of the film during the intermission is provided by the title
opening the first segment, because it can be interpreted as an allusion
to a gradual process of gaining awareness and understanding.
Perhaps ‘the dawn of man’ is something that happens as much in the
auditorium as on the screen, with audiences confronting the mystery
of the film much like the hominids confronted the first monolith.
Obviously, from its very beginning, the film has presented sounds,
images and actions which are difficult to connect with each other and
to comprehend fully. Yet, by revealing the truth about the discovery
on the Moon to viewers (when it is withheld from almost everyone
within the world of the film) and thus explaining the nature of
Floyd’s trip in the second segment and its connection to the first, the
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film has allowed viewers to gain at least a partial understanding of

what is really going on.
During the intermission, they are in the middle of gaining such
understanding about the questions surrounding the events of the third
segment: how is the Jupiter mission connected to the signal emitted by
the monolith on the Moon? What is happening with Hal?
On reflection, the scene in which Hal first reports the imminent failure
of the antenna component contains some clues. Before making ‘his’
announcement, Hal is talking to Bowman, and mentions rumours that
their mission has something to do with a mysterious discovery on the
Moon. When Bowman asks whether these comments are part of a
psychological test, Hal quickly agrees – and immediately afterwards
presents what would appear to be a false error message. Viewers might
conclude that Hal shares their knowledge of the Moon monolith and is
troubled by the fact that ‘he’ cannot share it with the astronauts, who
are completely oblivious to it. As a consequence, he seems to start
malfunctioning. How will this end? The computer’s comments
throughout the third segment about its own perfection and the fallibility
of humans do not bode well for what is going to happen next.
After the intermission, music very reminiscent of the film’s
overture (once again taken from Ligeti’s Atmospheres) can be heard for
just over two minutes against the backdrop of a black screen; again, in
the movie theatre, this music would have been played with closed
curtains, while audiences were returning to their seats.
Closely mirroring the beginnings of the previous two segments, the
film’s story resumes with a shot of the Discovery entering the frame
from the left foreground, a large part of it already visible when the
sequence begins. This is accompanied by a hissing sound and laboured
breathing, the latter belonging to Poole, who has exited the spaceship
to return the allegedly faulty component to the ship’s antenna.
After he has left his space pod to approach the antenna, the pod
ominously turns towards him (see p. 74), and soon afterwards he can
be seen hurtling across space. Bowman goes out in a second pod to
retrieve his body, during which time the life-support systems for the
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hibernating astronauts on board are switched off, resulting in their

deaths. When Bowman’s pod arrives back at the Discovery, Hal refuses
to open the pod bay doors, which forces the astronaut to enter through
the emergency airlock, a dangerous procedure because he has forgotten
his helmet. Once inside, Bowman, having put on a helmet, proceeds to
the room housing Hal’s electronic brain, and gradually disables the
computer’s higher functions. Slowly losing all mental powers, Hal begs
Bowman to stop, and eventually regresses to what appears to be a
computer’s equivalent of early childhood, singing a song and then
going silent. At this point, Bowman is confronted with a pre-recorded
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message from Heywood Floyd, revealing that the true objective of the
Jupiter mission is to follow the signal emitted by the monolith on the
Moon, which – as viewers might have suspected – Hal knew all along.
The segment ends with a close-up of Bowman’s face behind the
reflecting visor of his helmet, set against the red backdrop of Hal’s
‘brain’, looking slightly upwards at the screen on which Floyd declares
that the ‘origin and purpose’ of the lunar monolith remain a ‘total
mystery’. All the while, just as at the beginning of this segment, the
breathing and a hissing sound continue. Both image and sound fade
away quickly after the word ‘mystery’ is spoken.
The fourth segment realises the worst suspicions about Hal’s
intentions that viewers might have developed during the intermission.
76 BFI FILM CLASSICS

The computer almost succeeds in killing all of the astronauts,

explaining to Bowman that this is necessary to protect itself and the
mission. When Bowman responds by disconnecting Hal, he finally
emerges as the lone traveller, utterly lost and far away from home,
a requisite element in the ‘space odyssey’ of the film’s title.
This segment also allows viewers to make a connection – or to
confirm their speculations about a connection – between the
monolith’s signal at the end of the second segment and the Jupiter
mission. Indeed, just like the second segment, this one slowly builds
up tension towards the revelation that a monolith has been
discovered on the Moon. In that earlier instance, talk about the
monolith was followed by a physical encounter. One might expect
that such an encounter is now awaiting Bowman, leading to the long-
anticipated completion of the ‘dawn of man’ as promised by the title
of the film’s first segment. In the same way that the impact of the first
monolith on hominids initiated the dawning of humanity, we can
assume that Bowman will rise to full humanity through his encounter
with yet another monolith somewhere in space.
The fifth segment fulfils these expectations. It begins with the
title ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’ shown against a totally black
background, which gives way to an image of space once again full of
stars, thus closely resembling the openings of segments two to four,
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especially number three. While the eery vocalisations of Ligeti’s

Requiem are gaining in volume, the camera tilts down to reveal
Jupiter (thus reversing the upward tilt in the credit sequence); soon a
monolith floating in space enters the frame from the left side, and
not long afterwards the Discovery emerges into view from the
bottom of the frame. For a while, both the spaceship and the
monolith (or possibly several monoliths) move in-between Jupiter
and its moons, until a space pod finally emerges from the Discovery
and the empty space before it cracks open. Initially shaking violently
in his helmet and later reduced to a huge blinking eye, Bowman
appears to move into and through the space that has opened up (to
the accompaniment of Requiem as well as Ligeti’s Atmospheres).
First, colourful and ever-changing, abstract patterns rush past,
followed by a display of what might be gracefully unravelling
celestial events, before forward movement picks up again, now above
strangely coloured planetary surfaces (see pp. 78–9). In the end,
Bowman’s blinking eye looks out from the space pod into a
beautifully designed room, in which strange echoing sounds as well
as distant and distorted voices (from Ligeti’s Adventures) can be
heard murmuring, screaming and laughing.
Outside the pod, Bowman sees an older version of himself.
After the space pod and the younger Bowman have disappeared, this
older version walks into the adjacent bathroom, from where he in
turn sees an even older Bowman eating a meal. The latter soon gets
up to examine the bathroom, finding it empty. When he has resumed
his meal, he knocks over a glass and becomes aware of another
presence in the room – it is a very old version of himself, lying in bed
(see pp. 80–1). As already recounted at the beginning of this book,
when a monolith appears at the foot of the bed, the man is replaced
by a foetus, accompanied by the early rumblings of Thus Spake
Zarathustra. The camera then moves forward into the monolith’s
blackness, which gives way to a shot of the Moon. Once again, the
camera tilts down, this time to reveal the Earth on the right side of
the frame, while from the left the foetus – or Star-Child – in its bubble
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enters the frame. The final shot is a close-up of the Star-Child turning
slowly towards, and staring directly at, the camera. Just before the
musical piece is completed, this image quickly fades out.
Focused solely on Bowman’s experiences, to the
accompaniment of music throughout but without a single spoken
word, this final segment contrasts sharply with the preceding one,
which is full of conflict and features verbal sparring, emotional
pleading and a revelatory message, but no music (except for Hal’s
song). The fifth segment picks up on, and intensifies, Bowman’s total
isolation at the end of the fourth, which in turn marks the end point
of a steady process of separation, during which the close-knit group
of hominids millions of years ago gives way to the dispersed families
of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century humankind and the ultimately
dysfunctional unit of two astronauts and a computer millions of
miles away from the rest of humanity. If Bowman is the loneliest
human being who ever lived once he has disconnected Hal, his
subsequent journey makes him lonelier still. This is one way of
understanding the segment’s title, ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’:
when he reaches Jupiter, Bowman is already unimaginably lonely, but
then he is taken far beyond even such ‘infinite’ loneliness. There are
indications, though, that he will not remain this way: the voices
featured in Ligeti’s music provide him with a kind of company, as do
the appearances of his older selves in the alien room. There is also the
promise of the film’s title; if this is indeed an odyssey, then the lone
traveller will eventually return home.
Before he does, Bowman is reborn. His transformation into a
foetus is the culmination of birthday references throughout the film.
There is Floyd’s conversation with his daughter about her birthday,
and the birthday message sent by Poole’s parents to the Discovery, as
well as the computer’s regression towards the moment of its ‘birth’.
At the same time, the Star-Child’s wide-open eyes would seem to
suggest that it is wide awake, and hence that the ‘dawn of man’
announced at the beginning of the first segment has finally given way
to the rise of an entity that is fully human. Indeed, just as the
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dawning of human intelligence (and murderousness) – in the scene in

which Moon-Watcher learns to use bones as weapons – is
accompanied by Thus Spake Zarathustra, so Bowman’s
transformation into the Star-Child is associated with this piece of
music. Importantly, the triumphant climaxes of Thus Spake
Zarathustra, previously synchronised with Moon-Watcher’s bone-
smashing, now accompany the Star-Child’s return to the vicinity of
Earth and its final turn towards the camera. Instead of the triumph of
violence, the film now presents the return home as the ultimate
triumph. In this way, the final reprise of Thus Spake Zarathustra
responds to its very first appearance in the film’s credit sequence,
which, through the film’s title, promised viewers a ‘space odyssey’.
In the final shots, this odyssey is completed. The space traveller has
returned home – where ‘home’ is both the Earth floating in the
darkness next to the Star-Child and the cinema auditorium into
which it stares in the final frames.
One might wonder about the precise nature of the Star-Child,
and what it will do. In a way, the film freely admits its own inability
to answer these questions. While it is obvious that the emergence of
the Star-Child is somehow connected to the operations of the
monoliths across human and prehuman history, the very last words
spoken in the film concern the fact that the ‘origin and purpose’ of
these monoliths remain ‘a total mystery’. These words echo across
the remainder of the film, encouraging viewers to consider it with the
same sense of mystery that Heywood Floyd admits to with regards to
the Moon monolith. But if the film shares the monolith’s
mysteriousness, may it also share its transformative power?
This opens up another approach to understanding the Star-
Child. Throughout Bowman’s final journey and during his stay in the
alien room, the film places a lot of emphasis on the act of looking,
and thus equates Bowman with the film’s viewers, who have been
concentrating on this act all along. During his journey through space,
Bowman is frequently reduced to the image of his eyes, and in the
alien room, his most important action is to look at older versions of
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himself, an act which is followed by the disappearance of each

younger self. At the end, the very old man’s look at the monolith
leads to his transformation into the Star-Child, who eventually
directs its gaze at us, the viewers. Does the subsequent disappearance
of the Star-Child mean that it turns into what it last looked at? If so,
the Star-Child becomes us; we become the Star-Child – this
transformation the result of our encounter with this monolithic
movie.
There is more to come. The quick fading out of the image of the
Star-Child and of the accompanying music is followed by a very brief
moment of blackness and silence. Then credits appear to the
accompaniment of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, and while the credits
end – with ‘The End’ – after four minutes, the waltz continues over a
black image for another four minutes. In the cinema, the curtains
would close and the lights would come on at this point as the
audience rose to leave the auditorium. Both 2001: A Space Odyssey
and the journey promised by the film’s title are completed, and like
the Star-Child going back to Earth, people are now returning home
from the otherworldly space of the movie theatre. One might also say
that they have awakened from the dream of this movie to return to
their everyday lives – thus, the end of the film is their ‘dawn’. Or one
might consider the possibility that the whole film has been their dawn
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– and now they rise; like Bowman, they are reborn, as another
version of the Star-Child.
In any case, the last image they have seen is that of the Star-
Child, fully awake, staring at them, mirroring their own staring at the
screen; the last words they have heard are: ‘a total mystery’.
Leaving the cinema, viewers have thus been encouraged to gain some
understanding of the film but also to accept its mysteriousness, and
to take with them a sense of awakening and even rebirth. The waltz
accompanying their departure from the auditorium would seem to
suggest that, despite its final focus on the individual Star-Child, the
film does not leave viewers feeling separate and all alone but rather as
people involved in a communal activity. Individual contemplation of
the film and one’s experience of it are thus allied to the co-ordination
and connectedness and also perhaps the joy and exhilaration of
dance.
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7 Impact

On 16 July 1968, a young woman from Ohio wrote to Stanley

Kubrick to tell him that 2001 was

the greatest movie I have ever seen in my life. In fact it’s one of the greatest
things that ever happened to me ranking with Expo 67 and (of course!) the
Beatles. My parents didn’t exactly dig it – they liked the realism, the
technology, but they complained of not being able to find a story in it. … [2001
is] a hand reaching from destiny to help us on to better things. Mr Kubrick,
your movie – on me at least – has had the same effect as the monoliths
pictured in the film had on the race of man. … May that which is defined as
‘God’ bless you and the whole human race.133

For this viewer, the personal impact of 2001 was so enormous that
she was moved to make explicit what I have suggested is the film’s
self-reflexive dimension, whereby its very opacity and mysteriousness
– that is, its refusal to make it easy for the audience ‘to find a story in
it’ – mirrors the opacity and mysteriousness of the monoliths, thus
suggesting that, ideally, its impact on viewers would mirror the ‘effect
… the monoliths pictured in the film had’ on Moon-Watcher and
Bowman.
For this young woman, then, the film served as a wake-up call
moving her on to ‘better things’. While she could be sure only about
her own transformation, she suspected that others were affected
similarly; after all, she wrote that the film reached out to ‘us’, not just
‘me’. Her references to ‘destiny’ and to the divine, which might be
something other than the ‘God’ of traditional religion, also suggested
that, in her view, Kubrick was doing God’s work with this film.
At the same time, the letter indicated, the film’s impact depended also
on its cultural context, in particular on a general climate of optimism
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 87

and hope for the future, here exemplified by the world exposition in
Montreal in 1967, and on a process of rapid cultural change across
the 1960s, as epitomised by the Beatles.
This is certainly an extreme response to 2001, yet it is in line
with the majority of the many letters that Kubrick received from
regular cinemagoers after the film’s release.134 Given the film’s radical
departures from Hollywood conventions and the ambiguity, in
particular, of its ending, it is remarkable that most correspondents –
men and women, young and old, cosmopolitan and provincial, art
lovers and entertainment seekers – wrote very positively about 2001,
and that many of them saw in it a message of hope. In doing so, letter
writers frequently discussed ‘birth’ and ‘rebirth’ among the film’s
main themes, referencing especially the astronaut’s final
transformation into a foetus. According to one letter from May 1968,
the film thus made a statement about the true purpose of the
astronaut’s journey of exploration: ‘[his] discovery is not of some
strange new world but of himself; the wisdom of age is his rebirth’.135
Several viewers felt, just like the woman from Ohio, that their
own journey across the strange cinematic world of 2001 had strong
parallels to that of the astronaut. Ultimately encountering themselves
in the film, they were transformed by it, even reborn. ‘[2001] is
constantly on my mind and has loosened some of my prejudices’,
wrote one correspondent in April 1968, who then asked: ‘how many
times must I be born to realize what I am?’136 In addition to noting
their personal transformation, some letter writers perceived 2001 as a
radical break, and a new beginning, in film history. One of them
claimed in May 1968: ‘2001 does not mark the growth of the art of
the cinema; it is the birth of the cinema.’137 This writer went on to
outline the enormous, positive influence he thought this reborn
cinema could exert on viewers and perhaps on society at large:

[I]t is within the power of a film such as yours to give people a reason to go
on living – to give them the courage to go on living. For 2001 implies much
more than just an artistic revelation. On a philosophical level, it implies that
88 BFI FILM CLASSICS

if man is capable of this, he is capable of anything – anything rational and

heroic and glorious and good. … How can man now be content to consider
the trivial and mundane, when you have shown them a world full of stars, a
world beyond the infinite?138

In the light of the intensity and grandeur of many people’s

encounters with 2001, it is not surprising that some equated viewing
the film with a spiritual experience (sometimes in conjunction with
offering a theological interpretation of the film’s story). One pastor
noted that, despite the fact that he ‘did not fully understand’ the film,
‘the impression I carried with me as I left the theatre was that life
begins with the infinite (God), and ends in the same manner’.139 It is
ambiguous whether he is commenting on what he perceives to be the
film’s message, or whether viewing the film actually brought him
closer to God – or perhaps both. Another correspondent wrote:
‘Bless you for your spiritual poem. … You have created the aura of
love in every frame.’140 Once again, this does not appear to be a
statement merely about the film’s content, but also about the writer’s
experience of a transcendent love.
Thus, often taking their cues from the imagery and storyline of
the film itself, these correspondents articulated the profoundly
transformative impact the film had had on them and also their belief
that its impact might be indicative of, and contribute to, wider
transformations of cinema, culture and society. This is, I believe,
the foundation for the film’s enormous success with audiences in
late-1960s America. Its story about the birth and rebirth of humanity,
presented in a manner radically at odds with the conventions of
mainstream cinema, was able to engage a diverse audience primed to
believe in, and to embrace, the possibility of fundamental personal,
cultural and social change.
There is no space here to outline the complex developments in
American society across the 1960s which prepared 2001’s audiences
in this way, but I can at least give an example of how one might study
the deep resonances between this film and the culture in which its
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 89

audiences were immersed. Towards the end of his comprehensive

study The Sixties Spiritual Awakening, the religious scholar and
cultural historian Robert S. Ellwood discusses 2001 as a ‘Sixties
parable’, a cultural artifact which articulates many of the underlying
concerns of, and shifting trends in, American culture during this
period. It is worth quoting him at length:

2001 touched all corners of the decade’s conundrums. It celebrated the

wonder of science while suggesting the parricidal possibilities of its progeny.
But also, in line with the subjective visionary side of the Sixties, it made the
universe not only an astronomical but also a spiritual wonderland; an infinity
not only of mind-boggling beauty, potency, and distances, but also of
transformative possibilities for us its children, and even death did not finally
limit its power. The Sixties dream of true human transformation remains
alive in this end-of-the-decade film, but it seems now that it will not happen
merely in the secular city nor in the ‘real time’ of the lunar mission, but that
ultimate transfiguration will require some movement outside the circles of
ordinary space and time altogether, followed by the return of a wise child; all
this effectively removes it to the realm of timeless myth.141

In the context of Ellwood’s broader argument about the centrality of

religion and spirituality in 60s America, 2001 is thus seen to resonate
both with people’s active engagement with the reality of
technological, cultural, social and political change, and with their
desire to transcend such external reality altogether and focus instead
on ‘personal salvation’.142
Ellwood acknowledges that 2001 resonated with ‘the
counterculture’s dream of speeding up spiritual evolution by the use of
psychedelics’, yet his study makes it clear that, whereas the
counterculture was only a small part of 60s America, the decade’s
‘dream of true human transformation’ affected just about
everybody.143 The success of 2001 depended on audiences sharing this
dream, not on their consumption of drugs. Indeed, none of the many
letters to Kubrick which I examined mentions that the correspondent
90 BFI FILM CLASSICS

took drugs or witnessed drug consumption elsewhere in the cinema

auditorium. Furthermore, based partly on the themes identified in
MGM’s official announcement of Kubrick’s science-fiction project in
February 1965, the film was marketed as both an epic and a highly
topical film, a scientifically accurate and educational, spectacular and
uplifting space adventure for the whole family. Impressive box-office
results as well as the rarity of letters complaining about misleading
advertising suggest that for the vast majority of the audience, the film
succeeded precisely on those terms – that is, as a variant of mainstream
entertainment, and not as a countercultural alternative to it.
2001: A Space Odyssey was first released on 70mm in only
eleven cinemas around the world, starting with a world premiere in
Washington, DC, on 2 April 1968, followed by premieres in New
York and Los Angeles over the next two days, and then in Boston,
Detroit, Houston, London, Tokyo, Osaka, Sidney and
Johannesburg.144 It was reported that MGM launched the film with
‘the most extensive in-depth advertising, publicity and promotion
campaign in its history’, and that its immediate box-office success was

The original poster

 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 91

so impressive that early reports suggested it might eventually even

rival the two biggest hits in MGM history: Dr Zhivago (released in
1965, but still playing in 1968) and Gone with the Wind (originally
released in 1939, yet on a hugely successful re-release in 1967/8).145
As a roadshow, 2001 performed very well throughout 1968. It had an
exceptionally large number of advance ticket sales before it was
released, and by the end of the year, it had earned $8.5 million in
rentals from only 125 cinemas, and came eleventh in Variety’s list of
the top-grossing films of 1968.146 Once the film went on general
release in 1969, on 35mm at regular prices in a large number of
cinemas all over the United States, it was able to reach those audiences
who had not previously had a chance to buy tickets for it, and both
these new audiences and some members of the original audience who
came back to see the film again (and again) turned 2001 into a major
hit. By the end of 1969, it had added $6 million to its rentals.147
Taking into account the broad spectrum of people who wrote
so positively to Kubrick about 2001 in the months after its release
92 BFI FILM CLASSICS

and the fact that roadshows had traditionally appealed to all-

encompassing family audiences,148 we can conclude that across 1968
and 1969 the film succeeded with most audience segments, rather
than depending solely, or mainly, on the repeat attendance of
youthful fans (who, in any case, were reported to have stayed away
from 35mm screenings in 1969).149 However, early on, the trade
press began to focus its reporting on the presence of young people in
the audience for 70mm screenings of 2001, on their special interest in
the Star Gate sequence and their allegedly widespread consumption
of hallucinogenic drugs during screenings.150 It is, I think, mainly in
response to such reporting – rather than in response to actual
audience research – that MGM eventually introduced a more
psychedelic marketing campaign (with the tagline ‘The Ultimate
Trip’), but this only happened for the film’s 70mm re-launch in April
1970, by which time 2001 had already been playing in cinemas for
two years.151 Thus, irrespective of its close association with youth
and the counterculture, 2001 was a massive hit with mainstream
audiences.
It also was well received by critics, except for a small number of
leading New York reviewers whose work is often cited in support of
arguments about the film’s initial critical rejection. In fact, Variety
reported in June 1968 that ‘almost all out-of-town and foreign
reviews have been excellent while those in N[ew] Y[ork] were
generally downbeat’.152 Even in New York, there appears to have
been a largely positive reception which escaped notice, because good
reviews were overshadowed by the attacks of a few high-profile
critics. A fifteen-year-old fan of the film was so concerned about the
lack of appreciation in some quarters of the critical community that,
as he wrote to Kubrick, he kept ‘a record of reviews that 2001 has
received, mostly from New York publications. I am happy to
announce that 33 are excellent, which is much more than the reviews
that were not so good.’153
Despite this largely positive reception, when the annual ten-best
lists were compiled at the end of 1968 and awards were handed out
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 93

at the beginning of 1969, there was as yet no critical consensus about

the truly outstanding quality of 2001. The film was listed as one of
the ten best English-language films of 1968 by the National Board of
Review.154 Yet, the New York Times did not include 2001 among its
top ten, and it received no awards from the National Society of Film
Critics, the New York Film Critics, the Hollywood Foreign Press
Association, the Writers Guild of America or the Directors Guild.155
While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated
the film in four categories (including Best Director and Screenplay),
it only won the Special Visual Effects Oscar.156 It was not until the
beginning of 1970, when various publications tried to determine the
best films of the 1960s, that 2001 began to be recognised widely as
an all-time masterpiece. While it did not appear in Time’s top ten list
for the decade or the top ten selection made by film-makers in a Los
Angeles Times poll, it was voted the eighth best movie (foreign or
American) of the 1960s by readers of the Los Angeles Times.157
Two years later, a general consensus about the film’s status as
one of the best films ever made seemed to have been reached. A panel
of film producers and critics put together by the University of
Southern California ranked 2001 tenth in its list of ‘the most
significant movies in American cinema history … which gave new
concepts and advanced the art and technique of filmmaking’.158
At the same time, in Sight & Sound’s 1972 survey of international
critical opinion, 2001 was included among the twenty-five best films
ever made.159 By the early 1970s, 2001 had also become one of the
highest-grossing films ever at the American box office. The 70mm re-
release in 1970, together with continuing 35mm screenings that year,
and further re-releases of the film in 1971 and 1972 added more
millions to its already impressive tally, so that by the end of 1972 it
had passed the $20 million mark and was ranked among the twenty
highest-grossing films of all time in the United States, its level of
commercial success thus matching its level of critical recognition as
one of the all-time greats.160
94 BFI FILM CLASSICS

8 Influence

2001’s most far-reaching contribution to American – and also to

world – culture arguably lies in the fact that it both inspired the
making, and prepared the ground for the success, of two movies that
in 1977 marked an important turning point in Hollywood’s
operations: George Lucas’s Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. As we have already seen, before the
mid-1960s, no science-fiction movie, with the exception of a few
Disney comedies and adventures about advanced technologies, had
been ranked towards the top of the annual box-office charts in the
United States, yet, with the help of several re-releases, 2001
eventually became the second-biggest hit of all films originally
released in 1968.161 It was joined at number seven in the consolidated
chart by the epic adventure Planet of the Apes, which had been
released a few weeks before 2001 in February 1968 and earned $15
million in rentals. The film combined space travel and an encounter
with what initially appear to be extra-terrestrial intelligent beings
with a critique of racial and species relations (between different kinds
of ape and human beings) in an alternative society that nevertheless
mirrors contemporary America in key respects, and with the final
revelation that all this is in fact taking place on Earth in the distant
future after nuclear war has destroyed human civilisation.162
This double success encouraged Hollywood to invest heavily in
science fiction, yet rather than focusing on space travel and
encounters with extra-terrestrials, the vast majority of science-fiction
productions during the next few years were critical explorations of
future human societies on Earth, dealing with the impact of
overpopulation, technologically enhanced political oppression, the
aftermath of nuclear war, etc.163 Several of these films focused on
relations between humans and other earthly species (as in the four
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 95

Planet of the Apes sequels released by 1973), or between humans and

machines (as in Westworld, 1973, and The Stepford Wives, 1975).
With the exception of two Disney comedies about the relationship
between humans and a sentient Volkswagen beetle – The Love Bug
($23m, 2nd/1969) and Herbie Rides Again ($17m, 10th/1974) – and
of Stanley Kubrick’s follow-up to 2001, A Clockwork Orange
($17m, 7th/1971), none of Hollywood’s many science-fiction
productions made it into the annual top ten in the United States
before 1977.164 But in that year, the two most successful films at the
American box office were Star Wars and Close Encounters, the
former breaking all existing box-office records.
Lucas and Spielberg have acknowledged the formative influence
of 2001 on their work.165 Indeed, when George Lucas first talked
about his second science-fiction project in 1974 (he had previously
made the experimental, dystopian THX 1138, 1971), he initially
referenced Flash Gordon and then described the planned film as
‘2001 meets James Bond, outer space and space ships flying in it’.166
96 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Both Lucas and Spielberg had grown up with science-fiction novels,

comic strips, films, movie serials and television series, and Spielberg
had been particularly fond of Arthur C. Clarke’s work.167
When, following the release of Jaws in 1975, Spielberg focused all his
energies on a film about UFOs and a climactic encounter with
intelligent extra-terrestrial beings, 2001 was, in thematic terms, the
most important cinematic reference point for such a project, and also
the benchmark for achievements in the art of special effects, which is
why Spielberg hired the effects specialist Douglas Trumbull, who was
most famous for his work on 2001. In different ways, both Star Wars
and Close Encounters built on 2001’s depiction of spacecraft and space
travel, its epic scope and focus on events that have the power to change
the direction of history, its exploration of the relationship between
humans and aliens, and its spiritual, even religious sense that there are
higher, superhuman powers (‘the Force’, angelic beings inhabiting the
heavens) at work in the universe, which may enable us to be reborn
(as a Jedi knight or one of the elect who ascends to heaven).
In the wake of the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters,
there has been a significant change in Hollywood’s hit patterns.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 97

Many of its biggest hits, both in the United States and abroad, have
been science-fiction films.168 These include a few Earth-bound
dystopias, typically dealing with a confrontation between humans and
their machines – as in the Terminator and Matrix films (since 1984 and
1999 respectively) – and films featuring more highly evolved or
genetically modified humans, as in the X-Men and Spider-Man films
(since 2000 and 2002 respectively). Yet, the biggest science-fiction hits
have been space adventures, and films about encounters with alien life
forms (or alien machines) on Earth. These range from the five Star
Wars sequels and prequels (since 1980) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982), to the Transformers films (since 2007).
Since 1977, then, Hollywood’s success and impact both at home
and abroad has had a lot to do with the big themes and spectacular
attractions of science fiction. While traditionally, these themes and
attractions had been marginal to Hollywood’s operations, the success of
2001 in the late 1960s and early 1970s (together with that of Planet of
the Apes) inspired film-makers and studio executives to invest much
98 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Very early ad for

Avatar (the release
date was later changed
from May to December
2009)

more of their creativity and money in high-profile science-fiction

productions, and starting with Star Wars and Close Encounters, this
investment generated unprecedented returns, most notably for Avatar
(2009), a film made by 2001 fan James Cameron. Across Hollywood’s
science-fiction hits, we find an emphasis not only on the perfection of
special effects first achieved by 2001, but also on the film’s main
themes: space travel, encounters with extra-terrestrial intelligence,
human evolution, the relationship between humans and machines.
Through the mediation of Star Wars and Close Encounters, 2001 has
thus helped Hollywood to increase its global impact precisely by asking
questions about future threats and opportunities for all of humanity.169
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 99

Conclusion

The ending is hopeful:

You can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realised
that we are only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease and a
warning from the landlord.

These words are spoken by Dr Heywood Floyd, addressing his son

on Earth from a spaceship returning home from Jupiter, a planet
which has just been transformed into a new sun by the extra-
terrestrial intelligence controlling the monoliths. The words are
accompanied by images from all around the Earth, and when the
voice-over ends, the film shifts to space and then to Jupiter’s moon
Europa, which the new sun transforms from an iceball into a watery,
green paradise, in the middle of which stands a monolith, aligned
with one of Europa’s two suns to the accompaniment of Thus Spake
Zarathustra. This is the conclusion of Peter Hyams’s film 2010
(1984), which he wrote, directed and produced in close collaboration
with Arthur C. Clarke, who had written the novel 2010: Odyssey
Two on which the film was based.170 The novel was a sequel to 2001:
A Space Odyssey and had been published in 1982, becoming one of
the ten bestselling American novels of the year.171 Hyams’s film
earned $20 million in rentals and was among the twenty highest-
grossing films of the year in the United States.172
Clarke’s novel tells of a joint Russian–American mission to
recover the spaceship Discovery in the year 2010, and to solve its
mysteries. The mission reveals that Bowman is now an immaterial
entity, who returns from wherever the monolith took him to explode
a nuclear bomb orbiting Earth (an event already depicted at the end
of the first novel), and to communicate the intentions of the alien
100 BFI FILM CLASSICS

intelligence to the reawakened Hal and to humanity at large.

Rapidly replicating monoliths are used by the aliens to transform
Jupiter into a sun which will, in the distant future, allow intelligent
life to emerge on Europa, thus repeating the process the monoliths
had initiated on Earth by manipulating hominids millions of years
ago. To protect the evolutionary process on Jupiter’s moon, the aliens
send a warning via Bowman and Hal: ‘All these worlds are yours –
except Europa. Attempt no landings there.’173 Implicit in this
command is a warning, namely that the extra-terrestrials will
monitor humanity’s actions and are prepared to punish it, should
their command be disobeyed. Thus, the sequel’s optimistic depiction
of life-enhancing aliens is haunted, as it was in the original novel, by
a much darker vision of a potentially devastating alien threat.
Hyams’s film, however, focuses on the threat of nuclear war,
which is barely mentioned in Clarke’s 2010. The film starts with the
United States and the Soviet Union on the brink of war, then shows
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 101

how superpower rivalry and the beginnings of actual fighting on

Earth affect the interaction between American and Russian members
of the recovery mission, and concludes with the end of hostilities
brought about by the appearance of a new sun and by the aliens’
admonition (added to the text of the final message in the novel):
‘Use [these worlds] together. Use them in peace.’
Thus reversing Kubrick’s decision, in the final stages of
making 2001: A Space Odyssey, to remove the nuclear threat so
central to the film’s previous development and still so prominent in
Clarke’s original novel, Hyams’s sequel returns us to the very
beginnings of Kubrick and Clarke’s joint science-fiction project in
1964. Their point of departure was the fear of humanity’s imminent
self-destruction through nuclear war (so shockingly and hilariously
depicted in Dr Strangelove and so central to Kubrick’s personal
outlook) and the hope – shared by Kubrick, Clarke and other science-
fiction authors, by UFOlogists and SETI researchers – that space
exploration and contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence may help
humankind to avoid this fate. The extensive use of voice-overs in
Hyams’s film also reminds us of the momentousness of the drastic
last-minute decisions Kubrick made about the final shape of his film,
removing its voice-overs and much else, so that 2001 could become
as opaque and mysterious and stimulating as the monoliths at the
centre of its story. Thus, instead of merely telling a story about the
transformation of hominids and humans, the film acquired
transformative power over its audience.
As a filmic monolith, 2001 was enthusiastically received by its
initial audiences in the United States, so enthusiastically indeed that it
became one of the biggest hits of all time up to this point. The main
reason for this response was, it seems, the fact that its story about the
birth and rebirth of humanity and its very willingness to leave the
conventions of mainstream cinema behind interacted productively
with the firm belief, shared by many people at this particular
historical moment, in the possibility of fundamental personal,
cultural and social change. As a result, many Americans –
102 BFI FILM CLASSICS

approximating a cross-section of society, rather than being limited to

countercultural youth – were profoundly affected by 2001,
experiencing it as a personally transformative experience, and also
seeing it, approvingly, as an indication of, and contribution to, wider
cultural and social transformations. While the nuclear threat which
had been the starting point for this project was only a very minor
theme in the film’s reception (people who had read the novel
sometimes commented on it), Kubrick and Clarke’s attempt to
counter expectations of imminent nuclear war with a hopeful vision
of the future succeeded beyond all expectations.
Since the late 1960s, Kubrick’s film, with few exceptions well
received by critics right from the start, has garnered ever more critical
acclaim. In the process, its cultural status has shifted, away from the
realm of profoundly affective popular entertainment, available to
each and everyone, into the more rarefied realm of high art.
Most critical commentary has interpreted 2001 as a rather
pessimistic statement about humanity’s past, present and future.
The film’s huge popular success in the late 1960s, fuelled by a
tremendous optimism, has been forgotten, to the point where the
most vivid image of its original impact we have now is that of a drug-
addled hippie being taken on a psychedelic ride by the movie.
The only – and rather indirect – reminder of the fact that 2001
was once at the very centre of American popular culture is the spate
of science-fiction blockbusters with which Hollywood has come to
dominate box-office charts around the world since the release of Star
Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. As we have
seen, 2001 directly inspired Lucas and Spielberg and countless other
science-fiction film-makers, and, more generally, it prepared the
ground for studio executives to look for huge profits, and for cinema
audiences to look for profound experiences, in this previously
marginal genre. While it is all too easy to use 2001 as a critical stick
with which to beat more recent science-fiction cinema, I want to
highlight instead important continuities. Much like 2001 originally
did in the late 1960s, the majority of the most popular science-fiction
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 103

films since the late 1970s have been successful with all-encompassing
family audiences,174 and most of them have achieved this by dealing
with questions of global import and, quite frequently, by playing
heavily on mythic and religious resonances. In the light of the
terrifying threats and devastating destruction that the characters in
most of these films are dealing with so capably, it would appear that
the basis for the films’ success is an underlying sense of hope, just as
it was in the case of 2001. Such hope is, I would think – and it is a
thought Kubrick and Clarke seemed to have shared – an enormously
valuable resource.
104 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Acknowledgments

The initial archival research for this project in the United States at the
beginning of the new millennium was funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Board. In addition, I would like to thank staff
at the Stanley Kubrick Archive in the Archive and Special Collections
Centre at the University of the Arts London for all their help.
Thanks also to Lee Grieveson, Rebecca Barden and Joseph Garncarz
for their comments on the manuscript.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 105

Notes

1 The beginnings of this debate are 1968), in folder SK/12/6/14/2/9 in the

documented in two volumes which, Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA),
among other things, reprint a large University of the Arts London.
number of reviews and letters written 6 Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of
to Kubrick by regular cinemagoers (the 2001 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson,
latter appear only in the first of these 1972), p. 239, emphasis in the original.
volumes): Jerome Agel (ed.), The Making 7 In addition to countless
of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: Signet, interpretations, there have also been
1970), and Stephanie Schwam (ed.), several studies of the film’s production,
The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey notably Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the
(New York: The Modern Library, 2000). Future (London: Aurum, 2000).
2 See, for example, several letters 8 Ian Christie, ‘The Rules of the Game’,
printed in Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s Sight & Sound, September 2002, pp. 24–7.
2001, pp. 178–80, 182–3, 188–9. Cp. Peter 9 Ibid.
Krämer, ‘“Dear Mr Kubrick”: Audience 10 The film is currently ranked 88th;
Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in ‘Top 250 movies as voted by our users’,
the Late 1960s’, Participations: Journal of <www.imdb.com/chart/top>, accessed
Audience and Reception Studies, vol. 6 no. 2 15 June 2009.
(November 2009), <www.participations. 11 See <www/geocities.com/
org/Volume%206/Issue%202/special/ aaronbcaldwell/dimscan.html>, and
kramer.htm>. <connect.afi.com/DocServer/100Movies.
3 See, for example, the recent analyses pdf?docID=301>, both accessed 15 June
of 2001 in Gary D. Rhodes (ed.), Stanley 2009.
Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy 12 See, for example, R. Barton Palmer,
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008); James ‘2001: The Critical Reception and the
Naremore, On Kubrick (London: BFI, Generation Gap’, in Kolker, Stanley
2007), pp. 137–53; Geoffrey Cocks, James Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Diedrick and Glenn Perusek (eds), Depth pp. 13–27.
of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses 13 By 1975, the novel had sold 2.3
of History (Madison: University of million copies in the United States;
Wisconsin Press, 2006); and Robert Alice Payne Hackett and James Henry
Kolker (ed.), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Burke, 80 Years of Best Sellers, 1895–1975
A Space Odyssey: New Essays (Oxford: (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977), p. 18.
Oxford University Press, 2006). 14 Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space
4 See, for example, Jason Sperb, Odyssey (London: Legend Books, 1990),
The Kubrick Façade: Faces and Voices in the p. 23. This edition includes the original
Films of Stanley Kubrick (Lanham, MD: ‘Foreword’ by Clarke and Stanley
Scarecrow, 2006), pp. 85, 92–3. Kubrick, a 1989 essay by Clarke entitled
5 Annotated proofs of Jeremy ‘Back to 2001’ and two of Clarke’s short
Bernstein’s article ‘Chain Reaction’ (to stories which served as inspirations for
be published in the New Yorker, 26 July 2001: A Space Odyssey.
106 BFI FILM CLASSICS

15 Ibid., p. 23. also cp. the novelisation of the film:

16 Ibid., pp. 29, 36. Peter George, Dr Strangelove, Or, How I
17 Ibid., pp. 47–8. Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
18 Ibid., p. 236. Bomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
19 Ibid., pp. 51–4. 1988, first published in 1963).
20 Ibid., p. 93. 34 Dr Strangelove screenplay dated
21 Ibid., p. 96. 31 August 1962, p. 2.
22 Ibid., pp. 106, 173. 35 Ibid., p. 141.
23 Ibid., pp. 199–201. 36 A letter Roger Caras wrote to Clarke
24 Ibid., pp. 223, 232. on 17 February 1964 suggests that
25 Ibid., pp. 235–6. Kubrick was already well into the
26 Ibid., p. 236. preparations for the new project by
27 Ibid., p. 236. then; SK/12/8/1/13, SKA. Cp. Neil
28 Ibid., p. 46. McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorised
29 Ibid., pp. 199, 201. Biography by Arthur C. Clarke (London:
30 Ibid., p. 224. Victor Gollancz, 1992), p. 190.
31 Kubrick to Clarke, 31 March 1964, Alexander Walker has stated that during
folder SK/12/8/1/65, SKA. a visit to Kubrick’s New York apartment
32 These collaborations are not always in the late 1950s, he realised that the
adequately reflected in the writing film-maker was studying Japanese
credits for Kubrick’s films. In some science-fiction films and was probably
of them, Kubrick’s name is missing, thinking even then about ‘a film about
while in others the names of his Outer Space’; Alexander Walker, ‘It’s Only
collaborators have been omitted. a Movie, Ingrid’: Encounters On and Off
For detailed accounts of Kubrick’s early Screen (London: Headline, 1988), p. 268.
career, see Peter Krämer, ‘The Making of 37 Cp. Steven J. Dick, Life on Other
an Independent Filmmaker: Stanley Worlds: The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial
Kubrick and Post-War Hollywood’, Life Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge
unpublished paper presented at University Press, 1998), Ch. 4.
‘American Independent Cinema: Past, 38 Cp. Randall Fitzgerald, Cosmic Test
Present and Future’, Liverpool, May Tube: Extraterrestrial Contact, Theories and
2009; and Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Evidence (Los Angeles: Moon Lake Media,
Kubrick: A Biography (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 96–114; Brenda Denzler, The
1998), pp. 19–251. Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions,
33 Dr Strangelove screenplay dated Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs
31 August 1962, no author listed, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
contained in the ‘Vertical Files’ of the 2001), pp. 8–19, 36–55; Dick, Life on Other
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Worlds, pp. 138–50.
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 39 Dick, Life on Other Worlds, pp. 201–11;
(AMPAS), Beverly Hills; cp. scripts Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New
contained in folder SK/11/1/1, SKA; York: John Wiley, 1999), pp. 124–8.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 107

40 It is worth noting that by the time 53 Clarke to the editor of Scientific

Kubrick wrote to Clarke in 1964, earlier American, 23 March 1964, SK/12/8/1/11,
speculations about possible intelligent SKA.
life on other planets in our solar 54 Clarke to Kubrick, 9 April 1964,
system, notably Mars, had been SK/12/8/1/11, SKA.
rejected by most scientists, yet the 55 Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The World of the
American and Soviet space Communications Satellite’, Astronautics
programmes nevertheless included and Aeronautics, February 1964, p. 45.
plans for exploration of the planets, 56 Clarke to Kubrick, 9 April 1964,
and in the early 1960s unmanned SK/12/8/1/11, SKA; McAleer, Odyssey,
probes were sent to Mars and Venus. pp. 192–3.
Cp. Dick, Life on Other Worlds, Ch. 2. 57 Clarke to Kubrick, 9 April 1964,
41 Lyn Tornabene, ‘The Bomb and SK/12/8/1/11, SKA.
Stanley Kubrick’, Cosmopolitan, 58 ‘The Sentinel’, reprinted in Clarke,
November 1963, pp. 15–16. 2001, pp. 245, 248.
42 P. D. Smith, Doomsday Men: The Real 59 Ibid., p. 248.
Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the 60 Ibid., p. 249.
Superweapon (London: Penguin, 2007), 61 Ibid., pp. 249–50.
pp. xvii–xviii, 17–24. 62 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
43 Kubrick to Irvin Doress, 31 March (New York: Del Rey, 1990, originally
1964, SK/12/8/1/65, SKA. published in 1954), pp. 18, 35, 45.
44 Stanley Kubrick, ‘How I Learned 63 Ibid., p. 61.
to Stop Worrying and Love the 64 Ibid., pp. 55, 63.
Cinema’, Films and Filming, June 1963, 65 Ibid., p. 169.
p. 12. 66 Ibid., p. 129.
45 Interview with Roger Caras cited in 67 For detailed accounts of the
McAleer, Odyssey, pp. 190–1. Clarke–Kubrick collaboration, see
46 McAleer, Odyssey, pp. 58–62; Michael McAleer, Odyssey, pp. 190–211; Arthur C.
Allen, Live from the Moon: Film, Television Clarke, ‘Back to 2001’, in Clarke, 2001,
and the Space Race (London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 9–18; Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001;
2009), pp. 55–9. Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Son of Dr Strangelove’,
47 McAleer, Odyssey, p. 63. in Clarke, Report on Planet Three and Other
48 Ibid., pp. 11, 31. Speculations (London: Corgi, 1973),
49 Cp. Edward James, ‘Arthur C. Clarke’, pp. 244–55; LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick,
in David Seed (ed.), A Companion to pp. 256–310. Also cp. Agel, The Making of
Science Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), Kubrick’s 2001; Schwam, The Making of
pp. 431–40. 2001; and Bizony, 2001.
50 McAleer, Odyssey, p. 176. 68 These drafts can be found in folders
51 Ibid., pp. 86, 164–9, 177–8, 189. SK/12/1/1/2–4, SKA.
52 Clarke to Kubrick, 8 April 1964, 69 ‘Project: Space – First Draft Outline’,
SK/12/8/1/11, SKA. SK/12/1/1/1; this folder contains only
108 BFI FILM CLASSICS

selected chapters, some of which are referenced otherwise, figures on rental

individually dated (in mid-July). income given in this essay are taken
The quotations are on pp. 2–3 of from Cohn’s alphabetical listing.
Chapter 4. 80 A facsimile of this can be found in
70 Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, p. 33. Bizony, 2001, pp. 10–11.
71 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, 81 Judging by a later statement by
Journey Beyond the Stars. A Film Story; MGM president Robert O’Brien, Kubrick
copies of this can be found in folder was also regarded as a fiscally
SK/12/1/1/3, SKA, and in box 3503, responsible film-maker: ‘Kubrick
folder 2426, of the Turner/MGM Script represents a most unusual combination
Collection, AMPAS. The latter also of qualities: artistic ability,
contains a MGM ‘Reader’s Report’ dated management ability, and a sense of
15 February 1965 and referring to the coherence. And, not least, a splendid
above ‘film story’, which therefore must sense of economy’; quoted in Hollis
have been written and submitted earlier, Alpert, ‘Happiness is a Filmmaker in
although the stamp on the Journey London’, Saturday Review, 25 December
Beyond the Stars manuscript inexplicably 1965, p. 10.
gives the date 23 August 1965. According 82 Cp. Krämer, ‘The Making of an
to Clarke’s personal ‘log’, he completed Independent Filmmaker’.
the first draft of Journey Beyond the Stars 83 ‘All-Time Top Film Grossers’, Variety,
on 24 December 1964; Clarke, The Lost 7 January 1965, p. 38. Variety later
Worlds of 2001, p. 35. adjusted the rentals figure for Spartacus
72 Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, p. 50; to $11m; Cohn, ‘All-Time Film Rental
Clarke, ‘Encounter in the Dawn’, in Champs’, p. C102.
Clarke, 2001, p. 266. 84 Derek Elley (ed.), Variety Movie Guide
73 Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, p. 32. 2000 (New York: Perigee, 2000), p. 798.
74 Kubrick and Clarke, Journey Beyond 85 Steinberg, Film Facts, pp. 177, 291.
the Stars, p. 73. 86 LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, pp. 192, 223,
75 Ibid., pp. 98, 131. 245.
76 Ibid., p. 251. 87 The initial rentals figure was $4.5m,
77 ‘Reader’s Report’, probably authored but Variety later adjusted it to $3.7m.
by M. Silverstein, box 3503, folder 2426, I have derived the film’s ranking from
Turner/MGM Script Collection; McAleer, the unpublished annual charts that
Odyssey, p. 201; LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, Sheldon Hall compiled from the
p. 269. alphabetical listing of the rental income
78 Cobbett Steinberg, Film Facts (New of all films earning $3m or more in
York: Facts on File, 1980), p. 50. Cohn, ‘All-Time Film Rental Champs’.
79 See Lawrence Cohn, ‘All-Time Film 88 Elley, Variety Movie Guide 2000, p. 237;
Rental Champs’, Variety, 10 May 1993, Steinberg, Film Facts, pp. 174, 269, 313.
pp. C76–106, 108; and Steinberg, Film 89 On the history of Cinerama, see John
Facts, pp. 21–5. From now on, unless Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge,
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 109

MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), Blockbuster’, in Steve Neale (ed.), Genre
Ch. 5. and Contemporary Hollywood (London:
90 For this and subsequent rankings in BFI, 2002), pp. 11–26.
the annual charts, see Peter Krämer, The 98 J. P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne
New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to State University Press, 2004), Ch. 3;
Star Wars (London: Wallflower Press, Randy Lieberman, ‘The Collier’s and
2005), pp. 111–14. Disney Series’, in Frederick I. Ordway III
91 Cp. Belton, Widescreen Cinema, Ch. 4. and Randy Lieberman (eds), Blueprint for
92 Cp. Vivian Sobchak, ‘“Surge and Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact
Splendor”: A Phenomenology of the (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992),
Hollywood Historical Epic’, pp. 135–46. From the 1954/5 season to
Representations, vol. 29 (1990), pp. 24–49. the 1956/7 season, Disneyland was at
93 Krämer, The New Hollywood, pp. 21–8, no. 6, no. 4 and no. 14 in the annual
111–14. ratings charts. Alex McNeil, Total
94 Interestingly, The Bible: In the Television (New York: Penguin, 1996),
Beginning … was already in production pp. 1145–6.
at the time of MGM’s press release for 99 William E. Burrows, This New Ocean:
Journey Beyond the Stars. Upon its release The Story of the First Space Age (New York:
in 1966, Variety described it as ‘[t]he The Modern Library, 1999), p. 330.
world’s oldest story – the origins of 100 Ibid., Chs. 6–11.
mankind, as told in the Book of 101 Allen, Live from the Moon, Ch. 5.
Genesis’; Elley, Variety Movie Guide 2000, 102 Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 380.
p. 72. The prehistoric part of Kubrick 103 Cp. A. H. Weiler, ‘Beyond the Blue
and Clarke’s ‘film story’ approached the Horizon’, New York Times, 21 February
same topic – the origins of humankind – 1965, p. X9.
from a different perspective. The Bible 104 MGM Production Records cited in
became the second-biggest hit of all Robert Sklar, ‘Stanley Kubrick and the
films released in 1966. American Film Industry’, Current
95 Stephen Powers, David J. Rothman Research in Film, vol. 4 (1988), p. 118.
and Stanley Rothman, Hollywood’s 105 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C.
America: Social and Political Themes in Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Motion Pictures (Boulder, CO: Westview, screenplay dated 6 July 1965; copies of
1996), pp. 131–2. this can be found in the general Script
96 Sheldon Hall, Hard Ticket Giants: Collection, AMPAS; in box 3503, folder
Hollywood Blockbusters in the Widescreen 2427, Turner/MGM Script Collection,
Era, two volumes, unpublished PhD AMPAS; and in folder SK/12/1/2/1, SKA.
dissertation, University of East Anglia, Information on the production of 2001
1999, volume 1, p. 282. in this paragraph and the next one is
97 On roadshows, see Hall, Hard Ticket taken from a range of sources:
Giants; and Hall, ‘Tall Revenue Features: document on ‘main unit shooting’,
The Genealogy of the Modern 5 January 1968, SK/12/9/1/5/11, SKA;
110 BFI FILM CLASSICS

LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, pp. 269–311; Research Centre (PARC), New York
McAleer, Odyssey, pp. 201–20; Clarke, Public Library; and in the Turner/MGM
The Lost Worlds of 2001, pp. 36–49, 124–7, Script Collection, AMPAS. Shooting
188–91; Clarke, ‘Back to 2001’, pp. 13–14; started on 17 December 1965.
Dan Richter, Moonwatcher’s Memoir: 117 Clarke and Kubrick, 2001: A Space
A Diary of 2001: A Space Odyssey (New Odyssey script, February 1966,
York: Carroll and Graf, 2002); Anthony SK/12/1/2/5, SKA. While the script as a
Frewin (ed.), Are We Alone? The Stanley whole has no date, individual pages are
Kubrick Extraterrestrial-Intelligence dated, none later than 25 February
Interviews (London: Elliott and 1966.
Thompson, 2005), pp. 9–30. Also cp. 118 Kubrick to Clarke, 7 March 1966,
Bizony, 2001; Agel, The Making of SK/12/8/1/11, SKA.
Kubrick’s 2001; and Schwam, The Making 119 Clarke to Kubrick, 25 August 1965,
of 2001. SK/12/8/1/11, SKA.
106 See, for example, the novel drafts 120 This is a handwritten note on
printed in Clarke, The Lost Worlds of Clarke’s letter.
2001. 121 Kubrick to Clarke, 11 April 1966,
107 Cp. Naremore, On Kubrick, SK/12/8/1/11, SKA; emphasis in the
pp. 140–41. original.
108 Kubrick and Clarke, 2001: A Space 122 Kubrick to Clarke, 23 November
Odyssey, screenplay dated 6 July 1965, 1967, SK/12/8/1/11, SKA.
p. 26. 123 Clarke to Kubrick, 25 November
109 Ibid., p. 46. 1967, SK/12/8/1/11, SKA.
110 Ibid., p. 42. 124 See, for example, narration
111 Ibid., p. 2. concerning Hal, 22 January 1968,
112 Ibid., pp. 101, 108. SK/12/8/1/46, SKA.
113 Kubrick to Clarke, 31 March 1964, 125 Cp. Kubrick to North, 26 January
SK/12/8/1/12, SKA. 1968, and North to Kubrick, 29 January
114 Clarke to Kubrick, 24 August 1965, 1968, SK/12/8/1/50, SKA.
SK/12/8/1/11, SKA. 126 Richter, Moonwatcher’s Memoir,
115 Clarke to Kubrick, 12 October 1965, pp. 136–8.
SK/12/8/1/11, SKA. 127 William Kloman, ‘In 2001, Will Love
116 Clarke and Kubrick, 2001: A Space Be a Seven-Letter Word?’, New York
Odyssey script, December 1965. Times, 14 April 1968, Section D, p. 15;
While the script as a whole has no date, Joseph Gelmis, ‘Kubrick’s Message Is
individual pages are dated, none later Nonverbal’, Newsday, 4 June 1968,
than 14 December; the script was Section A, pp. 3–5; Charlie Kohler,
‘rec’d’, that is received, by MGM on 3 ‘Stanley Kubrick Raps’, The East Village
January 1966. Copies of this can be Eye, August 1968, pp. 30, 84–6, reprinted
found in folder SK/12/1/2/2, SKA; in in Schwam, The Making of 2001,
folder CTR no. 1637, Performing Arts pp. 245–57; Eric Nordern, ‘Playboy
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 111

Interview: Stanley Kubrick’, Playboy, By contrast, the British DVD of 2001 in

September 1968, reprinted in Gene D. Warner Bros.’ 2001 ‘Stanley Kubrick
Phillips, Stanley Kubrick: Interviews Collection’ converts the film to 25
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, frames per second, and its version of
2001), pp. 47–74; Maurice Rapf, ‘A Talk the film is therefore shorter by one 25th
with Stanley Kubrick about 2001’, of the running time. For information on
Action: The Magazine of the Directors Guild this and on the conventions of
of America, January–February 1969, theatrical presentation (regarding the
pp. 16–18, reprinted in Phillips, Stanley entrance and exit of audiences as well
Kubrick: Interviews, pp. 75–9; Joseph as the opening and closing of curtains
Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar while music was playing), I thank
(New York: Doubleday, 1970), Sheldon Hall. I present the length of
pp. 293–316, reprinted in Phillips, particular sections of the film with
Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, pp. 80–104. approximate figures because it is often
128 As previously noted, Kubrick made debatable exactly where – that is, with
several minor changes after the film’s which shot or at which point within a
first screenings, which were attended by shot – each section begins and ends;
only a few thousand people, including cp. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey,
many critics. These changes included a p. 185. Information on the film music is
number of cuts (adding up to about taken from David W. Patterson, ‘Music,
nineteen minutes), the insertion of a Structure and Metaphor in Stanley
shot of the monolith into the scene Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey’,
where Moon-Watcher gets the idea that American Music, vol. 22 no. 3 (Fall 2004),
bones can be used as weapons, and the pp. 444–74.
addition of the two titles ‘Jupiter 130 The word ‘odyssey’ and the
Mission: 18 Months Later’ and ‘Jupiter provenance of the title of the musical
and Beyond the Infinite’. See ‘Kubrick piece by Strauss can easily be
Trims “2001” by 19 Min[ute]s, Adds understood as an encouragement to
Titles to Frame Sequences’, Variety, delve into the history of western culture
17 April 1968, unpaginated clipping in so as to identify deeply resonant and
folder SK/12/6/1/4, SKA; Michel Chion, highly complex interpretive frameworks
Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (London: BFI, for the film, notably Homer’s epic and
2001), pp. 22–3; LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical
pp. 310–11. treatise Thus Spake Zarathustra.
129 All timings are taken from the Cp. Leonard F. Wheat, Kubrick’s 2001:
American DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey A Triple Allegory (New York: The Modern
in Warner Bros.’ 2007 Stanley Kubrick Library, 2000). I should add that the
box set in its ‘Directors Series’. amount of critical commentary on
This DVD version runs the film at 24 2001, and the range of analytical and
frames per second, which is the same interpretive approaches applied to it, is
speed as that of theatrical projection. truly impressive, comprising dozens of
112 BFI FILM CLASSICS

journal essays and book chapters, plus 134 For a detailed analysis of these
several books. Variants of much of what letters, see Krämer, ‘“Dear Mr Kubrick”’.
I offer in my own discussion of the film 135 Letter dated 31 May 1968, Malibu,
can probably be found in previous SK/12/8/4, SKA. The letter is printed in
analyses, yet I have made no attempt to Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001,
reference all such precursors, or to pp. 182–3. Agel does give the names of
explain in detail how my own account most of the correspondents.
differs from existing ones, because this 136 Letter dated 15 April 1968, Fort Lee,
would take up a considerable New Jersey, SK/12/8/4, SKA; printed in
percentage of the available space in a Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001,
short volume such as this. pp. 186–7 (here the letter is listed as
However, I would certainly recommend being from Leonia, New Jersey).
that readers also look at other critical 137 Letter dated 4 May 1968, Santa
writings about 2001, especially Michel Monica, SK/12/8/4, SKA; printed in Agel,
Chion’s magnificent study Kubrick’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, pp. 189–92.
Cinema Odyssey. 138 Ibid., p. 192.
131 According to the Oxford English 139 Letter dated 14 June 1968, St Louis,
Dictionary, the figurative meaning of Missouri, SK/12/8/4, SKA.
‘dawn’ is ‘beginning, commencement, 140 Letter dated 29 May 1968, San
rise, first gleam or appearance’. As a Bernardino, SK/12/8/4, SKA.
verb, the meanings of ‘dawn’ include 141 Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties
the following: ‘Of ideas, facts, etc.: Spiritual Awakening: American Religion
To begin to become evident to the mind; Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New
to begin to be understood, felt, or Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
perceived’. This would seem to describe 1994), p. 311.
the key development in the prehistoric 142 Ibid., p. 30.
scenes of the film quite well. 143 Ibid., p. 311.
132 Indeed, the introductory titles of 144 ‘“Odyssey” on Time; O’Brien
the sequel to 2001, 2010 (1984), state Comes Home’, Film and Television Daily,
explicitly that the discovery of the 27 March 1968, p. 1.
monolith on the Moon took place in 145 ‘“Odyssey” on Time’, p. 3; Charles
1999 and the Jupiter mission in 2001. McHarry’s ‘On the Town’ column,
133 Letter in folder SK/12/4/8, SKA; New York Daily News, 25 March 1968,
emphasis in the original. The name of unpaginated clipping in folder
the author is known to me but to SK/12/6/14/2/3, SKA; ‘MGM’s “2001”
protect the anonymity of this and other Takes Top N[ew] Y[ork] B[ox] O[ffice]
correspondents, I will identify Grosses’, Hollywood Reporter, 15 April
particular letters with reference to their 1968, unpaginated clipping in
date and the correspondents’ home SK/6/14/1, SKA; MGM press release
towns; here 16 July 1968, Rock Mill, dated 9 May 1968, SK/12/5/2/3.
Ohio. 146 Steinberg, Film Facts, p. 26.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 113

147 ‘All-Time Boxoffice Champs’, With subsequent re-releases, the film

Variety, 7 January 1970, p. 25. eventually reached the figure of $26
148 Cp. Hall, ‘Tall Revenue Features’. million reported in Cohn, ‘All-Time Film
149 ‘ “2001”: In 35mm Version’, Variety, Rental Champs’.
15 January 1969; unpaginated clipping 161 Cp. Krämer, The New Hollywood,
in press clippings file on 2001: A Space pp. 106–7, 111–14.
Odyssey, PARC; ‘Back to 70m [sic], Six- 162 Cp. Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as
Track Stereo, 2001 Displays Fast Legs American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular
with Young Mob’, Variety, 8 April 1970, Culture (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
p. 6. University Press, 1998). The impact of
150 ‘Kubrick’s Sure “2001” to Click’, Planet of the Apes and its sequels was
Variety, 10 April 1968, pp. 5, 24; ‘“2001” considerable, as is evidenced, for
Draws Repeat and Recant Notices, Also example, by the high ratings the films
a Quasi-Hippie Public’, Variety, 15 May received when they were first shown on
1968, unpaginated clipping in folder American television in 1973. Three of
SK/12/6/1/4, SKA; Stuart Byron, them were seen by about a third of all
‘ “Space”: Box Office Moon-Shot’, Variety, households, and Planet of the Apes was
29 January 1969, pp. 5, 19. among the ten top-rated movies ever
151 Jack Ano, ‘New York Scene’ column, shown on American television up to
Film Bulletin, 6 April 1970, p. 6. that point; Steinberg, Film Facts, pp. 32–3.
152 ‘ “2001” Gathers a Famous Fans File; 163 On Hollywood’s science-fiction
Kubrick Reviews, Except in N.Y., Good’, output during this period, see, for
Variety, 19 June 1968, p. 28. example, Craig Anderson, Science Fiction
153 Letter dated 19 June 1968, Flushing, Films of the Seventies (Jefferson, NC:
New York, SK/12/8/4, SKA; printed in McFarland, 1985). Among the few
Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, movies dealing with space travel, the
pp. 181–2. biggest earners were Barbarella (1968),
154 Steinberg, Film Facts, p. 282. with rentals of $6m, and Marooned
155 Ibid., pp. 174, 262, 269, 295, 314, (1969, $4m), while Silent Running (1972),
320. directed by Douglas Trumbull, who had
156 Elley, Variety Movie Guide 2000, worked on the special effects for 2001,
pp. 905–6. earned less than $3m; Cohn, ‘All-Time
157 Steinberg, Film Facts, pp. 145–6, 178. Film Rental Champs’.
158 Ibid., pp. 186–7. 164 Cp. Krämer, The New Hollywood,
159 Ibid., pp. 125–7. pp. 107–9.
160 ‘All-Time Boxoffice Champs’, 165 Cp. the documentary Standing on the
Variety, 3 January 1973, p. 30. The figure Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001,
of $27 million given in this chart was which is on the 2001 DVD in the 2007
later corrected by Variety to $20 million; Warner Bros. Kubrick box set.
‘Up-Dated All-Time Film Champs’, 166 Larry Sturhahn, ‘The Filming of
Variety, 8 January 1975, p. 26. American Graffiti’, Filmmakers Newsletter,
114 BFI FILM CLASSICS

March 1974, pp. 19–27, reprinted in late 1970s by referencing both Star Wars
Sally Kline (ed.), George Lucas: Interviews and Alien (1979) in his novel; Arthur C.
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two (New York:
1999), p. 32. Also see Stephen Farber, Del Rey, 1982), pp. 117, 194. It is also
‘George Lucas: The Stinky Kid Hits the worth noting that Clarke later wrote
Big Time’, Film Quarterly, vol. 27 no. 3 two more sequels: 2061: Odyssey Three
(Spring 1974), pp. 2–9, reprinted in Kline, (New York: Del Rey, 1987) and 3001: The
George Lucas: Interviews, pp. 33–44. Final Odyssey (London: Voyager, 1997).
167 Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: In addition, there are the three ‘Time
A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, Odyssey’ novels he wrote with Stephen
1997), pp. 79, 105, 121, 161, 263. Baxter: Time’s Eye (London: Orion, 2004),
168 Cp. Peter Krämer, ‘Hollywood and Sunstorm (London: Orion, 2005) and
Its Global Audiences: A Comparative Firstborn (London: Orion, 2008).
Study of the Biggest Box Office Hits in The authors’ note in Time’s Eye explains:
the US and Outside the US since the ‘This book, and the series which it
1970s’, in Richard Maltby, Daniel opens, neither follows nor precedes the
Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (eds), books of the earlier Odyssey, but is at
The New Cinema History: Approaches and right angles to them: not a sequel or
Case Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, prequel but an “orthoquel”, taking
forthcoming). similar premises in a different
169 Cp. Peter Krämer, ‘Welterfolg und direction.’
Apokalypse: Überlegungen zur 171 Michael Cader (ed.), 2001 People
Transnationalität des zeitgenössischen Entertainment Almanac (New York:
Hollywood’, in Ricarda Strobel and Cader Books, 2000), p. 305.
Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (eds), Film 172 ‘Big Rental Films of 1984’, Variety,
transnational und transkulturell. 16 January 1985, p. 16.
Europäische und amerikanische 173 Clarke, 2010, p. 320.
Perspektiven (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 174 Cp. Peter Krämer, ‘Would You
Verlag, 2009), pp. 171–84. Take Your Child to See This Film?
170 Cp. Arthur C. Clarke and Peter The Cultural and Social Work of the
Hyams, The Odyssey File (London: Family-Adventure Movie’, in Steve
Panther, 1985). Intriguingly, Clarke Neale and Murray Smith (eds),
acknowledged the rise of Hollywood’s Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London:
science-fiction blockbusters since the Routledge, 1998), pp. 294–311.
 2 0 0 1 : A S PA C E O DY S S E Y 115

Credits

2001: A Space Odyssey Special Photographic by György Ligeti,

USA/1968 Effects Supervisors performed by the
Wally Veevers Stuttgart Schola
Directed by Douglas Trumbull Cantorum, conductor:
Stanley Kubrick Con Pederson Clytus Gottwald; Requiem
Produced by Tom Howard by György Ligeti,
Stanley Kubrick Special Photographic performed by the
Screenplay by Effects Unit Bavarian Radio
Stanley Kubrick Colin J. Cantwell Orchestra, conductor:
Arthur C. Clarke Bruce Logan Francis Travis; Blue
Director of Bryan Loftus Danube waltz by Johann
Photography David Osborne Strauss, performed by
Geoffrey Unsworth Frederick Martin the Berlin Philharmonic
Film Editor John Jack Malick Orchestra, conductor:
Ray Lovejoy Additional Photography Herbert von Karajan,
Production Designed by John Alcott courtesy Deutsche
Tony Masters Camera Operator Grammophon; Thus
Harry Lange Kelvin Pike Spake Zarathustra by
Ernest Archer Editorial Assistant Richard Strauss,
Music by David De Wilde performed (uncredited)
Aram Khachaturian Art Director by Wiener
György Ligeti John Hoesli Philharmoniker,
Johann Strauss Make-up conductor: (uncredited)
Richard Strauss Stuart Freeborn Herbert von Karajan;
Wardrobe by Adventures by György
© 1968. Metro-Goldwyn- Hardy Amies Ligeti (uncredited).
Mayer Inc. Soundtrack Sound Supervisor
Production Company Gayaneh ballet suite by A. W. Watkins
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Aram Khachaturian, Sound Mixer
presents performed by the H. L. Bird
a Stanley Kubrick Leningrad Philharmonic Chief Dubbing Mixer
production Orchestra, conductor: J. B. Smith
a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Gennadi Sound Editor
production and release Rozhdestvensky, Winston Ryder
courtesy Deutsche Scientific Consultant
1st Assistant Director Grammophon; Frederick I. Ordway III
Derek Cracknell Atmospheres by György
Special Photographic Ligeti, performed by the CAST:
Effects Designed and Southwest German Radio Keir Dullea
Directed by Orchestra, conductor: Mission Commander
Stanley Kubrick Ernest Bour; Lux aeterna David ‘Dave’ Bowman
116 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Gary Lockwood John Ashley In

Astronaut Frank Poole Jimmy Bell Technicolor
William Sylvester David Charkham Metrocolor
Dr Heywood R. Floyd Simon Davis Filmed in
Daniel Richter Jonathan Daw Super Panavision
moon-watcher Peter Delmar Presented in
Leonard Rossiter Terry Duggan Cinerama
Dr Andrei Smyslov David Fleetwood Released in both 35mm
Margaret Tyzack Danny Grover and 70mm prints.
Elena Brian Hawley 2.20:1/2.35:1
Robert Beatty David Hines MPAA: 21197
Dr Ralph Halvorsen Tony Jackson Principal photography
Sean Sullivan John Jordan from 17 December 1965
Dr Bill Michaels Scott MacKee to 14 July 1966, mainly at
Douglas Rain Laurence Marchant MGM British Studios Ltd
voice of HAL 9000 Darryl Paes (Borehamwood,
Frank Miller Joe Refalo England).
voice of mission Andy Wallace
controller Bob Wilyman Credits compiled by
Bill Weston Richard Wood Julian Grainger
space-walker apes
Edward Bishop
Aries-1B lunar shuttle Premiered in
captain Washington, DC, on
Glenn Beck 2 April 1968. Released in
astronaut the US by MGM Film
Alan Gifford Company on 6 April 1968
Poole’s father at 141 minutes,
Ann Gillis subsequently rated G by
Poole’s mother the MPAA.
Edwina Carroll Released in the UK by
Aries-1B stewardess MGM Pictures Ltd on
Penny Brahms 10 May 1968, BBFC
stewardess certificate A,
Heather Downham subsequently rated U on
stewardess 10 February 1969 for
Mike Lovell general release.
astronaut
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