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Archive for April, 2008

2001: A Space Odyssey

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

In honor of the recent event, here are my thoughts.

I strongly believe that for a budding film nut, there are three stages that lead toward true understanding of the medium. The first stage is the “Spielberg stage.” This lasts through your early years, in which you endlessly watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, and Back to the Future on VHS and love them without really thinking about them. The second stage is the “Good, the Bad, and the Ugly stage,” in which a young child views a film that really demonstrates the potential for a melding of entertainment and art in the cinema (for me, it was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, though it might very well be The Road Warrior or Blade Runner for someone else).

The third stage is the 2001 stage. In this stage, the young nut begins to understand the full potential for emotional and thematic depth in the cinematic medium. Most likely, the film that spurs this will be 2001, considering works by Bergman, Antonioni, and Tarkovsky are probably too slow for him at this point. It was my experience, anyway. By the time 2001 was finished, I hadn’t the faintest clue I had just watched, but I knew it was probably one of the greatest films in existence. It wheted my appetite for films that didn’t make any immediate sense, yet, were such engrossing experiences that I would be perfectly willing to sit through them repeatedly (often realizing bits of their meaning on the way).

2001: A Space Odyssey is not a narrative film. Stanley Kubrick was famously contemptuous of narrative, instead choosing to divide his work into 6-8 different sections in which he strove for seperate atmospheres that built to a crescendo. 2001 is divided into four seperate sections: The Dawn of Man, 2001, The Jupiter Mission, and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.

The Dawn of Man opens with several static shots of humanity’s surroundings shortly before its evolution. They are one with the environment, which includes Tapirs and apes that look exactly the same as the humans. It is a hostile environment with carnivores and violent apes vying for territory. After being beaten in a territorial bout with the apes, the humans retreat in defeat. However, the iconic image of the Monolith greets them the next day, and, in a bringing together of science and religion, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke document what mankind’s first technological creation may have been: the simple use of a bone as a weapon for hunting and conquest.

Within the space of a second, Kubrick makes his famous match cut into tens of thousands of years in the future. With this single cut, Kubrick drew a connection between hitting stuff with blunt objects and the inconcievably complicated and high technology of space travel. The next part of this story is devoted to the trivialities and conventional life in space. Our protagonist here is merely on a business trip to deal with some disturbances on the moon. Long passages are devoted to life aboard the transports that take him to his destination, using the Blue Danube to create a connection between waltzing and this cosmic dance that showcase the current height of human innovation. Dancing among the stars, technology moves beyond cold, metallic surfaces and complex formulaes and becomes something both graceful and playful.

In short time, however, the monolith is encountered once more, and we move to the next stage: the Jupiter Mission. Describing the plot is quite useless, as this storyline has been ripped-off and parodied endlessly. I will only say that this section is among the most suspenseful and thought-provoking in all of cinema. The character of HAL, for he is more than a set-piece, manifests the flaws in our own technology and the question of what happens when our creations seem to mimic ourselves. Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood give superb performances, though their understated nature prevents them from ever achieving the recognition and acclaim they deserve.

But it is the final section, the journey through the stargate, in which the emotional and thematic core of 2001 is stripped bare and thrust into our very souls. It employs the avante-garde and the vocals of Ligeti’s Requiem to get under our skin like no film before or since. The final section in the room has baffled people endlessly, and the Star Child even more so. It makes little sense to the vast majority of people who have seen it, and it is the greatest ending ever concieved in the history of art.

In this short compression of time, Kubrick has charted the entire evolutionary ladder, eventually leading us to a state of being that, in the real world, lays far out in the future and in the present at the same time. Technology, advancement, evolution, we’ve all gone lengths our early ancestors could never have anticipated. But we have not done it by ourselves. There is a force that has had a hand in our development since we first emerged from the apes we once looked like. Call it God. Call it a universal pool of human thought. Call it nature. It really doesn’t matter.

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Tribute to Ingmar Bergman

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Last weekend, we at the academy were treated to a tribute to the great filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. If you are unaware of who he is, read this:

Bergman was born in 1918 in the country of Sweden. From the early fifties to his recent death in July of 2007, Bergman directed sixty-two films addressing themes of strife in family and faith. His career was very nearly derailed in in the late seventies when he exiled himself to Germany following a botched investigation of income tax evasion, but he returned and continued to make films. He often employed a similar cast throughout his career, which included Max Von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and Liv Ullman. His work is surrealistic, often reaching deep down into the human condition to ask deep, raw, and honest questions about relationships of all kinds.

If you are knew to Ingmar Bergman, I recommend you begin with his early international successes, such as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. They feature all he philosophical elements of his later work without the nightmarish surrealism and what some might consider pessimism of his later work.

Here are the films that were shown:

Fanny & Alexander - Bergman’s legendary cinematic take on his own childhood is a warm but surrealistic look at growing up. Seeing as this is a cut-down version of a longer television film (which I haven’t seen) there are some plot-holes within. However, the visual sumptuousness and overall atmosphere of the picture make it a masterpiece that only gets better with repeated viewings.

The Virgin Spring - Never my favorite among Bergman’s films, The Virgin Spring is a beautiful, powerful, thematic work nonetheless. It’s a disturbing look at the loss of innocence that comes with tragedy and retribution, a story I feel is timeless. Everyone is made guilty in some form or another, but in the end they find partial redemption that brings some hope to their future.

Through a Glass Darkly - While this is the weakest of Bergman’s trilogy of light, it remains a masterful look at dysfunction that results from a family member’s illness. As with many Bergman’s films, this is dark subject matter that manages to turn optimistic in its final scene.

Cries and Whispers - One of the most nightmarish films you’ll ever see, but within you’ll find one of the most raw examinations of a family afraid to even touch each other. By this film’s end, you should ask yourself which of the three sisters is truly alive.

Autumn Sonata - The only film at the tribute I hadn’t yet watched. A very good film, of course, but a notch beneath Bergman’s top-tier masterpieces. I felt as though the geography of this work was rather stagy, but the performances are truly incredible. It was well worth experiencing.

To finish this entree, I shall post my current rankings for the Bergman movies I’ve watched:

1. Persona

2. Wild Strawberries

3. The Seventh Seal

4. Fanny and Alexander

5. Cries and Whispers

6. Winter Light

7. The Silence

8. Through a Glass Darkly

9. The Virgin Spring

10. Autumn Sonata

11. Smiles of a Summer Night

12. Shame

Posted in History Lessons | No Comments »

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