2001 A Space Odyssey
The paper looks at how Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andre Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) make art cinema out of the popular genre of science fiction. Further, it focuses on the specific ways the two directors deploy to construct extraterrestrial space to explore key concerns of science fiction, including the relation of humans to technology, human to the alien or non-human, as well as the relationship of the present to the future. The specific constructions of those films shape a unique experience of extraterrestrial space for characters and audiences. In the process, each director offered a critical engagement with science fictional aspirations at a time when space travel was exciting and new.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 tells …show more content…
However, these films’ scene of wild nature has a different significance in each. The wild nature of primeval man in 2001 is strikingly artificial; a painted background merges into the foreground’s set with a specific lens and a deep focus. By contrast, Tarkovsky’s representation of the protagonist Chris Kelvin‘s childhood house appears more naturalistic, yet recalls Renaissance painting with its use of symmetry and colour, an aesthetic effect that is directly linked to memory and nostalgia and man’s emotional relationship to the past. The camera lyrically travels over paintings later in the film to represent Chris’s relationship to the past. In this way, nature is both exterior, a framing device for films about technology and the future, but also interior, in the way that they are linked to what each film defines as essential humanity: the primate who hungers, fights, and learns to use tools in 2001, the man who remembers, struggles with nostalgia, and is thus easily manipulated by the sentient nature in …show more content…
At first, within a tracking shot audiences have the impression that the astronaut is going around the circle in zero gravity. However, in the second shot while the camera mounted before the astronaut audiences realize that the spaceship is turning around. Robert O’Meara reveals how the set and cameras work in this
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 tells …show more content…
However, these films’ scene of wild nature has a different significance in each. The wild nature of primeval man in 2001 is strikingly artificial; a painted background merges into the foreground’s set with a specific lens and a deep focus. By contrast, Tarkovsky’s representation of the protagonist Chris Kelvin‘s childhood house appears more naturalistic, yet recalls Renaissance painting with its use of symmetry and colour, an aesthetic effect that is directly linked to memory and nostalgia and man’s emotional relationship to the past. The camera lyrically travels over paintings later in the film to represent Chris’s relationship to the past. In this way, nature is both exterior, a framing device for films about technology and the future, but also interior, in the way that they are linked to what each film defines as essential humanity: the primate who hungers, fights, and learns to use tools in 2001, the man who remembers, struggles with nostalgia, and is thus easily manipulated by the sentient nature in …show more content…
At first, within a tracking shot audiences have the impression that the astronaut is going around the circle in zero gravity. However, in the second shot while the camera mounted before the astronaut audiences realize that the spaceship is turning around. Robert O’Meara reveals how the set and cameras work in this