Preview
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
Starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and William Sylvester
Written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Saturday, October 4
Uptown Screen
Calgary International Film Festival
Q: When is a movie not just a movie?
A: When it’s a metaphysical enigma, a mythological documentary, a parable of human evolution and a beacon heralding a new era in consciousness.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is all of these things and more, according to Calgary-based writer Galen Bullard. He has recently self-published a book entitled Kubrick’s Prophecy, which aims to help readers explore and understand the mysterious symbolism of the film. The book will be launched in conjunction with the screening of a new print of 2001 at the Calgary International Film Festival, and the following day, Bullard will host a related seminar called "2001: The Myth Behind Our Reality" as part of the festival’s Film Talks program.
Recognizing that 2001 has generated almost as many interpretations as it has viewers in the 35 years since it was released, Bullard displays a rare brand of intellectual generosity in Kubrick’s Prophecy. Rather than asserting his own interpretation of the film as the correct one, he employs a process of Socratic dialogue to call attention to the patterns of symbols that recur throughout the film and urge his readers to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of those patterns.
If you’ve ever pondered the significance of 2001’s numerous planetary alignments, the appearances of the black monolith at various junctures, the HAL 9000 computer’s apparent consciousness or the Star Child who gazes out over Earth at the film’s end, Bullard’s scrupulously researched and footnoted insights will undoubtedly offer new perspectives.
First, though, one must be willing to perceive the film not merely as entertainment, but as a form of visual, aural and kinetic communication. Bullard’s research and experience – he’s seen the film nine times in the cinema and many other times on DVD – show that Kubrick was working with the cinematic medium in a highly sophisticated and intuitive manner. Bullard believes it’s important to experience the film intuitively as well.
"Your intuition will work with the ideas and the imagery (in the film), and things will pop into your awareness – they were there all along, but you just hadn’t figured out how to see them yet," says Bullard, whose background includes studies in computer science, film theory, mythology, anthropology, astronomy and particle physics. "That’s what was delightful for me about the film. Once I saw a significant pattern or symbol – and saw that I wasn’t just making it up, that the theme was reflected in all these different parts of the film – I said, ‘OK, my awareness has been opening up in the process of exploring this.’"
This process of opening up has led many viewers to experience 2001 as a spiritual awakening – at some level, the film’s narrative, which spans four million years of human development, combines with its formal structure to induce a meditative state in which we are asked to philosophically consider our individual place within our species, as well as the place of our species within a greater evolutionary continuum. While this prompts anxiety in some people and hope in others, one thing is certain – to fully appreciate the film, we must quiet our rational minds and embark on a journey to the very limits of human consciousness.
"The whole film is designed as a meditation," says Bullard, who himself practices vipassana meditation. "To start with, the pace is so slow that your mind-chatter comes up, but if you keep bringing your attention to the movie, the mind-chatter quiets. The circular motion… also lulls the mind and the body…. Kubrick actually speaks to us at all our levels of awareness, including the body."
By prompting us to consider our place in the universe, Kubrick also raises questions about human dependency on technology. Among other things, 2001 can be seen as a cautionary tale, or prophecy, about the ways that technological dependency can limit our consciousness. Bullard hopes that his book will lead people to explore the film’s mythological enigmas once more and become aware of Kubrick’s prophecy.
"I see that as a valuable thing because we’re making a mess of a lot of things on our planet," he says. "I think it’s not because of malicious intent, it’s simply because we lack sufficient awareness to match the power of our technology to cause harm or good. And without enough conscious awareness of the consequences, we’re going to make some serious mistakes – we already have, and they can continue to a point where we can cause some much more serious harm to ourselves and our planet.
"I think this film can help us in recognizing that we need to open our awareness." |
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