Film: 2001 :: Papers

Film: 2001 2001 is a masterpiece of cinema that still influences film makers nearly thirty years after it was made -- but what does it actually mean? Therein lies the enigma. Of course, 2001 is open to many interpretations and probably even Kubrick couldn't provide the "correct" one. The film is very different from the book; Kubrick reduced the original script to its bare essentials making the actors part of the narrative , but not telling the narrative through the script. making it a lesser part of the hole experience. Where there is speaking it is almost always symbolic The first words spoken signal the decay of human language to empty phrases: "Here you are, sir. Main level, please." The opening of 2001 is the Dawn of Man sequence which dovetails neatly with end of Dr. Strangelove: "We'll meet again, some sunny day " First image in the film is of a rising Sun Obviously, Kubrick pondered deeply the astonishing reality, that idea that man was smart enough to blow up the earth, but not smart enough to stop that from happening (kubric)(man doesn't want to nail himself, but he does). How could such a phenomenon occur? With such strong symbolic events and imagery in the opening seen it is hard to see them all as individual events, kubric uses these to tell the narrative of the story. The Sun is not just light, but heat (a desert). Making the Sun not necessarily good, the Sun is usually seen as positive in relation to dark, but not in a desert. This makes the sun a negative, with the use of water as a positive. The leopard killing the zebra Is a key element to the opening scene representing the behaviour of man the Zebra is a coexistence of black and white? Good an bad together just like man, making the leopard the destruction of man kind maybe symbolising the bomb. To echo the directors words ,QUOTE "you're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film" but