There isn’t a note of original music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I don’t have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn’t do it with words.” Tagged 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Cage, silence, sound design These scenes are pretty much a demonstration of the philosophy behind John Cage’s (in)famous 4′33″: there’s no such thing as silence, and the world is full of interesting sounds if we just listen. Just for those few seconds, and bracketed by probably the two noisiest effects in the film (alarms in Dave’s pod, and oxygen rushing into the airlock), sound is totally absent from the film. The weight and tension and meaning in the silence in these scenes is as significant as any music could be.Ĭonsider the later scene, as Dave re-enters the ship without his helmet: we sense the vacuum of space because while we see a jet of gas, and we see Bowman tossed around like a ragdoll, and we see him pull the lever to close the hatch, we hear nothing. The white noise even carries on when the intermission begins, a little of the tension of the film carried into the real world. Dead, echoless silence while Frank and Dave conspire against Hal.Frank’s oxygen supply hissing, and his breathing, during his spacewalk.In the first half of the “Discovery” act alone, there’s: They get less comment than the soundtrack because they’re less obvious, but Kubrick’s types of silence are as carefully chosen as his music. (Some versions of the film omit the intermission I think the length of that silence alone is reason enough to include it.)īut during the long silence, there are different types of background noise. There is dialogue, and there are sound effects, but both are scant, and the latter is often indistinguishable from background noise anyway. As I said in my main 2001 article, the bulk of the plot of the movie takes place during a long silence, 46 minutes without any accompaniment music. I don’t know if John Cage ever saw 2001, but I expect if he did, he’d have loved how Kubrick used silence. (Part two, on A Clockwork Orange, is finally underway.) Of course, it’s also an appropriate time to link back to my piece on the music from the film. Kubrick realized that, if he was going to make a film about human fear and awe, the viewer had to feel those emotions as well. Its eerily neutral and silent appearance at the crossroads of human evolution evokes the same wonder for members of the audience as it does for characters in the film. In the end, Kubrick decided that “you cannot imagine the unimaginable” and, after trying more ornate designs, settled on the monolith. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of thinned and elongated humans, resembling shadows at sundown, were briefly an inspiration. These gargoyle-like creatures were rejected, and “ended up dotted around the garden,” according to Kubrick’s daughter Katharina. For a time, Christiane was modelling clay aliens in her studio. In their earliest meetings in New York, Clarke and Kubrick, along with Christiane, sketched drafts and consulted the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst. In a movie about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick faced a crucial predicament: what would the aliens look like? Cold War-era sci-fi offered a dispiriting menu of extraterrestrial avatars: supersonic birds, scaly monsters, gelatinous blobs. The best thing I’ve read for the anniversary is Dan Chiasson’s piece for the New Yorker, rich with details I’d never heard. I almost criminally let the 50th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey pass without comment (and without rewatching the film).
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