[HN Gopher] 'Dear Mr. Kubrick': 1960s Audience Responses to 2001...
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'Dear Mr. Kubrick': 1960s Audience Responses to 2001 -- A Space
Odyssey (2009) [pdf]
Author : wslh
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-11-24 18:56 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.participations.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.participations.org)
| FredPret wrote:
| > " she had gone to a drive-in cinema with her husband and
| children to see a double bill of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery
| Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey"
|
| Bizarre choice - apparently they marketed it as a family movie
| Willingham wrote:
| I can't imagine an atomic family from the 60's rolling up to
| this and getting caught off guard like that XD
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The ending is one of the scariest moments in cinema for me. I
| remember watching it in the middle of the night on PBS I
| think. I was absolutely terrified about what was in that room
| with him as he was aged and kept looking over his shoulder.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I feel like we all have a "I saw it in middle of the night
| on PBS and it really screwed with my head" movie.
|
| For me it was being maybe 13 and tuning in to the last half
| of Lord of the Flies at about 1am. Those kids abandoned on
| a lonely island, followed by the rescuer showing up,
| followed by credits, followed by the national anthem and
| test colour bars will forever be burned into my brain.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| For me it was the first letterboxed thing I had ever seen
| on TV and I asked my dad what was wrong with the TV.
| Feels like it was on A&E? At least 30 years ago.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| My parents had recorded something on our VCR and "to be
| safe" it recorded the first half hour or so of the
| following movie. The following movie was the original
| Alien. It stopped around the dinner scene before it gets
| really going. I must have watched that part of the movie
| ~20 times when I was around 10. I'd be constantly afraid
| about facehuggers hiding under the bed or behind the
| shower curtain when it was dark.
| djkivi wrote:
| For me that was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger
| Ebert was not just a movie critic... And it inspired
| Austin Powers as well!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can see it easily happening. People were not "tuned in"
| back then as we are now. People used the newspapers to see
| what was playing and what times where available. Trailers
| weren't available 24/7 for instant viewing. You saw previews
| before the movie you were about to watch. The TV advertising
| wasn't so prevalent for movies. My parents would go to the
| movies and see whatever was playing on the one screen the
| theater had when they were kids, not just go to see a
| specific movie at the cineplex with 30 different screens.
| Things were very different back then.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This was still somewhat the case in the late 90s and early
| 00s before Youtube and IMDB were really big. We'd go watch
| Star Trek Nemesis because it had Star Trek in the name or
| watch whatever looked good in the trailers last time we
| went. What was your alternative? Watch it on your CRT tv a
| year later, probably with ads? Rental existed, but at least
| where I lived it was very uncommon. I honestly miss it.
| Driving to the cinema with a bunch of friends, sometimes
| not even certain what we'd watch and how it would turn out.
| Really great! Recently I visited an old friend at his new
| (to me) apartment and it came up that he had kept all his
| cinema tickets from back in the day. We went through all of
| them swimming in nostalgia, a little blurry-eyed, while our
| wives laughed at us.
| GoatOfAplomb wrote:
| > late 90s and early 00s
|
| I remember going to Moulin Rouge without knowing it was a
| musical!
| glimshe wrote:
| The Barbenheimer of the 1960s...
| riwsky wrote:
| "Poohthousand and one"
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That was normal in the 60s. Scifi was encouraged. They wanted
| kids to be inspired by space and technology. Star Wars changed
| things, driving a wedge separating what would eventually be
| "kids" movies from hard scifi, but that wasnt always so. Movies
| like 1953's War of the Worlds were very much all-family
| affairs.
| m463 wrote:
| She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm _after_ 2001
|
| And honestly, thinking back, the end of 2001 is pretty
| nonsensical to most normal people. I remember watching it when
| I was young and it was hard to figure out what the trippy stuff
| meant, let alone the end.
|
| In comparison, 9 years later Star Wars was completely
| approachable to the entire family.
| masswerk wrote:
| > She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001
|
| Mr. Kubrick's programming choices are, indeed, bizarre. ;-)
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| "The audience for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey ... has
| always included an unusually large number of people ... who felt
| the need to express their feelings and thoughts about the film in
| writing."
|
| This may be the truest statement I have ever read. I'm rolling.
|
| FWIW, I like it.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei
| Tarkovsky's _Mirror_ , his most avant-garde film. On one hand,
| you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded
| cinephile friends, and even they might reject it as artsy-fartsy
| or unintelligible. On the other hand, a number of ordinary
| proletariat people in the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky to say how his
| film touched them deeply and felt directly relatable to their own
| lives.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > On the other hand, a number of ordinary proletariat people in
| the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky (...)
|
| A number of ordinary proletariat, that strikes me as an oddly
| specific subset of people. Is the implication that "proletariat
| people" are down to earth people who like simple things and so
| Mirror was in a sense down to earth, if only you had the right
| sensibilities? Or what's the implication?
|
| In any case I for one can't imagine anything more fartsy than
| someone who'd self identify as proletariat. You realize that
| regular workers didn't call themselves proletariat, right?
| Communists called workers proletariat. So anyone calling
| himself proletariat was a communist, not a regular worker who
| just want to do his job. In other words, supremely fartsy. So
| you're saying that fartsy people liked a fartsy movie. That
| actually makes sense.
|
| Edit: just started reading the movie's Wikipedia page
|
| > including newsreel footage of major moments in Soviet history
|
| OF COURSE it was popular with communists. Damn, I'm good.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| I'm sorry to interrupt your flight of fancy there, but the
| word "proletariat" came from me and not the people writing
| letters to Tarkovsky (as someone from Eastern Europe of a
| certain generation, I'm as likely to reach for that word to
| describe people in highly menial jobs as, say, "working
| class", but then again nearly everyone in the USSR was
| working class).
|
| I would suggest watching the film before furthering
| speculating about it. That newsreel footage and the nonlinear
| way it is presented is far more likely to challenge viewers
| than arouse any patriotic or otherwise enthusiastic
| sentiments.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > nearly everyone in the USSR was working class
|
| For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a
| farmer, so not proletariat and not communist.
|
| > I would suggest watching the film
|
| The first few paragraphs on how the movie is about a person
| remembering important episodes of his life got me curious
| and gave me Butterfly Effect vibes (good), but reading
| further down I started getting Mulholland Drives vibes (not
| good).
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| "For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was
| a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the
| context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet
| terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but
| I haven't checked this thoroughly, divided the
| proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian selskie
| proletarii) and urban proletarians (gorodskie
| proletarii). In any event, in colloquial contexts the
| word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial
| trudging wherever it's lived.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Of course Lenin had an interest in selling the idea that
| everyone is actually proletariat. In reality by Marx's
| definition, proletariat are those who don't own the means
| of production (and are therefore stuck in earning by
| selling their labour), whereas farmers at least until the
| NEP died, mostly owned their own farms which means they
| did own the means of their production, which is also why
| farmers, or virtually everyone in the USSR outside the
| cities hated the communists.
|
| But I got your point.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| Your comment is incredibly uninformed (and the third such
| in a row). Whole rural areas of European Russia went over
| to the Bolsheviks, and this has been thoroughly
| documented in countless diaries, letters, memoirs, and
| literature - it's something that anyone familiar with,
| say, Volga-Kama areal studies is well aware of (just as
| one is well aware that, alas, many of the same rural
| people ecstatic at new opportunities in the wake of 1917,
| were shot under Stalin in 1933-1937). In spite of serfdom
| having been abolished under Alexander II, or having never
| been enforced at all in some areas, smallholders
| regularly found themselves falling into debt to powerful
| rural magnates, and exploited through those magnates'
| "company stores". The Bolsheviks' depiction of a "rural
| proletariat" oppressed by a "rural bourgeoisie", however
| unorthodox it might have been compared to Marx, proved
| easy for rural people to sympathize with.
| nl wrote:
| > nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not
| proletariat and not communist
|
| This statement has a number of flaws.
|
| > nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer
|
| True during the early years, but after WW2 changed
| rapidly (in line with the West). [1] shows rural
| population percentage dropped from 67% in 1939 to 56% in
| 1956, and it rapidly decreased after that. [2] is female
| specific but by 1975 under 1/3 were working in
| agriculture.
|
| In addition, everyone _other than the actual owner of the
| land_ was considered "The Agricultural Proletariat".
| Engels wrote [3] about this in 1845 well before the
| establishment of the Soviet Union.
|
| > so not proletariat
|
| As seen above, this doesn't follow _especially_ after the
| establishment of collective farming where everyone were
| considered workers.
|
| [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1233891
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_working_class#Women
|
| [3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/cond
| ition-w...
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| You really cracked the case here wow!
| aprilfoo wrote:
| > OF COURSE it was popular with communists
|
| A long story short: it wasn't. Tarkovsky suffered from
| censorship and lack of support for the production of non
| propaganda movies, like many others.
|
| > Edit: just started reading the movie's Wikipedia page
|
| Watching movies and reading about them before commenting on
| them is usually a good starting point.
| aredox wrote:
| I happened recently with my girlfriend and I after watching
| _The boy and the Heron_ , the last Miyazaki.
|
| I was disoriented, trying to make heads or tails of what I just
| saw, and she was completely happy of all the poetry and
| symbolism she just saw.
|
| Some art pieces are not meant to be overanalyzed. They are
| meant to be _felt_.
| wetback wrote:
| I had the same experience with the movie. Even though I knew
| up front about Isao Takahata's passing, I struggled to make
| all the imagery fit into my expectations of a "coherent"
| story. At one point I just had to let go of my search of any
| overarching analogy, and just enjoyed the fireworks.
| yzydserd wrote:
| The oft quoted phrase: "writing about music is like dancing
| about architecture".
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Thankfully, I read the book before seeing the movie.
|
| Most of the friends I've been with who saw the film first did a
| good job of following the plot up until the final act, which was
| pretty much unfilmable at the time.
|
| Decades later, the Jodie Foster movie, Contact, did a much better
| job of visualizing "a trip through an interstellar mass transit
| system" than 2001 showing a trippy light show.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| Note though that the movie is not an adaption of the novel.
| They were written in tandem, and the movie was published
| slightly before the book.
| nickcw wrote:
| The book makes a lot of things clearer than the film.
|
| Interestingly the book and the film were developed together by
| Kubrick and Clarke as a collaborative process.
|
| Usually the book comes before the film, but occasionally it
| comes after.
|
| I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed
| alongside the film but I expect there are!
| mulmen wrote:
| > I can't think of other examples where the novel was
| developed alongside the film but I expect there are!
|
| Game of Thrones?
| Loughla wrote:
| That was a television series that should've waited. They
| needed the books to be finished.
|
| Because it's either:
|
| A) regular Hollywood schlock that ruined the last seasons;
| or (worse)
|
| B) that was his actual direction for the book series and
| now he knows that it's not good.
|
| Either way, I believe we will never get the final books in
| that series due to the television series.
| mulmen wrote:
| I definitely agree the show influenced the books. Not
| sure that's better or worse. I didn't hate the ending as
| much as everyone else. It made sense. Maybe it would be
| more palatable with a subsequent series.
| watwut wrote:
| Counterpoint - the books will never be finished, so
| waiting would make no sense.
|
| However, they should hire writers that can actually write
| characters and plots other then simplest ones. The
| writing quality was indeed horrible by the end.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Star Wars?
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| And interestingly Clarke set the destination as Saturn,
| whereas Kubrick made it Jupiter. In the sequel book, _2010_ ,
| Clarke used Jupiter as in the movie.
| atombender wrote:
| The Third Man is another example. Graham Greene wrote a
| treatment before he wrote the screenplay. The treatment,
| which wasn't written with publication in mind, was later
| published as a novella, and it differs from the film in
| several notable ways, because Greene and the directors
| changed things during the writing of the screenplay and the
| principal making of the film.
| masswerk wrote:
| The third act is pretty much _Jaws_ after the breakdown of the
| animatronic shark. There are actual pre-production stills
| showing aliens [1], but this was found unsatisfactory and the
| film drifted towards a much more abstract direction. Probably,
| it 's the much better film, because of this. (Personally, I
| can't think of any solution showing the events in real life
| that isn't cheesy or even kitschy. It may have been _The Abyss_
| of 1960s cinema. As-is, the notion that the first two realistic
| acts of the film are driving towards an enigmatic, kind of open
| end, was certainly important for its reception and its long-
| term relevance.)
|
| [1] Compare
| https://touringinstability.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/the-alie...
| nox101 wrote:
| What is wrong with The Abyss? The theatrical release was
| fine. The extended addition with the 5 minute video montage
| of the aliens preaching to Bud that humans are destructive
| seemed like the only bad thing to me but that wasn't in the
| theatrical release.
| masswerk wrote:
| Hum, the ending had to be remade after first screenings,
| and even as-is, it's subject to critique by many,
| diminishing the value of the entire film. (I recall it even
| being laughed at. I guess, audiences may have become more
| tolerant, since.) It may have done better with a more
| abstract solution, as well.
|
| (There may be specific topics where "show, don't tell"
| becomes "experience, don't show". And _2001_ tried to
| accomplish this. _The Abyss,_ on the other hand, tried
| still to show, probably failing in its mission. -- There
| was a time when German media theory, in the wake of F.A.
| Kittler, was kind of obsessed with the written signifier of
| the novel giving rise to an immediate, visually
| representative significant. Observed from this perspective,
| even Clarke 's novel takes a step back into abstraction: we
| may find it hard to invoke an immediate imaginary
| representation, while reading, the narrative pretty much
| falls back to us being told, instead of giving rise to
| imagination, much until the last, much more "tangible"
| gesture of the Space Child. But, even then, the perspective
| of the Space Child, cynical without cynicism, and what may
| come of this, is very much an open ending. So, why not move
| this openness forward in the plot?)
| EGreg wrote:
| I thought the movie Contact was very different from the book,
| and the ending was different -- no?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Both movies had a sequence that was supposed to represent a
| human being traveling through the equivalent of an
| intergalactic mass transit system to a distant location.
|
| At the time that 2001 was made, effects were not there yet.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e90egkb-x1s
| csours wrote:
| I watched Bowie's 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' after hearing a
| very wide range of opinions - love, hate, and "meh".
|
| It's a very interesting film in somewhat the same vein as 2001 -
| It does not provide a narrative throughline and the conclusion is
| less than satisfying.
|
| An unsatisfying narrative and conclusion is a double edged sword
| - it can lead people to think about the film for a longer time
| and ruminate on it - or it can make people angry and/or say
| stupid things. See also
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URo66iLNEZw
|
| ---
|
| I also think about Alex Garland's film 'Civil War'. It is very
| unsatisfying to never be told which side is the 'right' side, or
| what the war was about.
|
| That unsatisfaction can make someone hate the movie, or it can be
| taken as commentary on war - it doesn't matter which side is
| right or what the fighting is for, no one wins a war. Winning a
| war is not morally satisfying. I think this is very very hard for
| Americans to understand, as our military tradition has centered
| on WWII.
|
| I feel pretty confident in saying that no war that America fought
| after WWII has had a satisfying conclusion.
|
| After 'Winning WWII' America also won the peace, which is
| actually why we can feel satisfied now. In no war before or since
| has America won the peace at anything close to the Post-WWII
| level.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Tangential, but TIL there exists a journal of audience &
| reception studies.
| mediumsmart wrote:
| Dear participations: I can't find any audience responses in that
| pdf. Only thoughts about them in a different language.
| chiph wrote:
| > The audience for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
| (1968), which was initially released on 70mm in Cinerama theatres
| (with their huge, curved screens) in April 1968 before going on
| general release on 35mm in January 1969, has always included an
| unusually large number of people (including many academics in
| Film Studies and other disciplines) who felt the need to express
| their feelings and thoughts about the film in writing.
|
| Well, I'm not a letter writer. But if you want to experience the
| film in 70mm (alas, without the curved Cinerama screens) look for
| a showing by Alamo Drafthouse. They have at least one copy of the
| film in 70mm and will occasionally show it at a theater (I saw it
| in Austin). They include the intermission in the show, as 2001
| was considered to be a very long film for it's time (but not
| nearly as punishing as the LOTR extended edition films). The
| "trippy dimensional travel" scene with it's music is
| unbelievable.
|
| There is apparently a 4k transfer now, but I don't know if they
| started with a 70mm print or the later 35mm print.
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