Using the Music to Convey the Story

We hear a lot of twaddle about what a genius Kubrick was because, eg, he films exactly down the center of a corridor, spaceship or whatever, when in fact HTFE would you do it?

For mine his genius is in both his music selection and then in the way he uses it, and in 2001 ASO we see this from the very start with the black screen and "black music" to set a black mood.

But then from his vast musical knowledge he selects what was to that time an almost unknown piece of music, ie the initial "fanfare" called Sunrise from Also Sprach Zarathustra, which he repeats twice more in the movie AT appropriate times.

The music has two "false starts" or "yes, this could BE it" statements followed by a third conclusive statement of "this IS it" joining into the triumphant statement to end the piece.

Watch the sequence in the movie if you will, after the initial darkness is punctuated by the MGM announcement.

The music STARTS at the exact moment the Moon slides down from top of screen and the FIRST statement is also exactly as BOTH the Earth and Sun begin to appear, showing the perfect alignment needed for an eclipse.

Then the SECOND statement heralds half the Sun exposed (behind a Waxing Crescent Earth) and the disappearance of the Moon totally from the bottom of the screen.

The Final statements have the full Sun separating from the Earth.

Now one might say (most do) that it is all just "artistic" but IMHO there are some most important "things" going on here (especially compared to the next instance of the music with MoonWatcher) but that is the subject of a far more detailed post.

My point here is to appreciate the expertise required in getting all that "sound & vision" to line up in space and time, and maybe I am more focused on the difficulty having tried to do some similar editing in MovieMaker.

This is the "Trailer" for my new App about The River Thames in England at Thames 'N All and uses the same music to introduce Old Father Thames to the viewer - after a bit of Conrad/Coppola lead-in.

The Great God Gun

On first seeing this movie at about age 65 I was totally UNDERwhelmed by the laborious detail of American "space candy", knowing how Kubrick despised such matters, SO I was taken back to 1961 doing my final High School exam in English [subject] in Australia and the Essay The Great God Gun, but try as I may to Google it I got nowhere.

But just now I finally managed to find it here

The academics who decided how to "learn us culture" back in 1961 had found a collection of essays but had decided that most were in fact not Essays but Articles, so the exam paper question we were primed all year to answer said:

1.  The "Collection of Essays" contains many entries that might be better classified as Articles.  Discuss, giving examples, the difference between the two literary forms.

We were primed as to best example of an Essay being The Great God Gun, and as you read it you will see why I had the flashback when watching this movie, reinforced by the general opinion in forums that the great majority of "sheeple" [or Ultimate Men] did NOT see any deeper meaning than the "basic" Clarke [Darwin ascribed] version of "dumb ape gets smart and becomes man and man goes to Jupiter".

But I had not remembered [after 50 years] that the author had continually reverted back to the comparison to "the savage", so having just now read the Essay again I am even more firmly convinced that this is where Kubrick got his inspiration to put this movie together in the way he did, with two DISTINCT "sides of the fence".  I see this as an example of the same style Kubrick uses to invite ridicule of his apes but at same time agreeing with Nietzsche that the DUMB one is man.

"The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and stone." Poor savage! If we could only take him, with his childlike intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles—how ashamed the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone! How he would abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!"

Stations of the Cross

Sorta goes with Phases of the moon.

However when I first saw this movie 2 years or so back I was immediately taken back 65 years to when, being taken to church [Catholic] by my father [who art in Heaven] I was fascinated by the Stations of the Cross down both walls of the church.  They were of the "carved" type [ie not just paintings] and were quite impressive.

So when I woke from the boring Timothy Leary psychedelic LSD sequence and saw Dave [now in black] seated under the picture of a man in red seemingly hanging from a tree, the "burglar alarm" [if you will] that was ringing loud and clear was that this was a Kubrick version of The Last Supper, and of course it further developed that way, right down to the Judas spilling of the salt.

 The one I had in mind was Station #12 which I called the wailing women, and here is a typical depiction:

 Note the outstretched arms of the distressed woman, and if we compare to ASO we see:

 We have the same type of wailing women and outstretched arms.  The man is in the same plane but is clearly 3 feet higher and his head is slumped forward as for someone who has been hung.  And when we first see Dave in black here his head is slumped right down towards the table as if he is already dead.

I will try to add some video but the issue is these 4 paintings line the side walls of the room as for the Stations of the Cross.  They are based on the idea Kubrick got from the Dorchester Hotel with 4 paintings.  So IMHO he has adapted painting #4 into the one above which is where Dave in red walks towards, sits down and becomes Dave in black, as his life "passes before him" Lester Burnham style.

About Skulls and Eclipses

Please see this video re the Ape segment of Part 1

Comments to follow [if needed]

ISS and other satellites

This post is more to do with checking the "Hollywood physics" in Gravity but I don't have a Gravity blog, so I put it here.

Here is the ISS [International Space Station] web site ISS

And here is a typical trace map of the 90 minute orbit of Earth.

This image has elastic bands stretched around the "fattest part" of my Earth Globe to display 2 orbits, the first [on right] passing over East part of Australia and the left being TWO orbits later [as per map above] just West of Australia.

The orbits stay on the fattest part but "move" to the left by about 3,000 klm for each orbit [so about 6,000 klm as shown above] but in fact it is the 1/16 th rotation of the Earth in the 90 minutes [to the right] that causes the "displacement", and is the reason for the gap in the map above.

In the 90 minutes the Earth rotates 22.5 degrees and my gut feeling is that this is sort of related to the inclination of the Earth itself at the same 22.5 degrees.  Anyone know?

To continue using "round figures" the ISS is traveling at 30,000 kph and is 400 klm above Earth.

This image shows the globe rotated 2 x 22.5 = 45 degrees.  Note I am showing [for convenience of photography] the Earth inclined UP from camera position which is 22 Dec in Australia [Summer] whereas it is really 22 June, however I don't think the ISS minds, albeit the sun shadow in map above would be totally different, with the "wine goblet" turned upside down.

And this one shows the "intersection" point some 45 degrees further on.  Note that the ISS orbit has an Inclination of 50 degrees so both these orbits  "kiss" the 50 Degree South Latitude.

The exact same thing is shown for the top of the orbits over North-West of America

Here are views for both sides of Earth. 

Finally we have a picture to show orbit distances.

If you look over the top of the Globe at the bamboo slats, then the ISS is only the height of one of the slats [about 1 cm] above the Earth and a Jumbo Jet would fly at about the top surface of the elastic band.

Comms satellites would be at about the blind on the far left for the simple reason that that distance of 30,000 klm from memory is the distance where the satellite does exactly ONE orbit a day, so relative to Earth it remains fixed so you don't need to reposition your satellite dish.

Then GPS satellites work on 2 orbits per day so are somewhere halfway between Globe and blind.

 Hubble orbits at 550 klm and 20 degrees inclination.

The Dawn of Man

This blog follows on from the PRE Dawn of Man blog above.

The purpose of this segment is to demonstrate how Kubrick seems to be alluding to the evidence that sites like Stonehenge were in fact "ancient eclipse computers", meaning that ape/early man were not in fact as dumb as "modern man" thinks they were [conceding that modern man CAN still think], and reflecting Zarathustra's message that "once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape"

In ancient folklore there WAS a character called Moon-Watcher and he had a very complex job year round because he had to observe and plot [using Aubry Holes in case of Stonehenge] the path of the moon to determine the all important NODES that are vital for an eclipse.  This theory is neither proven or disproven SO is the IDEAL vehicle for Kubrick to weave his magic.

The very obvious features of the initial scenes is that they all show sun/moon rising/setting AND either natural "markers" or perhaps ape-made markers, eg the pile of stones at 1:04 could not have formed naturally.

Then starting at 1:11 we see [especially from the leopard's eyes] that it is getting darker, but NO sunset.  The leopard has just killed a zebra but is very nervous and rather than eating his kill, he just looks around and growls.  The same for the apes who instinctively go back to their cave as if it is night time but they just sit there wondering who "pulled the curtain".

One ape tries to tell the leopard to shut up and the others tell HIM to not upset the leopard, who is still growling.  Then as they sit in silence we see Moon-Watcher "doing his thing" in watching [and remembering?] what is going on in the sky.

The leopard is used by Kubrick to "time stamp" the leopard and apes as happening at same time in the above 2 minutes of darkness, but in general Kubrick does not time stamp scenes, meaning for example that it may not be the next morning after the eclipse that the apes awake to find Santa has been and has dug a hole and planted a monolith without waking a single ape.

By that bit of frivolity I am saying that IMHO Kubrick intends that the monolith [in all scenes] is to be taken to be "symbolic" only - a McGuffin if you will [Kubrick describes it as a "Jungian archetype"].  I think he confirms that in the "Last Supper" scene where the large pod [as well as a monolith] somehow fits through a normal door and then disappears, meaning that similarly with the ape monolith we are not meant to see it as an actual block of rock but merely symbolic of an "inspirational happening" [in this case the recent eclipse].

So we then go through the "glory be to God" worshiping of the monolith, but IMHO it is the next scene that matters more, although without time stamping we don't know how soon after the symbolic monolith this happens. 

We see that Moon-Watcher has a sort of "Observatory" and as he goes into it the other apes obediently get lost.  Note how the first thing he does is clears the ground to make a "drawing board", after which he keeps looking up to make sightings of his markers and then looking back down to plot them on his drawing board [from 4:40 to 5:10].

So this is his version of the ancient eclipse computer and he kinda smiles [apes have thin smiles] and thinks back to the previous vision of an eclipse about to happen [or just happened] with the sun and moon lining up over the symbolic monolith, and most IMPORTANTLY The Sunrise fanfare plays for a second time to tell us that THIS is an INSPIRATIONAL moment in the movie, and IMHO Kubrick is showing the ape version of Archimedes formulating his famous solution by sitting, thinking in his bathtub, per:.

"Archimedes then took to the streets naked, so excited by his discovery that he had forgotten to dress, crying "Eureka!", (Greek: meaning "I have found it!")."

And it seems very clear that Kubrick is using the fact that "inspiration breeds more inspiration" where in solving his "science problem" [and being able to PREDICT the next eclipse, thus becoming a true leader] he casually bashes a bone in celebration and [ho hum] spawns another "solution to an unstructured problem" as the MBAs say, ie using bone to kill animals.

He then throws the bone into the air as his Eureka, but much more because of his science vision than his killing vision, and this bone falls to the ground, NOT taken up by man.

Finally we see apes go to next step of using a bone to "wage war" over another ape tribe, and in victory an ape throws this bone also high into the air.

However this time there is no Zarathustra fanfare, so while it may have also been "inspirational" to the apes, the movie says it was not a "GOOD" inspiration, AND this time it IS "taken up" by man as we see the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction" with an atomic warhead in space.

The PRE Dawn of Man

At first blush [and for most folk at ANY blush] the opening sequences [up to time we see a space craft] seem fairly simple and generally as:

Ape is stupid; Ape sees Monolith; Ape gets smarter and uses bones as implements to kill for food and power; fade to space.  Let's watch this cut down version to discover a lot more.

Movie starts as black BECAUSE there is an eclipse happening and we ARE "eclipsed", hence the black.  But as "all inspiring" my own experience of a Full Eclipse [Cairns 2012] turned out to be at age 67, this is a DOUBLE eclipse, and guess what, it is viewed from a similar spot to where Starchild is "born" at the end of the movie, ie in a "pod" about 500 miles above "The DARK Side of the Moon".

Now the amazing personal coincidence is that I viewed and filmed my own "Monolithic Moment" in 2012, just 2 months before I watched this movie for the first time, and I made the comment on UTube [under movie]:

"It must have been terrifying in older times when there was no knowledge of impending eclipses, with the world suddenly turning to Night"

You can view movie here  And as a coincidence I too did a "double effect" by filming the actual dawn as well as the eclipse [less than an hour later].

But back to ASO, the first thing to realize is that the initial action/sound is BEFORE any reference to apes and thus can be seen as representing the WHOLE movie.

The MGM logo is thrown in just before we start to come out of the eclipse and the first thing we see [very faintly] is the dark side of the moon viewed from about 500 miles up, and this starts at 0:28 about 20% from screen top.

At 0:33 it has moved down to about 30% from screen top and at same time and same PLACE we see the sun on the point of exiting the eclipse by Earth.  That is to say a giant ruler would rest perfectly across from moon to earth to sun.

At 1:00 the last of the moon leaves the bottom of screen and at same moment another logo appears, changing at 1:08 and again at 1:18, at which time the eclipse has ended, ie sun has fully "popped out" from Earth.

Please note that for a Full solar eclipse viewed from Earth, the virtual sizes of moon and sun are very close to being identical, so the period of "full darkness" [about same as for a full moon] is only about 2 minutes [as seen in my Utube video], but here the sun is way smaller than the Earth, so the darkness [as viewed from other side of moon] would be several hours [and be darker, without "edge effects"].

And all that is perfectly timed to see out the Sunrise Movement [at 1:40] from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  It is the first of 3 times this theme is played [one for movie, one for apes and one for "Starchild" - and NONE for man] which IMHO can ONLY be referring to Nietzsche's central message ["spoke"] from Zarathustra which says:

"Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss ... what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."

Please move to next blog post The Dawn of Man [coming soon].