BEYOND: THE MADMAN AND SIDEREAL CINEMA
(on 2001: A Space Odyssey)
– For one must be able at times to lose oneself if one wants to learn something from things that we ourselves are not.1
I read: "New battles". And then: "After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!"2. 2001 (also) tells us of God's death, of his new death, of the shadow's defeat, and therefore of the new light. The michelangelean gesture of the old man pointing at himself (the rationally shaped monolith irrationally wandering through space: a human monolith) is the source of a new light, of a new life, it's the creation of the new man, son of man, in the first year of the third millennium – a year after when, aged 33, Adrian, the new Christ-Faust son of Mary-Rosemary shall die crucified: Polanski's film is also about God's death, and 2001 is its continuation.
A man of theatre once told me: "I'm nostalgic about the year 4000". I reply to him with ambiguous words: "We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there – and there is no more 'land'!"3. When two-thirds into the film I read "Jupiter and beyond the infinite", I feel like I'm losing my balance and that I find myself in a fundamental turning point – and not only of the film. And now either I refuse to continue on this journey or I accept it completely: either I share of the dimension of the irrational – to achieve, beyond the infinite, the total rational-irrational dimension (where there is no more "land") – or I reject it. And, for better or worse, they reject it – those who have both of their feet firmly on land and that see the irrational as a disease and the irrational ones as sick. But, "finally, the great question would still remain whether we can do without illness, even for the development of our virtue; and whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self knowledge do not need the sick soul as much as the healthy; in brief, whether the will to health alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice and a piece of most refined barbarism and backwardness"4: health, rationality, that's what the apes discover in "the dawn of man"; but from them there will develop a man gifted only with a "sterile" rationality, only half a man. It's not by chance that the film, divided into three parts by three title cards, does not distinguish the apes' section from that of Clavius, both equally belonging to "the dawn of [the new] man"; just as, not by chance, the great artificial satellite that spins to the rhythm of a waltz reminds us the ferris wheel at Vienna's Prater5, for it is contemporary to it, belonging to its same culture: from the Prater to the satellite, as from the apes to the men that both touch the mysterious monolith with their hands, there is no "historical leap" – a leap that, on the contrary, will be taken "18 months later", perhaps unconsciously so, by the two astronauts aboard the "Discovery", this elongated worm creeping through space. But, once again, the leap does not happen without conflicts; for David Bowman may succeed, he must overcome some "trials", he must undergo some battles. He's not alone in the "Discovery": accompanying him, there are five people who must all be "overcome": the three hibernating scientists, HAL 9000 and Frank Poole. This last one in particular is presented as substantially analogous to Dr. Floyd. The sequence involving Dr. Floyd and some observations on Frank Poole are in this sense revealing: on the one hand, in them we see in action a rationality that uses its own powers in order to conquer and to repress, a rationality that does not count on unknowns – and which will end up a victim of these; and, parallel to that, we see a cinema that makes use, in a refined manner, of the most customary stereotypes of the science-fiction cinema made in USA; in Floyd, the present of a civilization and of a cinema is reflected; and then we have Poole who, although standing one step ahead of Floyd (observe how different his televisual relation to his family members is), is contrasted to David Bowman – the man of the future – by the efficacy of his body (he works out during his breaks) and the efficacy of his operational intelligence (he plays chess with HAL; David, on the contrary, shows him the drawings he's done – artistic intelligence!), which render him a man still stuck to the present, not sufficiently unhooked from the "land", not ready, or willing, to journey beyond the infinite (he'll accomplish this journey, yes, but by passively plunging through space). The total man shall be born out of an eye, out of a curious and restless man, out of a David Bowman who overcomes that which he is inclined to be towards that which he should be, towards that which he can and must be (his name, biblical and michelangelean, and his surname, Bow-man, are prophetical).
When I speak of the irrational, I allude to that temptation that disturbs western culture, temptation for something other than diversity: a nostalgia for our native, ancestral union, an aspiration towards reconstructing this primitive harmony, perhaps, for us westerns, an image of the East, jungian mandalas or renoirian rivers (or little red books?...). 2001 is the story of a great mutation. "It is a curious fact", Jung observes, "that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese has never developed what we call science. Our science, however, is based upon the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth. But a great change in our standpoint is setting in. What Kant's Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics. The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions [...] every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception. The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. [...] But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one [...]"6. And Nietzsche adds: "but [we] haven't got over, got behind the picture. [...] Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces"; but "an intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment – that saw the stream of the event – would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness"7. David is the knowledge of the continuum (of the circle and of the spiral, as we'll see); to affirm himself, he must free himself from his, and ours, present, not as much of Floyd or Poole as of HAL 9000, the pure, exemplary, divine rationality incapable of making "human errors". HAL is, in the economy of the film, a vengeful god, with his omnipresent Eye that sees man sinning and that judges him, emitting immutable sentences. But this time, man does not repent; if Abraham's gesture is repeated, offering the body of Isaac-Poole to the god HAL, its meaning won't be repeated, for the stretched out arms which signal an offering must let go of him in order to violate the sacred tabernacle, in order to open, with a sacrilegious and liberating gesture, the narrow door which leads into the forbidden places where the assassination of God shall take place. God painfully regresses: becomes man, child, ape. David rebels, progresses: the supreme gesture takes this new Ulysses beyond the pillars of Hercules of an exclusively rational spacetime; with childish eyes – sensible to the new – he sees, experiences and lives the Great Adventure: the descent into Hades or/and into the mother's womb, discovery and/or creation of spermatic universes where – in the past and/or in the future – we watch the creation of the universe and/or of a human fetus. Out of the adventure, of the exemplary experience, one exits recreated: time and space, past and present, macrocosms and microcosms no longer exist: a human mind can go beyond these divisions; it can visit new lands, it can still discover, invent, create; David knows that, now, the difference between God and man is that God moves within the limits of the infinite, while man moves beyond the infinite. From that original nucleus which wee glimpse in a few shots, between the lightwaves that invade the screen, a galaxy, the earth's core, an atom or a spermatozoid is born, through the work of man, the new man, gifted with a "divine", divinely human intelligence... Abraham's sacrificial gesture was against man and for God; that of David's is for man and against God. And as Abraham's gesture has been inverted – in this anti-bible – so has that of Adam: the first man's receiving hand, in the michelangelean last judgement, gained life from God; that of the last man of Adam's lineage – the Old Man with an oriental face – analogously stretched out, gives life, it creates, through a human monolith (the new clay?), the total man, the first man of the new lineage. That it indeed is about aspirations to totality is confirmed by the fact that Kubrick composes his film around the mother-figure (mandalic, still) of the circle: the circular outline of the planets and the sun, the circular artificial satellite and the waltz that accompanies its sweet rotational movements, the circular interior of the spacecraft where the flight attendant moves with humorous graciousness, the circular interior of the "Discovery", and so on, up to the circularity of the planet-placenta which contains the new man, a fetus with open, moving eyes, searching, intelligent, circular eyes... The circle is becoming, it is action, it is continuity: it is the negation of death. The circle of 2001, therefore, is a circle which enlarges its own movement, that is, a spiral. Don't we get the impression – passing from the apes' episode to that of Clavius, and from Clavius to the one aboard Discovery, and from that to beyond the infinite, that is, this quick succession of four ages of man – of vertiginously traveling through a spiral and losing the notions of causality (who doesn't get lost trying to follow the plot of 2001?), first outwards and then extremely fast inwards, finally returning, in the last shot, to the central nucleus from which we started (but enriched by that new element, that new man born out of movement)? 2001 is more than a planetary film, it's a galactic film.
2001 is a comical film. As a total film, which strives towards covering the continuum of human experiences, it cannot shy away from facing the contradiction that would be – for a "balanced" film – to introduce an abnormal dimension: but since this film does not wish to be balanced, or wishes it in a superior level, it was indispensable, already in the level of its theoretical projection, to foresee its comical dimension. Which is so magnificently incarnated that it no longer exhausts itself only in its structural function, but manages to be enjoyable as such: it is simultaneously an element of balance and of imbalance, of deviation and of harmony. It is, more than anything, a salutary dimension: humor, when one manages to notice all the miniatures and toys among the millions the film cost, seems to me like a high form of serenity! "The lovely human beast seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well; it becomes 'serious'! And 'where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing' – that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all 'gay science'."8
2001 is an optimistic film. Its opposite is the (only) other true seventy-millimetric film, Playtime: there, the passage from chaos to cosmos to chaos took place under the sign of tragedy, the time for playing was a time for death; here, cosmogony takes place under the sign of the highest faith and of the deepest joy. 2001 is a vital film: it speaks to us of life and it creates it in the theater, as we watch it, because it is a joyous film. And to vitalize, to return to the spectator the sense of his own physical individuality isn't the last of reasons for which artworks are made and continue to be made. 2001 is a film that entertains and awes (isn't that what Brecht used to say?).
2001 is a film about cinema and about the spectatorial stance. It tells the story of the eye and of its metamorphosis: the phosphorescent eye of the tiger, the female ape's eye that gazes into the sky, Floyd's dim eye, HAL's fixed eye, David's bright eye, David's colorful eye, David's monochrome eye, the rotating eye of the new Adam; and Kubrick's cine-eye, and finally the spectatorial eye. The total fields are open so that the spectator, developing his own inner tensions, may play by freely chasing images (and sounds): this is also the "new American cinema", overground cinema. Godard once said, of a film: "It's no longer about reality or fiction, nor of one overcoming the other. It's about something else entirely. What? The stars maybe, and men who like to look at the stars and dream"9. And Cocteau: "But evasion has nothing to do with true poetry. It's the invasion that counts [...] the invasion, the collective hypnosis of an audience which we don't wake up and which we finally push deep into themselves"10; "because, as Goethe used to say, it is by tightening up against oneself that we risk finding fraternal souls"11. And Artaud, Breton, Buñuel, all agree with Cocteau: only the imagination can apprehend that which can be. Recovering the dimension of the fantastical, 2001 founds the possibility of a new "authoritarian", screenic cinema, made of full, clean, definitive images, of choices unequivocal and yet rich in ambiguity. This is where Kubrick's optimism, which is also cinematographical, resides: the new cinematographic spectator (who perhaps isn't "an other" in relation to the current one, but simply the "other" who hides within himself, his repressed partner) can let himself be captured by the fascination of the screen, can let himself go, and dream. Because, if 2001's harmony is only screenic, a "dream", the film also directly poses us a question: doesn't the total harmony pass by the dream? Doesn't the "transcendent", so-called "alienated" image, the "cinema of ideas", give us an harmony still too "ideal", too rational, too platonic, that is, too partial? Isn't the recovery of the irrational, of the fantastic, of the imaginary, of the oneiric – which, in the cinema, must pass by the screen – capable of achieving more ambitious and "stellar" goals? In short, if one aims all the way up totality, then the authoritarian image shall be meaningful once again. And then the cinema and the arts shall be playful once again, and the "losing in oneself" of those who with childish eyes gaze at the childish psychedelic effects or at the dazzling colors that invade the screen shall regain its beauty. In the splendour of 70mm, we find once again the miniatures and effects of Méliès and the colors of Walt Disney, as in Partner and Made in USA. The spectator of 2001 must also be the primitive spectator, with clean eyes; that is, with a thirst for discovery, ready for surprises, free of prejudices and moralisms, of castrating censorships; that is, also: intelligent, as the spectator who Rossellini guides with his hand along the strange itinerary that leads from the friars of Francesco to the luminous face of Irene (in that authentic "Chinese" film that is Europa '51) and to the little monkey of India (that is, still, by the doorstep of the East – seen through western eyes, naturally).
2001 is an odyssey: an epic film. It is a cosmogony: a mythical film. But, since its time isn't static, motionless, but rather a time of regeneration, a creative time, the time of becoming, we shall say that 2001 is also a great film on the idea of history. It is, above all, these three things at the same time. Because only in the new epic of the historical-mythical man, the total man, it is possible to glimpse the man of the future, of the third millennium (myth and history, both opposites, were already inseparably united in Bezhin Meadow, a sublime science-fiction film...).
2001 is a religious and mystical film; or better, it is a film about religion and about mysticism. It recovers their essence, that which serves us, in order to recover – and overcome – Homer's happiness, the happiness of our Greek childhood, when it weren't the gods who created men but men who created the gods. "...Perhaps religion could have been the strange means of making it possible one day for a few individuals to enjoy the whole self-sufficiency of a god and all his power of self-redemption. Indeed – one may ask – would man ever have learned to feel hunger for himself and to find satisfaction and fullness in himself without this religious training and prehistory? Did Prometheus first have to imagine having stolen light and pay for it before he could finally discover that he had created light by desiring light, and that not only man but also god was the work of his own hands and clay in his hands?".12
2001, starting from the myth (the dawn of man) and passing through history (man – both Soviet and American! – at the apex of his technical and scientific achievements), takes us beyond myth and beyond history, and without resorting to God.
" 'God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!' Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. 'I come too early', he then said; 'my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars – and yet they have done it themselves!' ".13
2001 is the film of a proud and modern man. It is an apocalyptical film, as is the last short film by Straub, also a proud and modern man; and the road which it points to is that of a sidereal cinema, glimpsed in the stars of Stromboli, in the miracle and "life" of Ordet, in the jet of Simon of the desert, in the night which ends Playtime, in the red sun of Dillinger is dead, in the dawn of The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, in the planetary conflict between Eros and Thanatos in Trasferimento di Modulazione, in the common palpitation of macro and microcosms in The Art of Vision, etc. etc. In front of such a spectacle, which goes beyond cinema, the problem then is: are we up to these men who already think in terms of the future? How many of us are ready to take the giant leap? Who will be left behind? Who is already irreparably behind?
– ADRIANO APRÀ
Originally published in Cinema & Film #7-8, winter-spring 1969.
Translated from the Italian by Gabriel Carvalho.
Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science, aphorism 305. Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff for Cambridge University Press.
The Gay Science, aphorism 108.
The Gay Science, aphorism 124.
The Gay Science, aphorism 120.
As well as the Great Wheel which was a part of the Universal Expo in Paris in 1900, a symbol of and an act of faith in progress.
This satellite wheel is also one of the erotic elements of the film (2001 is also a great erotic film). The penetration of the small "Pan American" ship (with its so-aseptic flight attendant and passengers) into the central rectangle of the satellite (equally aseptically inhabited) has a clearly sexual value: but a mechanical, degraded, "genital" sexuality, worthy of a unidimensional civilization. Parallel to that, and in opposition to it, we'll experiment a "polimorphically perverted" sexuality (which prescinds from the genitals and involves the whole body – the body of the spectator, who's reduced to a kid "playing") in the sound-optical penetration which characterizes the so-called psychedelic sequence: the eros "beyond the infinite". From this total sexual act, the new man shall be conceived.
Carl Gustav Jung, Foreword to the I Ching.
The Gay Science, aphorism 112.
The Gay Science, aphorism 327.
Jean-Luc Godard's Au-delà des étoiles, a review of Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory, in Cahiers du Cinéma #79 [translated from the French].
Jean Cocteau, Entretiens sur le cinématographe (interviews with André Fraigneau), Éditions du Rocher, 2003, pages 51 and 71. [translated form the French]
Jean Cocteau, answer to an interview titled "Le livre blanc du cinéma", published in La Table Ronde #149, May 1960. [translated from the Italian]
The Gay Science, aphorism 300.
The Gay Science, aphorism 125.