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Lovecraft and Kubrick
2001: A Space Odyssey
A film is — or should be — more like music than like fiction.
This is the film that has showed most compellingly what cinema is, and what it is capable of. Kubrick stripped the medium to its most basic elements and from them assembled this grand and austere poetry, which is a monument to the motion picture, and a philosophical journey into film: to find its beating heart and amplify it tenfold. I cannot call it my favourite movie, nor the most entertaining, but I must call it the best.
In the beginning there was darkness — not the silent, familiar, and expectant darkness of Genesis, but a darkness of sourceless screams, unnerving and confusing. In the beginning, says Kubrick, was The Monolith.
The opening sequence is unconventional, certainly, and perhaps not commercially practical; but it is essential. It instills a cyclopean, almost Lovecraftian, dimension: a mingling of the deeply ancient and the strikingly modern, planting a visceral terror inspired by enormity of time and space, a fear of the unknown and unknowable. It is this feeling that unlocks the film.
And then comes “The Dawn of Man”. We are shown that 2001 will encompass all that humankind was, is, and will be — the arc of man, “from ape to angel”. The (re)appearance of The Monolith is powerfully…
