2001 by Peter Krämer

Author:Peter Krämer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

As far as the space odyssey in the year 2001 promised by the film’s title is concerned, these prehistoric scenes clearly have to be understood as a prologue (although one might wonder whether the monolith has arrived on Earth during an odyssey of its own). More immediately pertinent for making sense of this segment is its opening title, which has rich resonances across its imagery and action. As noted earlier, at the most literal level, ‘dawn’ refers simply to the beginning of the day, and much of what follows depicts the daily routine of hominids – foraging and eating, going to the waterhole and drinking, grooming and jostling, posturing and evading enemies, sleeping and waking up. Yet, during one such literal dawn, their encounter with the monolith changes certain aspects of their daily routine for ever, because it dawns on them (this dawning being represented by a shot of the sun rising above the monolith) that bones can be used as weapons, animals can be eaten and enemies can be killed. This in turn implies that the scenes following the appearance of the monolith give us a first glimpse of ‘man’, whose ‘dawn’ the opening title announced. Yet, this dawn must surely be followed by the rise of man, just like daybreak is followed by sunrise.

The next segment begins with a (not quite perfect) match-cut from the falling bone to a vaguely bone-shaped spacecraft silently floating in blackness punctured only by the light of distant stars, thus returning viewers to space, where they had been located in the credit sequence. Accompanied by the beginnings of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, a pan reveals that the spacecraft, which exits the frame in the left foreground, is situated above the Earth. Both the match-cut and the fact that ‘man’ and ‘his’ tools have literally risen into space indicate that the dawning of humanity shown in the first segment has given way to its rise to predominance by the beginning of the second. Presumably having conquered the Earth (although we never see how life on Earth is organised now, except for brief glimpses of house interiors), humanity has moved on to explore the heavens.

It is tempting to think that the story has moved forward to the year 2001 of the film’s title. The action depicted in this segment could thus be understood as the beginning of the ‘space odyssey’ viewers have been promised. Dr Heywood Floyd is on a trip to the Moon, transferring from the spaceship Orion to a space station and from there taking another spaceship (the Aries) to his destination, once again to the accompaniment of the Blue Danube waltz. He gives a short presentation at the Clavius base before taking a Moon bus to the crater Tycho, where he is shown a four-million-year-old monolith which has recently been excavated. His journey to Tycho is punctuated by another of Ligeti’s choral pieces (Lux aeterna), while his Requiem returns when Floyd visits and inspects the monolith, the music being disrupted when the mysterious object starts to emit a signal at the very moment it is first hit by sunlight.

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