2001
[related: HAL, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, Hāl]
Seminal science fiction film that emerged from a strained collaboration between famed film auteur Stanely Kubrick and pantheist author and professional diver Arthur C. Clarke. The glacially-paced film outlines the malfunctioning of HAL, a soft spoken artificial intelligence who eventually murders the entire crew on the Discovery One spacecraft, save for one captain David Bowman (played by Keir Dullea)[1]. Modeled after systems of AI in development at Bell Laboratories and IBM, HAL displays an affinity for chess, foreshadowing IBM's development of Deep Blue in the late 1990's.[2] Famously, Kubrick refused to divulge the true cause of HAL's malfunction in interviews - even shielding his actors from the machine's intent, causing great frustration amongst cast and crew. Tensions boiled over when Kubrick insisted the final confrontation scene between Bowman and HAL be reshot over 100 times, while giving no additional notes or context. The astronaut-suit clad Bowman, suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, eventually became confused and disoriented, performing the climactic scene in a fugal haze . . . and the director had his take.
Kubrick remained obsessed with artificial intelligence throughout his life, and perished in the midst of developing his magnum opus, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Though Kubrick began work on the film in the early 1970's, it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1999.
Although now widely lauded, 2001 was deeply divisive upon its release. Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky criticized the film's "emotional sterility" and felt it was too reliant on au courant special effects, later releasing his emotive sci-fi masterpiece Solaris in direct response. 2001's juxtaposition of opposing aesthetics - cool alienation mixed with psychedelic abstraction - proved influential in subsequent decades, influencing interior designers, visual artists, and high profile musical acts like Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, alongside various no wave and underground rap groups.[3] [4]
- ↑ Revered stage actor Douglas Rain voiced HAL for the film using effects from the Etro Information Rate Changer, an obsolete analog pitch-alteration tool dating from the 1920's.
- ↑ Cryptolinguists have noted that the spelling of HAL precedes IBM by one letter in each position, perhaps hinting at the provenance of its name. Other camps have hypothesized reference to the term Hāl from Sufi mysticism, a temporary state of elevated consciousness. Unattributable in origin, Hāl is by nature transient yet within the grasp of all living beings.
- ↑ I.E. Konami Dream's phrequeleaked and pitch-shifted ambient single HAL which was illegally embedded on an IBM Deep Blue webpage.
- ↑ Pitch-shifted perhaps in perhaps reference to HAL's formant-darkened hypnotically apathetic vocal cadence.