Stanley Kubrick's 2001 by Kolker Robert;

Author:Kolker, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2006-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

The Cinematographic Brain

HAL’s computer brain would seem to be cross-linked at several points to Kubrick’s “cinematic brain.” HAL’s red eye with its yellow pupil is reminiscent of a camera lens, and his ubiquitous presence, monitoring, recording, and controlling the movements of men, elevates HAL to directorial status (figure 13). His studio/body is the Discovery itself, and the battle between HAL and the men for dominance turns on HAL’s ability to see them even when they think they have escaped his surveillance. The agonistic encounter between men and machine, leading to the deaths of four men, the rape-like destruction of the sexually and affectively indeterminate computer brain, and Dave’s survival present a critical “history of consciousness.”24 In the words of Gilles Deleuze: “Our lived relationship with the brain becomes increasingly fragile, less and less ‘Euclidean’ and goes through little cerebral deaths. The brain becomes our problem or our illness, our passion, rather than our mastery, our solution or decision.”25 Thus, Kubrick’s treatment of the brain constitutes a formal strategy for the representation of the film’s thematic and diegetic material.

The cinematographic brain is the film, underscored in the Space Odyssey’s last episode, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” Here, the Odyssey’s confrontation with radically different conceptions of the brain reaches its apotheosis. Instead of the animal brain advancing inexorably toward domination, the human brain moving relentlessly toward deception, and HAL, the computer made in the likeness of man, dramatizing the failure of both animal and human strategies—unable to command human life without destroying it—the cinematic brain is the creation of media that have the potential to create a different and critical sense of reality.

“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” begins with psychedelic images of the astronaut’s rush through space, intercut with a dizzying montage of lines and colors and close-up images of changing colors in Dave’s eyes, and culminates in the Louis XVI bedroom, Dave’s own aging and death, and the appearance of the monolith and then of the futuristic fetus. This episode recapitulates images and motifs from the previous episodes.26 The emphasis is on the vastness of the universe, the role of the human traveler now swept up in space and time by forces over which he has no control, and the doubling of images, mirror images, and splitting between objects and their reflections. Doubling as a distancing device was conspicuous earlier in the film: the doubling of Moon-Watcher and Dr. Floyd; the twinlike appearance of the astronauts Dave and Frank; the parallel computers on Earth and aboard Discovery; and, of course, the four identical black monoliths. The astronauts’ images are also doubled in the video transmission from Earth and in the close-ups of their faces as they observe themselves (and as HAL observes them) on the monitors. More doubling is evident in Dave’s two journeys in the pod, first to replace the AE35, then to retrieve Frank.

In the final episode, Dave sees himself in a mirror and over his own shoulder. Aging, freed from his astronaut’s artificial skin, he observes himself as an older man sitting at a table.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.