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The
year 2001 has arrived and man’s adventures in space have little or nothing
in common with those imaged by British writer Arthur Charles Clarke
and made famous by “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the film directed by Stanley
Kubrick (1928-1999) and released in 1968.
Let’s
start by summarising the story (or stories) which were told in what
is considered to be an outstanding masterpiece of sci-fi cinema. The
film starts at the dawn of mankind. A group of vegetarian apes fight
over a pool of water with rival carnivore apes and discover a perfectly
geometric slab of stone, a mysterious black monolith.
An
ape uses a bone as a weapon and kills. Four million years later, in
the year 2001, an American scientist sets off to the moon following
the discovery of a black monolith sending radio signals to Jupiter.
The
expedition is the only way to solve the mystery. Thus, the spaceship
Discovery is launched to Jupiter with astronauts Frank Poole and David
Bowman on board, together with three scientists in a state of hibernation.
Discovery is guided by an intelligent talking computer called HAL9000.
During the voyage, HAL rebels, causing the death of Frank Poole by giving
incorrect information and severing the existence of the three men in
hibernation. HAL’s delirious craving for omnipotence is arrested by
David Bowman who succeeds in deactivating the computer.
Bowman
continues on his voyage, finds the black monolith on Jupiter but is
transported into a new dimension of space and time to a 18th century
room where an extremely aged Bowman sees the monolith again and is born
again as a foetus floating above the earth.
Besides
the spectacular use of colour (inspired by hallucinogens), the success
of Kubrick’s film was also due to the soundtrack featuring music by
Richard Strauss, Jhoann Strauss, Aram Khacaturjan and Gyorgy Ligeti.
But now back to the beginning.
What
did Clarke and Kubrick get wrong? Well, there aren’t any airlines offering
trips into space, nor have any multinationals opened space hotels yet.
There is a space-station in our current reality, an ice cold module
covered in solar panels - a far cry from the comfortable, elegant “double
wheel” shown in the film. And what about HAL, the terrible talking computer
who decides to sabotage Discovery’s mission.
Despite
the indisputable progress that has been made in this field, nothing
of the kind has yet been developed, although modern computers that travel
in space are considerably smaller than HAL.
But
some of the film’s predictions have come true.
Made
in 1968, at the height of the cold war, “2001: A Space Odyssey” showed
Russian and American astronauts working side by side: nobody would have
thought it possible at the time. In addition, Discovery’s control module
is full of screens like our present-day Shuttle, whilst at the time,
control module were full of counters and pressure gauges.
The
next question is an obvious one: why is it that years later, films like
“2001: A Space Odyssey”, Star Wars” by George Lucas and “Close Encounters
of the Third Kind” by Steven Spielberg are still talked about? The most
likely explanation is that the scope for adventure has been inevitably
broadened since modern man’s ration of adventure has been unduly cut.
Even before Verne, Wells, Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke, Baudelaire had
the answer: “N’importe où, hors de ce monde!”
As
soon as man reached the extreme confines of the globe and they thus
became irremovable boundaries, flights of fancy became commonplace.
Be warned! Unlike in the past, fantasy is no longer the key to mythical
kingdoms or islands of blissful oblivion. In a world that has borne
witness to the Gulag and concentration camps, in a world in which reason
has been condemned to the shadows of long nights and almost mortal dreams,
fantasy has become a “mixture of hope and terror, enthusiasm and horror”.
By
its very nature, fantasy is forced to look to the future and the cosmos,
but here too, in a realm where space and time know no bounds, it imposes
its will, merciless laws, terrifying automatism and the indifference
of progress. Beneath the recurrent conversations and theories on the
appearance of flying saucers, the underlying fear is the unknown.
May
I remind you of the catchphrase with which the film “Close Encounters
of the Third Kind” was released: “We are not alone”. (traduzione Interpres
sas-Giussano)
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