Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey by Michel Chion
Kubrick by Michael Herr
The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey Edited by Stephanie Schwam
In the year that it named (it was Stanley Kubrick who decided that the film should be pronounced 'two thousand and one', rather than 'twenty-oh-one', and it stuck), the film 2001: A Space Odyssey has itself kept rather a low profile. Re-released to just a handful of London cinemas in a pristine 70mm print, Warner Bros. have eschewed a wider release, perhaps dissuaded by the apparent lukewarm commercial reception to last year's much trumpeted A Clockwork Orange reissue. I caught it the other night, as part of a double bill on Turner Classic Movies with Lolita, but I don't recall it getting a high profile screening on any of the terrestrial channels this year, let alone a wider theatrical run.
This somehow seems symptomatic of the critical esteem in which the post-mortem Kubrick is held. The mauling handed out to Eyes Wide Shut appears to have undermined, at least in the short term, his reputation for rigorous intelligence applied to accessible material to such an extent that his most famous and probably most significant work is deemed too challenging for today's audiences. While the Kubrick Industry continues apace with the reissue of many of his films on DVD, his defining work is denied the platform that it so self-evidently needs.
Yet if Kubrick's critical reputation is slightly on the wane, no one appears to have told Michel Chion, whose Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey, a book-length appreciation of 2001, is unquestioning in its assumption of the director's greatness, sometimes hilariously so. Even the most inconsequential of shots is applauded as evidence of Kubrick's 'genius' in this unapologetically auteurist response to the film.
Chion is good on the context in which the film originated and the contemporary reaction, and is equally sure footed when discussing Kubrick's mise-en-scène, much of what we now think of as being 'typically' Kubrikian traceable to this first film he made with something like complete autonomy. But I was left floundering in Chion's theoretical wake during much of the second half of the book. He take ages explaining why 2001 isn't a silent film and argues that it is as much the sum of what Kubrick chose not to show ('The Said and the Shown') as what is onscreen, resulting in such contortions as:
"2001 is exemplary for its dialectical play between the said and the shown. Much of the film consists of the shown, but it manages to inscribe the shown within the not-said - and how can you create a shown and a not-said if not through a said?"
The book concludes with an agreeably barmy chapter on Eyes Wide Shut. Chion argues that it compliments 2001 to such an extent that the narrative is actually seen through the eyes of a hovering unborn male child of the protagonist couple, who may be the mysterious Star Child from the end of 2001. You'd have to be pretty glum not to enjoy this.
Chion is clearly in thrall to Kubrick's gifts, but there's no suggestion he was ever subject to his personal charm. Not so Michael Herr who was stroked for years by seemingly endless phone calls before sitting down with Kubrick to adapt Gustav Hasford's novel The Short Timers as Full Metal Jacket. Herr's is a truly loving memoir that celebrates Kubrick the Artist and the Man but doesn't blink when faced with the shortcomings in both (meanness with his and the studio's money being a recurring theme).
Little of this short book (too short, actually) is taken up with the details of their creative relationship, and indeed one rather gets the impression that Herr doesn't actually care over much for Full Metal Jacket ("I've never had any idea at all what he thought he was doing in the second half …"). But instead it is full of love and admiration for the man, and fuelled by resentment at precisely the sort of snide critical re-evaluation mentioned earlier. Although he professes to have been a terrible movie critic when starting out as a journalist, Herr is in fact very perceptive, if generous, in his evaluation of Kubrick's works and fiercely defends Eyes Wide Shut from its detractors. Particular, if elegant, wrath is reserved for Frederic Raphael who co-authored the screenplay with Kubrick and later went on to write 'Eyes Wide Open', an entertaining but nakedly self-important account of their clearly less than happy working relationship. Herr does not spare Raphael the knowledge that the director asked him to doctor the script as shooting approach ("It needs your ear"). Fearing a lengthy stay in Kubrick's kitchen, the centre of his operations, Herr declined "and I had no regrets. Now, of course, I have a few".
Finally, a good word for a book that slipped out completely unheralded last year from the Modern Library. The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of four books in a series called 'The Movies', of which Martin Scorsese is allegedly the 'Series Editor'. Stephanie Schwam has obviously done all the work, though, and this book is made up of around 20 previously published and new pieces 'selected' by her, which provide a rough chronology to the gestation, shooting and reception of the film. It also includes Arthur C. Clarke's short story 'The Sentinel', which inspired the film.
There are contemporary magazine articles alongside eyewitness testimonies (including special effects designer Douglas Trumbull and composer Alex North, whose score was famously dropped late in the day) with new articles from the likes of 2001 scholar Piers Bizony and Kubrick confidante Alexander Walker. Of particular note are the publicity interviews Kubrick conducted, which, in light of his subsequent almost pathological distance from the press, are something akin to reading the Voice of God transcribed - although one can't imagine God making quite the sort of curious predictions for mankind's future Kubrick articulates. Either he was once very game at this sort of thing, or he took his musings about science very seriously indeed: "Within ten years, in fact, I believe that freezing of the dead will be a major industry in the United States and throughout the world; I would recommend it as a field of investment for imaginative speculators." Let's hope Stanley's broker never acted on that tip.
