Cannes gives a tribute that’s truly out of this world
2001: A Space Odyssey, once called trash and now hailed as an ‘incredible masterpiece,’ gets its full due for its 50th anniversary
CANNES, FRANCE— The world wasn’t ready for the extraterrestrial intrigue of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when it arrived in the spring of 1968.
The film looked like a colossal fail until a Hollywood marketer came up with the ad line “The Ultimate Trip” to sell it as a celluloid high for hipsters.
But that was then and this is now: a Cannes Film Festival tribute Sunday hailed 2001as an “incredible master- piece,” to use the words of filmmaker and Kubrick fan Christopher Nolan ( Dunkirk, Interstellar), who helped make the event happen.
Nolan, who prefers analog to digital film, also persuaded studio Warner Bros. to strike a new 70-mm celluloid print that’s “the closest we could get” to the original, along with the room-quaking sound many people remember from widescreen Cinerama viewings at places such as Toronto’s long-gone Glendale Theatre, where 2001played for several years.
Nolan, 47, was 7 years old when his dad took him to see 2001at the “largest cinema in London,” his hometown.
“Like so many others who saw this film, I came out with a new, fresh and changed idea of what movies could do, that I, like so many other filmmakers, have carried with me,” Nolan said.
To name just a few of those filmmakers, along with Nolan and Canada’s Denis Villeneuve, they include George Lucas ( Star Wars), James Cameron ( Avatar), Alfonso Cuarón ( Gravity), Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), Steven Spielberg ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and Alex Garland ( Annihilation).
More amazing, perhaps, than the belated respect afforded 2001is the fact that the film is arguably even more powerful now than it was in 1968, even though its title year is now viewed through a rear-view mirror.
Kubrick and his co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke accurately envisioned a future of interplanetary space travel, hand-held computers, advanced artificial intelligence and extreme paranoia about security matters. In the film, the latter is symbolized by mysterious black monoliths left as sentinels on Earth by an advanced alien race, a discovery covered up by politicians fearful of mass public panic.
What seemed so strange in 1968 now seems a plausible human response to the rise of AI and the exciting/scary possibility that one day we may discover we’re not alone in the universe.
And how does the new/old print of 2001look? Much as I remember it from my earliest screenings as a kid watching it at the Glendale, with the col- ours not quite as bright as in current digital versions of the film, but more like the classic 1960s Technicolor films of its day — and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
(Torontonians will soon be able to see it for themselves: TIFF Bell Lightbox will begin screening this “unrestored” version of 2001starting June 8.)
The experience was movie geek heaven, the only thing missing being the curved Cinerama screen from back in the day — and maybe we’ll also get that at some future anniversary celebration of “The Ultimate Trip.” Godardian film math: Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard to rewrite the rules for Cannes press conferences. Rather than travel to the fest this past weekend to talk about his new film The Image Book, which is competing for the Palme, the lion of the French New Wave and dedicated film iconoclast chose to do individual FaceTime exchanges with journalists.
He’s a frail 87, so the reluctance to travel was understandable, and speaking to him via a communal cellphone was a unique experience, not unlike viewing his new film, which is a potent montage of movie clips, newsreels and his trademark slogans that rage about life on planet Earth.
I asked him whether he still subscribes to his famous 1960s maxim that “a film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.” His answer was as thoughtfully obscure as you’d expect. He said the statement was “a joke” designed to “go against Spielberg and others who said there has to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
“Of course, I didn’t make this a real battle horse, but once I drew a parallel, which wasn’t very successful. It was an equation (and) a child in primary school can easily understand that equation: if X + 3 = 1 then X = -2. And when you produce an image, be it of the past, the present or the future, you have to do away with two images each time to find one really good one. It’s like the equation. That’s the key to the cinema, to a good film. But when you say it’s the key, you shouldn’t forget the lock as well.”