Saturday | October 12, 2024 7:00 pm

2001: A Space Odyssey

Screening on Film
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Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
With Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester.
UK/US, 1968, 35mm, color, 149 min.
Print source: George Eastman Museum

Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction epic remains a defining film of the Sixties and one of the purest expressions of his vision of Man controlled by fateful patterns that he cannot perceive but the viewer is allowed to fathom. The equal power of 2001: A Space Odyssey to awe and to confuse its audience frightened MGM executives, who worried that the film would not recoup its tremendous costs. Realizing its psychedelic potential as a trance-inducing head film, the studio boldly rereleased 2001 two years after its first tepid reception, now with the savvy tagline, “The Ultimate Trip.” Youth audiences flocked to the cinema to “drop into” Kubrick’s film and travel together through the Stargate. – Haden Guest

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PRECEDED BY

Allures

Directed by Jordan Belson.
US, 1961, 16mm, color, 8 min.
Print source: HFA

In the late 1950s visionary artist and filmmaker Jordan Belson began a collaborative and extraordinarily creative enterprise that would alter the course of his career: a series of pioneering son et lumière shows designed and executed with avant-garde composer and sound artist Henry Jacobs in San Francisco’s state-of-the-art Morrison Planetarium. For two years Belson and Jacobs dazzled Bay Area audiences with their “Vortex Concerts,” intricate live performances that transformed the planetarium into a unique kind of cinematic space, harnessing the scientific technology as well as projection and sound apparatuses to create a heroic early expression of “expanded cinema.” Anticipating both the psychedelic light show and the art of the VJ, the widely popular Vortex Concerts continued until the planetarium management abruptly ended the series in 1959. This experience with live projection performance channeled directly into Belson’s breakthrough film Allures, his first work to turn away from traditional animation techniques and to explore the plastic qualities of light as a sculptural element. Although denied by Kubrick, Belson’s cinema is often cited, for obvious reasons, as an influence on 2001: A Space Odyssey. – Haden Guest

Image courtesy Center For Visual Music.