list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

 

The 30 second flight-attendant sequence in the Lunar transfer shuttle shows a solution to a problem (Velcro shoes) and gave the 1968 audience an image they'd never seen before (or even thought about) - there is no "up" and "down" in space. Kubrick and Clarke were also normalising an extraordinary event - showing a future where space travel was exactly the same as air travel is today - mundane and ordinary - at a time when tv audiences were transfixed by the extraordinary of the Apollo space missions - they were parallelling the everyday crossing of the Atlantic in an airliner to the voyage of Columbus. That scene, together with the the Pan-Am Orion space plane and the Hilton Hotel space station,  for me is key to the rest of the film - it establishes a reference point for the events that follow - it says "in the future, this is ordinary - what follows is not..."

 

The same technique is used on the Discovery/Jupiter mission sequences, Bowman and Poole are shown doing ordinary everyday things (like jogging) in an extraordinary environment, Kubrick is using those scenes to normalise the 1968 audience into accepting those events as being unremarkable and everyday in the future, in contrast to the events that will follow the passage through the Star-gate (all those lines and colors ).

 

Those elements set the pace and meter of the whole - interplanetary space travel is long, slow and boring, it's not all wizz-bang of 50s B-movie Si-Fi.

 

A minor point about the music: no electronic and/or avant garde music was used in the film - the four pieces by György Ligeti (Requiem, Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna and Adventures) are all 100% orchestral and are Contemporary Classical (microtonal and polyrhythmic). It was a conscious decision by Kubrick not to use electronic music at all in the film - he would later use electronic music in Clockwork Orange (notably Timesteps). Again Kubrick is using the juxtaposition between the "ordinary" classical music of Richard and Johan Strauss during the "ordinary" space scenes to the "extraordinary" classical music of Ligeti during the "extraordinary" space scenes as a way of differentiating to the 1968 audience that the remarkable events (from their perspective) of space travel are mundane compared to what could be out there. The use of the chorale Requiem during the Monolith sequences perhaps sounds clichéd now because it has been parodied so much since, but again, at the time it was unexpected (and dare I say - mind-blowing), using it to "auralise" the silent signal of the Monoliths signified that they were ethereal, other-worldly and not of this earth. 

About the music: ... wow. I thought it was electronic stuff, but if it was an orchestra, ... those must have been really elaborate arrangements. Someone probably toyed with acoustic phenomena or something. And, of course, it was easy for me to confuse avant-garde with contemporary classical.

Enjoyable whole through, although I was expecting something more unconventional cinematographically. Not that there's anything wrong with a straight and understandable plot, haha. Like most of these classics, further analysis should be seeked or thought. Recommended, although I'd say watch 8 & 1/2 first.