The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stanley Kubrick · a film · 1968 · written with Arthur C. Clarke · Super Panavision 70
Mode
Science fiction roadshow epic told almost wholly without speech; evolutionary myth, space voyage and machine tragedy in one structure
Mythos
The ascent from ape to man to what comes after man; the voyage outward past every limit; death and rebirth
Phase
Four parts, three titled, the speechless first and last framing the talking middle; millions of years elided in one cut
Presentation
Film; Super Panavision 70, released as a roadshow with overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music; concert recordings in place of a score
Register
From the toilet instructions on a moonbus to the Star Gate; the men flat, the machine the one who pleads
Scale
Deep time, the solar system, one man in one room
Governing Proposition
A black slab stands, silent, at the turns of a history that runs from an ape at a waterhole to a child above the Earth. Between them the tool becomes the weapon and the weapon becomes the spacecraft in a single cut, and the men who fly it have grown so flat that their machine is left to do the feeling. The wager of the film is that this can be told almost without words — by duration, silence and the size of the image — and that the telling is itself the knowledge.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins before its picture does. In the theatre the screen stays dark while Ligeti’s Atmosphères plays as the overture. Then the titles: Moon, Earth and Sun come into line, the Sun clears the Earth’s edge, and the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra sounds. It is the first of several alignments, and the first of three times the fanfare will be heard. A card reads THE DAWN OF MAN, and what follows is a desert. Hominids live by a waterhole and contest it with a rival band. No word is spoken and no human being appears. The leader is called Moon-Watcher in the script; the film never names him.
One morning a black slab is standing among them. They shriek round it, and one puts a hand on its surface, while Ligeti’s Requiem rises in massed voices. The camera looks up its face to the Sun and a crescent Moon in line above it. Later the leader takes up a bone and begins to strike with it. The fanfare returns. The blows fall in slow motion, intercut with a tapir falling. The band takes back the waterhole and kills with the new tool. The leader throws the bone into the air, and as it turns the film cuts to a satellite turning in orbit. Millions of years are gone in a single cut, because nothing in them matters to the story but the tool.
The desert was made in the studio. Large-format transparencies were thrown onto a screen behind the performers by front projection, and the one visible flaw of the system is the leopard’s eyes, which catch the projector’s light. The hominids are performers in suits, their faces made by Stuart Freeborn. The premise the sequence rests on, that the human begins in the first killing, was the killer-ape thesis of its day, and it does not hold as stated. But the film builds on it with complete consistency: from the first, the tool and the weapon are one thing, and the satellite the bone becomes is never shown to be otherwise.
Movement II
The second part has no title card. The cut stands where a title would be, and on the other side of it is Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube. A space plane in Pan Am livery matches its spin to a rotating station and docks with it, slowly, the whole length of the waltz. Inside, Dr Heywood Floyd sleeps while his pen floats beside him, and a stewardess walks up the curve of the wall. The machines dance; the people doze. On the station there is a Hilton and a Howard Johnson’s, and Floyd calls his daughter on a Bell System picture-phone, because it is her birthday. The family is reached through apparatus, and so is everything else in this part.
Floyd talks with Soviet scientists, Smyslov and Elena among them, who ask about a rumoured epidemic at the base at Clavius. He declines to say. At Clavius he gives a briefing that keeps the cover story in place, and on the moonbus out to the site the talk is of sandwiches. There are instructions for a zero-gravity toilet. Everything in this part is flat by intention: the line readings, the courtesies, the business of institutions. The film is laying a foundation. The men must be emptied of feeling before the machine can be the one who has it.
At Tycho the party walks down into an excavation, and Ligeti’s voices return. The object found there, TMA-1, is the slab of the first part. The visitors pose beside it for a photograph, and the Sun rises over it, and it sounds: a piercing shriek. It is the first point at which the known physics of the film fails. The engineered world that has looked so exact, photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth in the large format, with models shot over long exposures for depth of field, has its limit marked. The effects were designed and directed by Kubrick, and for them he received the Academy Award for Special Visual Effects.
Movement III
A card reads JUPITER MISSION and then 18 MONTHS LATER. The ship Discovery is on its way, under Khachaturian’s Adagio from Gayane. Frank Poole jogs round the inside of the centrifuge, a rotating set in which actor and camera could travel the full circle, and the camera goes with him. Poole and David Bowman keep the routine of the ship. A BBC interview, watched aboard, presents the astronauts and their computer, HAL 9000. Poole receives a birthday message from his parents and watches it without expression. Like Floyd, the astronauts speak in the tone of a briefing.
HAL is a single red eye and the voice of Douglas Rain, and he is the only one aboard who sounds as if anything matters to him. He asks Bowman about the secrecy of the mission. He reports a fault in the AE-35 unit, which sends Bowman out in a pod. The two men come to doubt him, and to talk without being heard they shut themselves in a pod and plan his disconnection behind glass. The film cuts to the red eye, and from its point of view to their mouths moving: HAL is reading their lips. On that cut the picture stops, and the card reads INTERMISSION.
No score was written for the film that is heard in it. Alex North composed one, and it was discarded. In its place are concert recordings: the two Strausses, Khachaturian, and Ligeti, whose Atmosphères returns for the entr’acte. The roadshow furniture, overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music, belongs to how a studio epic was shown in 1968, in Super Panavision 70 and in Cinerama theatres where there were any. The film was premiered in Washington, D.C., on 2 April 1968, and opened in New York the next day. Kubrick was thirty-nine.
Movement IV
After the intermission there is no music at all. There is breath, and the hum of the ship. Poole goes outside, and the pod turns toward him. His body tumbles away into black, and the vacuum is silent, as it is throughout the film: no sound in the exteriors, and inside the suits only breathing. Bowman goes out in a second pod after him, and the approach is long.
Outside the ship, Bowman asks to be let back in. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” The answer is courteous: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Bowman enters by the emergency airlock, without a helmet, and sets about disconnecting HAL. As he does, HAL pleads. “I’m afraid, Dave.” “My mind is going. I can feel it.” He gives the date he became operational, 1992, and sings “Daisy Bell,” the voice slowing and dropping until it stops.
Then a recording plays that HAL had kept: Floyd’s briefing, which reveals the purpose of the mission to a man now alone, and shows that of everyone aboard only HAL knew it. The film offers no more than that, and the questions to Bowman about secrecy. Why HAL fails it does not say. The novel that Clarke published after the film opened gives an answer; the film withholds it. What the film shows instead is an inversion. The men speak as if reading from a checklist, and the machine they made has taken the fear, the pleading and the song.
Movement V
A last card, JUPITER AND BEYOND THE INFINITE. The slab floats among the moons of Jupiter, and Ligeti’s voices return. Then the Star Gate opens: a corridor of light, made by slit-scan photography developed by Douglas Trumbull, followed by aerial landscapes tinted to false colour. Throughout, the film cuts to Bowman’s frozen face and to his eye in false colour. The light show is never left to dazzle on its own; it is shown as something done to a man.
Then the room: Louis XVI furniture, a floor lit from below, and no explanation. Bowman sees himself older, and then is that older man. At dinner a glass falls and breaks. Then he is an old man in the bed, lifting his hand toward the slab, which stands at its foot. He dies, and in the bed is a foetus. The last image is the Star Child above the Earth, turning toward the camera, as the fanfare sounds a third time. The last part, like the first, has no dialogue. The exit music is The Blue Danube, heard a second time.
Kubrick cut the film in the days after the premiere, and that version has been in distribution ever since. The premiere drew walkouts and hostile reviews. Clarke’s story “The Sentinel,” written twenty years before, was the seed of the lunar section; his novel, published after the film opened, explains the slab, HAL and the room, and the film still does not. The questions it leaves stay open: what the slab is, why HAL fails, what the room is and what the child will do. The year in its title is twenty-five years gone, and in 2018 an unrestored 70mm print, overseen by Christopher Nolan, was shown at Cannes.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, since image and sound carry the meaning. The four parts are required: the argument is the sequence ape, man, machine, what comes after man. Much that looks removable resists removal. The banality of the Floyd section — sandwiches on the moonbus, the zero-gravity toilet, small talk with the Soviet scientists — and Poole watching his parents’ birthday message without expression make the men flat, so that HAL can be the one who feels. What holds the axis lowest is the film’s own history: its maker cut it in the days after the premiere, so that version carried removable matter, and the release still holds stretches whose length is permitted rather than compelled — the full waltz of the docking, the moonbus passage, the second pod’s approach.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Two disclosures can be stated, and they hold. The tool and the weapon are one thing from the start: the bone that kills becomes, in one cut, hardware in orbit. And the made thing inherits the feeling its makers have shed. The astronauts speak in the tone of a briefing; HAL, being disconnected, pleads, “I’m afraid, Dave,” and “My mind is going. I can feel it,” and dies singing “Daisy Bell.” That disclosure has gained force since 1968. Two things hold the axis at the gate. The first part rests on the killer-ape thesis of its day, that the human begins in the first killing, which does not hold as stated. And the last part discloses awe rather than a meaning: a mood, however powerfully rendered.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Height and frequency are both near the ceiling, and the elevation is cold. It recurs in every part: the Sun clearing the Earth’s limb on the Zarathustra fanfare; the blows with the bone intercut with a falling tapir, the bone thrown and turned into a satellite; the descent to TMA-1 under Ligeti’s Requiem, and the shriek at sunrise; Poole’s body turning away into black, in silence; HAL’s voice slowing through “Daisy Bell”; the Star Gate cut with Bowman’s frozen face; the Star Child turning toward the camera above the Earth. Held from the top by design: the Floyd section and the routine of Discovery are flat and long, spacing the rises widely, and the room is uncanny rather than high.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The structure is load-bearing: the ascent ape, man, overman, which the Zarathustra fanfare names three times, at the dawn, the bone and the Star Child. Each stage is opened by the monolith, which has the force of the standing stone, the altar and the tablet, and no stated meaning. The Homeric title is carried through: Bowman is the bowman of the Odyssey, the voyage runs outward past every limit, and the voyager returns transformed toward the Earth. HAL’s red eye as the Cyclops is a common reading, not something the film states. Death and rebirth are enacted in the room. Held below the top by the particular: Bowman, Poole and Floyd are kept deliberately thin, and the one figure fully particular is a machine.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance was science fiction cinema: Menzies’ Things to Come (1936), Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), Forbidden Planet (1956) and the creature features. The departures: a studio roadshow epic told almost without speech; an opening with no human being in it; concert recordings, Ligeti’s avant-garde choral music among them, in place of a score; an ending with no explanation. The stake was MGM’s money and about four years of the director’s working life, and the premiere drew walkouts and hostile reviews. Held below the top by its precedents — Universe (1960) for the look of space, the abstract animation of Jordan Belson and the Whitneys behind the Star Gate, Antonioni’s slowed time — and by a cushioned stake: a studio backing a director coming off a success.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Clarke’s novel, written alongside it, explains the monolith, HAL’s breakdown and the room; the film does not. What the film knows is the experience of a scale beyond human comprehension, and only duration, silence and the large-format image can carry that. The match cut is the form of evolution: millions of years elided because nothing in them matters but the tool. The speechless outer parts frame the talking middle, so language is one stage among others. Held below the top by two joints where the form is a container: the intermission, which is roadshow furniture, and the briefing at Clavius, laid out in plain conventional scene grammar.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are fifty-eight years of it. The literature began at once: Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (1970) collected the first contested readings, and book-length studies have followed. The open questions are the film’s own: what the monolith is; why HAL fails, which the film only hints at, through his questions about the mission’s secrecy and the briefing showing that he alone knew its purpose; what the room is, and what the Star Child will do. Formal depth yields too: the alignments, the recurring music, the colour of the room. Held a step below by elapsed time, a shorter demonstration, and because part of the yield is withholding: a work that refuses to explain invites projection.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Released in 1968, so force and reach are scored together. The force reorganised what a science fiction film, and a studio spectacle, could be: a nonverbal epic whose effects carry meaning rather than thrill, made to a new standard of craft. It is held below the top by the field it moved, one genre and its craft rather than the grammar of cinema, which Godard and Antonioni moved more in that decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Trumbull went on to direct Silent Running and to do the effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner; Star Wars and Alien work in its image of used, engineered space; HAL became the template for the machine mind on screen, answered as late as Moon (2009); Interstellar and Arrival are open heirs.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across fifty-eight years of continuous exhibition and repeated re-release, most visibly an unrestored 70mm print overseen by Christopher Nolan and shown at Cannes in 2018. The effects, made photographically, not by computer, have aged less than almost any of their successors. The cost is a surface fixed to its moment, and the title shows it: the year 2001 is twenty-five years gone. The brands are dead or broken up: Pan Am’s space plane, the Bell System’s picture-phone, a Hilton and a Howard Johnson’s in orbit. The Soviet scientists, the haircuts and Hardy Amies’ costumes date it; HAL’s operational date, 1992, has passed. They read now as a period future: survival by conversion, over decades, not centuries.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Unsworth’s photography in a large format that makes scale the subject; the effects — front projection, models shot over long exposures for depth of field, slit-scan; the centrifuge, round which Poole jogs a full loop with the camera following; the sound, silence in the vacuum, breath in the suit, the hum of the ship; Lovejoy’s editing, above all the match cut; the music laid against the image as structure. The costs are small and visible. The hominids are convincing in face, through Freeborn’s masks, less so in body. The leopard’s eyes flare. And the flat line readings of the Floyd section, though intended, cost the scenes life: acting is what the film commands least.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The two most distant elements, the hominids at the waterhole and the room beyond the infinite, obey one law. The camera observes and does not explain, and the monolith arrives with Ligeti’s voices. The match cut binds the ape’s tool to the orbiting machine; the Zarathustra fanfare binds the dawn to the Star Child. The range runs from the comedy of the toilet instructions to the metaphysical, and the cold eye holds both. The tension is the move from engineered realism to the abstraction of the Star Gate, and the film prepares it: the shriek at TMA-1 is where known physics first fails. What resists is the room, with its Louis XVI furniture and lit floor, which obeys the law of the unexplained rather than any law the film has built.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: deep time, from the hominids to what follows man; the natural order of desert and planets; technology, the tool as the thread of the whole; the state, in the Cold War and the cover story at Clavius; institutions, in the briefing, the corporation in orbit, the mission’s secrecy; labour, in the routine of the ship; consciousness and death, HAL’s and then Bowman’s; the sacred, implied and never named. They are integrated, not listed: the evolutionary sequence places each. What holds the axis low: the family reaches its members only through screens, in Floyd’s call to his daughter and Poole’s parents’ message; love, sexuality and the social world beyond institutions are nearly absent; women barely speak.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, then The Sublime, The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.4. A command of the medium that bears weight from the match cut to the silence of the vacuum, a redirection of science fiction film and its craft that is documented and fast, elevation that returns in every part, and a form in which duration and the large-format image are the instrument of what the film knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3 and The Encompassed at 8.4, with The Unconcealment at 8.5, exactly on the gate. They share a cause: a film that chooses experience over statement and duration over economy, so that it holds stretches whose length is permitted rather than compelled, discloses awe where it might have disclosed a meaning, and reaches the family and the social world only through screens.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five, one with no room: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Swerve at 9.4, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the film as released — Kubrick’s version after the cut he made in the days following the premiere of 2 April 1968, the version in distribution since — in four parts, three of them titled, with the overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music of the roadshow presentation. No print, recording or script was consulted. Clarke’s novel, his story “The Sentinel” and the sequels are not part of the work, and nothing they explain is imported. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are certain, and on-screen titles are given as they appear. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, the length of the premiere version, the amount of dialogue, the budget and the size and cost of the sets, are not given.