Dear Sarah (and anyone is interested in it), 

I’ll tell you what I thought about _2001 A space Odissey_ by Stanley Kubrick 
and why I liked it. I would be very happy to have any opinion about it. 

I studied the narrative structure of the film and tried to divide it in 
unities (please, forgive my semiotic-structuralist background, I used to be 
an Eco fan, but at the moment I deny my past).
Organizing the film into a structure was a very hard work because of the 
complexity of the narrative but I did it and it helped me to get into this 
film with all my soul, and to get lost into it. Anyway here is my 
‘segmentation’ of the film, to which you might not agree: 

2001-A SPACE ODISSEY
STANLEY KUBRICK 1968 

PART 

THE DAWN OF MAN  

 -A-
1       DAILY LIFE  OF  MONKEYS
2       FIRST STRUGGLE OF MOONWACHT
3       THE NIGHT SLEEP OF MONKEYS
4       WAKING UP WITH THE MONOLITH
5        MOONWACHT USES A BONE
6       MONKEYS BECOME CARNIVOROUS
7       SECOND STRUGGLE OF MOONWACTH
	
 -B-
8       DOC. FLOYD’S FIRST TRIP
9       DOC. FLOYD’S ARRIVAL
10      FLOYD’S TRIP TO CLAVIUS
11      CLAVIUS
12      FLOYD’S TRIP TO MOON
13      THE MOON 

PART
MISSION JUPITER 

14       FRANK E DAVID ROUTINE ON DISCOVERY-1
15                        D. AND F. HAVE LUNCH AND WATCH THE PROGRAM
16       F. AND D.’S ROUTINE ON DISCOVERY–2
17      F. PLAYS CHESS WITH HAL
18      HAL SIGNALS A BRAKDOWN
19      CHECK UPS
20      D. GOES OUT IN THE SPACE
21      F. AND D. STUDY THE  SUSPECT PIECE
22      F. AND D. CONSULT HAL
23      F. AND D. SI CONSULT EACH OTHER INTO  C-CABINE
24                           F.  IS KILLED BY HAL. D. TRIES TO RECUPERATE THE     
CORPSE  - D. CATAPULT HIMSELF INTO THE SPACECRAFT
25                         D. GETS TO THE CENTRE OF HAL MEMORY AND  DISCOVERS THE 
SECRET OF THEIR MISSION 

PART
JUPITER AND BEYOND
26      D. INTERSECTS THE ORBIT OF THE  MONOLITH
27      SPACE-TIME TRIP
28       NEW DIMENSION
29      THE UNIVERSE AND THE ASTRAL FETUS 


Part one The dawn of man
Section A – Pre-temporal world
As you see, Kubrick conceived a tripartite structure for his film. I divided 
each part in sections and unities (sequences). I divided the first part – 
The dawn of man – in two sections. The first section is about monkeys. In 
this section, we assist to a world without humans and, consequently, without 
time, that is to say without any conception of time. Time is in fact only a 
human convention. It’s true that even if we deny the objectivity of time we 
know that we get older and die, and that the sun rises and sets periodically 
etc. But our conception of time, has everything to do with our need to make 
our world explicable
But the world of monkeys doesn’t need time, it is the world before time was 
born.
The world of monkeys is a *pre-temporal* world, where Time is Zero.
What about the space? If time is absent, space is frozen. Except for a 
couple of very short pans which only discover piece of space, shots don’t 
indulge in any movements of sort. You know why? Because movement involves 
time! At the cinema movement is the absolute witness of the passing of time, 
if the camera moves this implies that time is there, and maybe, life too 
(but this is not relevant). No Time, no movement. That’s it. This is the 
world where time and space don’t really exist, or don’t exist as we think 
they exist. This is a pre-temporal world. 

Section B
Back to the human world, thanks to an enormous time jump. The beginning 
shots of the section are long and slow pans which ‘dances’ in any 
directions. There is the movement of the spaceships and the movement of the 
movie camera which shows them moving. The movements of the movie camera 
implies time and space. There is music and music implies time and acoustic 
space. There is a trip and travelling implies time and space. There are 
human beings who are used to thinking in terms of time and space. In this 
section time is there and is unquestioned. The narrative is linear, we know 
what is happening and what Doc. Floyd is going to do. The shooting is 
classical, symmetrical, linear.
But, if time is an unquestioned concept in this section, it’ s not the same 
thing for space.
The first trip of Loyd is linear in time and space. It is depicted by 
classical shot, without any kind of interferences. The second trip of Floyd, 
the one towards Clavius, shows something. During the sleepy journey of Floyd 
the hostess of the spaceship is showed while bringing food to captains. At 
this moment something interesting happens: we see her rotating in order to 
enter the flight deck. The following shot is upside down, then after a 
rotation the movie camera re-establishes the scene. Now, we can easily think 
that this is an amazing tool used to shock spectators in 1968. Or we can 
think that it has a meaning. I think that as in most of classical American 
movies this scene is anticipation of something. The difference is that in 
classical film anticipations are used as narrative tools, here it is used as 
a logical tool. It anticipates the imminent destruction of the concept of 
space as something featured with points of reference. In that scene we loose 
our points of reference for a short time, and in the movie we are about to 
loose our points of reference definitively. That scene represents an 
anticipation in this sense. It threatens space as we conceive it. So, while 
in the first trip both time and space are linear and unquestioned, in the 
second trip we assist to the threaten of a possible collapse of space.
The third trip presents a more strong threaten. While going towards Moon and 
Monolith, Floyd and friends are shot in three moments by a handcamera (?),  
space is shaky, it is adherent to human perceptions and not to human 
conceptions. Both in the ship and on the Moon  characters are lost in an 
uncertainty and indeterminacy, they are in danger because space is in 
danger. We are thrilled by the event and menaced by the camera, what we see 
is a doubtful world. The Space as we conceive it is about to die. 

Part two: Mission Jupiter
Never more points of spatial referrence. The world David anf Frank live in 
is a world without gravity and without directions. Frank runs around the 
room horizontally, he first seems to go up then he seems to go down but he 
doesn’t do neither the first nor the second thing. He’s only going, he’s 
running in a space which is different from our space. Our questions about 
direction and orientation simply don’t make sense. After that, we see the 
image of David, who is rotating, reflected in Hal’s eye. After that, in the 
sequence in which Frank and David are eating, there is a tansgression of the 
axis on action, the most important of classical rules of American cinema.
Thus, the loss of an oriented and solid space is embodied at scene level (F. 
running), at frame level (D. rotating) and at editing level (the overcoming 
of axis). The collapse of space, or at least of a structured space, pervades 
all of cinematographic tools. A following scene which shows Frank and David 
in the same space (the flight deck) but in different condition of gravity, 
confirms the destruction of a structured space. 

Third part: Jupiter and beyond (I don’t know if this is the real title, I’ve 
translated the Italian one)
Right after the destruction of space, here is the destruction of time. David 
meets the Monolith and makes a Space-Time trip. At the end of this terrific 
experience, he enters a new dimension where time is exploded. The world 
discovered by David is the opposit of that of monkeys, it’s not a world 
without time, but a world filled with any times which are contracted into a 
single moment. The world of monkeys was a pretemporal world, in which time 
is Zero. In this world Time is N.
After the time without time, time was invented by men . Now a new time has 
arrived, in which time is no longer structure or measurable, but 
simultaneous and chaotic. And we know that chaos is not disorder but a 
superior order which human mind doesn’t understand. 

In conclusion, I think that by destructuring time and space, which are the 
main coordinates which rule our mind and our relation to the world, Kubrick 
is trying to say something about knowledge. Maybe that we should overcome 
the euclidean and cartesian logics to reach knowledge and truth, which might 
be very far from our perfectly working structured world. 

That’s what I thought when I saw the movie.
I hope that it was enough understandable, I’m writing without worrying about 
writing well, because it’s like talking. I prefer to be natural. So, please 
forgive my mistakes! 

Bye bye 

P.s. Too long? 

Francesca