2001: A Space Odyssey

It's been crunch time at the University. Final projects and papers galore. Nothing new though. Recently, I finished a short film, Can't Be Friends, a piece centered around the relationship of a couple who are torn apart by their child. The piece was made as my final for my Liberal Arts degree in the Blount Program. In this post, I didn't want to focus on the film so much as the essay accompanying it. I decided  to compare the merits between one of my favorite movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the message I wanted to convey through my film.

 2001 A Space Odyssey By Clarke, Arthur C./ Kubrick, Stanley.

You can watch the entire movie in increments HERE. It's not a hard read, but I understand the attention span can waiver. I know it happens to me even when I'm checking something out I'm interested in. If you do take out the time to read send me your thoughts.

The Interpretation of Cinema as Art and its Ties to Human Development

 History has displayed the fact mankind has a distinctive attraction towards our gift of creativity. This is not to say other animals do not retain the capacity, but we must acknowledge no alternate reature capably reaches the bounds of artistic gab the human mind displays. Whether the ability to formulate artistic endeavors arose from the scribbling our prehistoric ancestors or the divine outpouring of an unknown benevolent being we must give reference to the understanding the creative arts is a byproduct of gene-culture coevolution. This is “the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated” (Wilson 218). Steadily, people have realized “that the arts are not solely shaped by errant genius out of historical circumstances and idiosyncratic personal experiences” (Wilson 218). Instead, “the roots of our inspiration date back in deep history to the genetic origins of the human brain” (Wilson 218). All forms of art find their ancestry in the biological roots of humanity’s history. Whether poetry, painting, theater, or cinema, mankind’s evolutionary growth has provided the fodder to nourish our intellectual spirit. Combining the subject of my independent project along with the analysis of art within the social and biological aspect, my paper pushes to associate the importance of man’s biological functions in the epiphany of the humanities. When taking into consideration the scope of my short film project Can’t Be Friends, this being the interpretation of cinema as art, we must also track cinema’s development into a medium of artistic representation through the examination of my piece along with films deemed works of art not only in the field of cinema, but art in general.

         In Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate we are given an in-depth exploration of human nature in connection with its biological roots. Pinker explains how many of the established forums of interpreting the human condition such as the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine do little justice to the complete spectrum mankind’s state. The idea human’s decisions, thoughts, and personalities solely stem from society and upbringing is outdated. It is also partially inconsistent with the true mechanisms behind our nature. Instead, we must view the average person as complete combination of genetics and evolution bore from the millennia of ancestry once scouring our world as well as the outcome of our societies’ culture (Pinker 5-58).

This is all said to set up the reasoning behind both Pinker and Wilson’s interpretation of the arts and culture.  Wilson points out that “works of art that prove enduring are intensely humanistic” (Wilson 219). Works of art are may be “born in the imagination of the individuals, nevertheless [they] touch upon what was universally endowed by human evolution” (Wilson 219). It is quite difficult to argue this point when so many universal themes are shared by cultures across the world. In fiction and mythology one can frequently find categories of topics shared in every sub-group’s explanation of their origins. Themes include the story of creation where gods or a god create mankind, the triumph against heavy odds, the odyssey of the hero returning to his land, the world ending in apocalypse, the source of great power such as a tree of life or philosopher’s stone, the nurturing women such as Mother Earth or Gaia, the wise or holy man who has special powers of the mind, the virgin who represents purity, the trickster such as the god’s jest or clown, and the monster that threatens humanity (Wilson 223-224).   

   

How do we account for the universal appeal of these over-reaching themes? Why can we find tales of heroes fighting monstrous odds and stories explaining the creation of man so abundantly? Pinker leads us to understand that culture “can be seen instead as a part of the human phenotype: the distinctive design that allows us to survive, prosper, and perpetuate our lineages” (Pinker 60). This distinctive design naturally makes culture “emerge from that lifestyle” (Pinker 60). Wilson points out the arts spawned from human’s desire to attain some sense of order within the world when we attained a level of intelligence that went beyond basic primal instinct. Other animals have adapted to life that specifically deals with the parts of their existence necessary to keep them alive. For example, does a gazelle need to ponder the existence of God or the beauty of the surrounding landscape when the focal point of its life is making sure a lion, cheetah, hyena, wild dog, or crocodile does not make him a delectable morsel. This formula does not excuse the emergence of art as some unique system of coping inherent to humans just because we are humans. When humans reached the potential of “Homo-level intelligence” the brain began to process in a more advance scenario giving us the ability to make sense of conditions well beyond the realm of instinctive survival. The “evolving brain, nevertheless, could not convert to general intelligence alone: it could not turn into an all purpose computer” (Wilson 225). This meant for many of the thoughts, situations, and events we could not ascertainably explain, the arts “filled the gap” (Wilson 225). Humans of earlier time periods explained the human condition through magic, inexplicable creatures of yore, rituals, and forces of nature that “could be ritualized and expressed in a new, simulated reality” (Wilson 225). The beginnings of the most sophisticated, prehistoric cultural transformation can be seen in the “wall paintings, engravings, and sculptures found caverns of the southern half of Ica Age Europe” (Wilson 226). This dates well beyond the scope of human history giving us a wider scope of the time and power evolution wielded over the course of the arts before we as humans became more-so the forefront leaders in our own capabilities.

Fast-forward to the current representation of culture and you have a miasma of varying sub-groups, fetishes, trends, mainstream and underground movements, genres, counter-culture categories, and customs oozing out of the orifices of the human condition. At some point the arts became more than just a mechanism to organize and understand the world. It evolved into the expression, celebration, and perversion of its natural propensity. I now direct my attention to a significant, yet minute piece of culture’s growing arm of creation, cinema.

As anything else associated with culture and the humanities, cinema can be considered a skill and form blanketed under the arts. Cinema is an art-form with its own aesthetic and varying appeal. Speaking on its ancestry, modern film was preceded by the theater which held many of the key elements seen today such as scripts, sets, costume, directors, production, music, actors and audiences. The key difference begins with the visual display of a film. While a play happens naturally before an audience where everything is in the moment, a film represents a previously recorded work forever inscribed in history once documented through the lens. The film aims to lull you into its aesthetic, slowly pulling the individual from his reality into its own.

While all films can be considered works of art, there are those in particular who transcend the boundary of cinema becoming immortalized as a symbol of aesthetic akin to great literary and artistic painting counterparts. An example of this is Stanley Kubrick’s work, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  2001 fleshes out the spectrum of man from his primitive beginnings to his exploration into the unknown fathoms of space. Summarized, the plot involves a team of astronauts on a mission to Jupiter who face harrowing circumstances when the artificial intelligence on their craft turns against them. Still, such a summary does not do justice to the grand scale the movie extends towards. Produced during the height of the space race between USA and the USSR, the movie sections itself into four parts: The Dawn of Man, The Lunar Journey in the Year 2000, Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later, and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite (Dirks). Each piece delves into a personal segment of mankind’s growth. The Dawn of Man interprets our creation and our transition from instinctive animal to a creature capable of formulation and thought. This is witnessed by the ape-man’s realization a bone can be used as a weapon. The Lunar Journey in the Year 2000 transitions the audience from the primitive epiphany of prehistoric man to millions of years in the future where space travel and exploration is a dream materialized. Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later delves into the main plot examining the power and repercussion of technology capable of rational thought and decision. Finally, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite enters the realm of human rebirth, the cosmos giving life to a being evolved from the denizen of man, yet functioning on a higher plane we cannot fathom at this moment. The “first spoken word is almost a half an hour into the film, and there’s less than 40 minutes of dialogue in the entire film” (Dirks). The film is delivered at a mind-crunching slow pace with either music or silence, but neither at the same time (Dirks). The film leaves much of its story to the imagination giving the audience a film equivalent to a Rorschach blot, yet its silent imagery and mysterious symbolizations of life and rebirth convey a message pleasing to the aesthetics of human nature.

2001: A Space Odyssey gives credibility to cinema as a powerful art-form. It displays the work of film to be another piece of Wilson and Pinker’s explanation of human nature in adaption to its environment. Art has evolved beyond the rudimentary need to explain and now creates that which the world did not naturally form. I believe this supports the idea of gene-culture coevolution as the film touched on American culture during its time, while delving into the man’s continued struggle to understand and define his world.

My film Can’t Be Friends pales in comparison to such a feat, but on a much more minute scale works under the same banner, cinema as art. By encompassing the relevance of cinematography while experimenting with the emotions invested within the parental abandonment experience, I created a small-scale film representing an issue many can associate with. In the same way, Kubrick took a large scale issue, the creation of man and the power of technology, and raised its understanding to a widespread audience. Kubrick used music, silence, and ambiguity to create a world of awareness inherent only to the audience, while I took the conventions of the dynamics of relationships and set the entire film silent giving the audience the ability to reflect on the reasoning and outcome.


Bringing this all-together, one must consider art an age old condition and phenotype, a society driven outcome of the human condition and an evolutionary piece of our growth as instinctual driven creatures. Literature, cinema, or art, consider them unique, yet generic, or should I say genetic. A segment of our identity as an animal, philosophically and biologically.

             

Bibliography

Dirks, Tim. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). May 1996. 24 November 2010 .

Pinker, Steven. "The Blank Slate." New York: Viking Penguin, 2002.

Wilson, E.O. "Consilience." Religion, Ethics and. New York: Brown Little, 1998.