
The Infinite Set: On '2001: A Space Odyssey' - prismatic
http://reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/2013/space_odyssey
======
GuiA
What a great essay. Worth the read.

 _" Upon reaching Jupiter, Bowman is guided into a wormhole, triggering
Trumbull’s bravura psychedelic sequence. On either side of a perpendicular
line dividing the screen, two vertical planes of brightly colored lights and
shapes emerge, rushing past and out of frame, giving the illusion that Bowman
(glimpsed in a juddering cutaway shot and then in paralytic stills) is racing
through a corridor of infinite dimensions at speed-of-light intensity. Modeled
in part after the avant-garde films of Jordan Belson (who later created
special effects for The Right Stuff) and fraternal animators James and John
Whitney (collaborators with Saul Bass on Vertigo’s title sequence), Trumbull
recreated screen space with his slit-scan technique, combining long exposures
of circuit board diagrams, Op Art prints, film negatives, and electron
microscope photographs for this sequence, which cleverly exploited the simple
x and y axis geometry of an ideally proportioned widescreen frame."_

That scene is probably my favorite movie scene of all times. My dad was a big
fan of _2001_ , and made me watch the movie when I was 13 or so- I missed a
lot of the subtleties, but that last part of the movie added a new layer to
existence that I could have never conceived of before. For a nerdy teenager
who was really into science and sci-fi, it was mind blowing to be exposed to
such an artistic depiction of the subjectivity of the human perception of time
and space, and the ambiguity of reality.

It's interesting to read the techniques that went into making it - it's a very
creative use of the medium. I can't help but feel that CGI has put special
effects designer into a box of vertices and polygons, resulting in special
effects that all look the same. I certainly can't think of a single movie that
has something as unique and distinctive as the wormhole scene in _2001_. I had
high hopes for _Interstellar_ , but it fell very flat (there are some groups
doing very cool work in more traditional animation however - I really like
Studio Laika, for instance).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
They were probably the best optical effects ever made.

Also interesting is the way they echo and expand on the imagery of the scenes
inside HAL 9000.

[http://metaspatial.net/conferences/io/hal9000.jpg](http://metaspatial.net/conferences/io/hal9000.jpg)

Kubrick was a genius photographer before he was a genius director. It's well
worth hunting down the images he took in his pre-Hollywood career. E.g.

[https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/photograph...](https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/photographs-
by-stanley-kubrick-look-magazine-life-in-new-york-40s-6.jpg?w=800&h=823)

~~~
ghaff
A good case could also be made for the original Star Wars--albeit in a faster-
paced and more action-oriented--as opposed to perfectly composed--way.

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lostgame
There is basically a point in cinema history before this film and after this
film.

So much of what Kubrick did here has never been replicated, few have even come
close to the impact he created on the industry and the level of
professionalism he created.

However, that's not to say the end result is particularly enjoyable for me to
watch. It's long runtime wears down on me and by the first hour I find myself
wanting to watch many scenes at 1.5x speed just to feel like I'm watching a
movie and not staring at slightly-moving still photography.

~~~
Animats
Films have been speeding up for a century, in two ways. Editorial geography
disappeared in the 1960s. Editorial geography example (not mine): Bogart gets
phone call. Bogart gets up, walks out door. Bogart walks out door of building,
gets into cab. Scene of Bogart in cab. Bogart gets out of cab, pays cabbie.
Bogart walks into apartment building lobby. Pushes elevator button. Shot of
elevator indicator coming down. Doors open. Bogart gets in. Shot of elevator
indicator going up. Elevator doors open. Bogart gets out, walks down hall,
rings doorbell. Lauren Bacall opens door. Bogart goes in. That's editorial
geography. At one time, it was felt that audiences would get lost without such
a sequence. Today, writers and directors would skip directly from the phone
call to an interior shot of the apartment. Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless"
(1960) is said to have put an end to that.

Related to this is average shot length as a metric.[1][2] "2001" has an
average shot length of 13 seconds. At the other extreme are the Bourne movies,
which are now down to around 1.1 seconds per shot. James Bond movies have sped
up over the years, with "Dr. No" at 7 seconds and "Die Another Day (2002)" at
2.4 seconds. This is an industry-wide trend.

Trailers are insane. Trailers routinely break the 1 second barrier today.

So there's been a speedup in two dimensions - removal of unnecessary context,
and shorter shots. To a modern viewer, 2001 looks quite slow-paced.

With enough short shots, films can conceal the lack of a plot. (This is a
problem with effects-heavy movies. After you leave the theater, you realize
the plot made no sense. But it was a great effects demo reel.)

[1]
[http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php](http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php)
[2] [http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2007/01/average-shot-
leng...](http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2007/01/average-shot-length.html)

~~~
reedlaw
That's why I can watch trailers of new movies and feel like I've seen enough.
Usually you get the gist of the plot (or lack thereof) along with plenty of
spectacular scenes making the rest of the movie unnecessary.

~~~
taneq
The problem is that most trailers actually _don 't_ give you enough to really
understand the movie, and they're generally pretty good about not giving
spoilers... but they're produced to give you the _impression_ that you've
basically seen the whole movie. So it's really easy (I do it too) to dismiss
an entire movie based on a 15-second trailer.

Unless you're talking about the Tomb Raider movie. The trailer with the fight
between Lara Croft and the robot is basically the first 5 minutes of the movie
and you can stop watching after that. :P

------
erdevs
As regards the wormhole sequence, one must appreciate the innovation in
technique, meticulous execution, groundbreaking visuals, and also the
incredible cinematic boldness in showing such a long, strange sequence in
theaters at the time. Truly impressive and meaningful work, which left an
indelible mark on cinema over the past 5 decades.

That said, a part of me has always wished this sequence gave more thought to
the physics and what it might be like to visualize the experience of traveling
through a gate/wormhole like this. I don't think the coloration, visual
patterns, or sequencing represents much understanding of the then-current
physics theory on what this sort of thing might possibly be like, and I'm not
sure it even captures it well in the abstract.

Amazing cinematic work which moved the industry forward in a positive
direction. I just always wished they'd somehow been able to go even further
and applied the same brilliance of vision and execution in technique to an
even more refined concept that incorporated some viable notions of the
possible/theoretical physics involved in traversing through space-time like
this.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _That said, a part of me has always wished this sequence gave more thought
> to the physics and what it might be like to visualize the experience of
> traveling through a gate /wormhole like this. I don't think the coloration,
> visual patterns, or sequencing represents much understanding of the then-
> current physics theory on what this sort of thing might possibly be like,
> and I'm not sure it even captures it well in the abstract._

'Interstellar' did some of that, and they had to hire Kip Thorne as a
consultant, and run a render farm to raytrace the relativistic effects.

I'm not sure the theory was quite at the same level in the '60s, and the
cinema technique was definitely not the same. It would have been a lot harder
to do any degree of realism.

~~~
erdevs
Yeah, Interstellar definitely scratched this itch for me, and I appreciated it
for doing so.

Certainly the theory has developed greatly since then. But being even somewhat
informed about the contemporary physical theory would've made the sequence
even more impactful and satisfying, for me personally.

I don't think technique would've necessarily required greater complexity or
difficulty. For example, one might have used the same planing technique, but
used different patterning and colorization, based on more mathematically
derived outputs. Not suggesting any kind of simulation or super-advancement.
Just using the same technique, but informing the visuals based on more
physical theory.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I think that would have been literally impossible in 1969.

Firstly there was no theory of wormholes back then. Black holes were
incredibly obscure mathematical abstractions in physics journals that weren't
accessible to most people.

Secondly, this was 1968, when the world's faster supercomputer ran at 36MHz.
Evans and Sutherland were just getting started when 2001 was being made. There
were no GPUs, no digital frame stores, and monochrome bitmapped displays were
still exotic.

It's easy to take computers for granted today. You can plot and animate almost
anything, and you can do it at home - or on your phone.

Not so in the late 1960s. Mathematically derived animations would have needed
a mountain of cash to pay for computer time just to get something very rough
and approximate.

~~~
erdevs
Why do you assume computers would've needed to be involved? One can plot
space-time warping by hand. Indeed, Einstein had no benefit of computer
assistance in developing his theories of relativity and gravity warping.

Why assume a complete theory of black holes or wormholes was necessary?
Clearly the _concept_ existed. Clearly we had General Relativity. One could
imagine a more speculative but still physics-based visualization of what might
happen in traveling through such a nexus of space-time.

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chiph
The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin has a 70mm print of 2001, and I was lucky
enough to get a ticket to a viewing two summers ago. They even kept the
intermission in place for a 151 minute film, a length today that would barely
raise an eyebrow (LotR - The Two Towers is 179 minutes).

It really is a mind-blowing film. He changed the design language for space
from jump-suits and ray-guns to something cleaner and more logical. As well as
spaceship design, clothing and the space suits. And reinforced IBM's design
language as _the_ way a computer should look (even the non-homicidal ones).

------
js2
I think this has probably been submitted separatly to HN, but also worth
reading is the Typeset In The Future entry on 2001:

[https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-
odyss...](https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/01/31/2001-a-space-odyssey/)

