Andrei Tarkovsky: Dialogue on Science Fiction

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Where 2001 examined the technological progress of man through a notably distant lens from its characters, Solaris devastatingly explores the inner psychology of its protagonist (scientist Kris Kelvin), who is tortured by phantom images of his dead wife aboard a spaceship hovering the Solaris ocean, which is argued to have the special ability to accommodate the most desperate human desires.

Where 2001 can be argued as having a relatively positive view towards progressing space travel and thus forwarding the Apollo agenda, Solaris is quite pessimistic towards human space travel. Where technology in 2001 is intended an awe-inspiring display of choreographed beauty, the technology of Solaris is decrepit and useless, and the halls of the spaceship act as largely abandoned canals of depression and defeat rather than a locale for progressive innovation... Space travel is viewed in Solaris as a largely futile, lonely, and unattractive venture. Human space exploration has not led to a final accomplishment here as much as it has simply come to a standstill...
                             – Landon Palmer:  Kubrick’s ‘2001’ vs. Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’

Solaris (1972) is arguably Tarkovsky’s most approachable film. While it is far from conventional in its story and structure, it stands centrally in relation to his other films: behind him were his impressive debut, Ivan's Childhood (1962), and his first epic masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966); ahead of him were the experimental, personal, Mirror (1975), Stalker, a philosophical, bleak work, and finally, two difficult, contemplative films made in exile, Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). 

Tarkovsky had seen Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and reportedly thought it unemotional and cold. Reports at the time suggested Tarkovsky’s film was a direct response to 2001. Tarkovsky undoubtedly uses more individual characters and the human drama is more central than in Kubrick’s film. Nonetheless, Tarkovsky’s film, while a reaction to Kubrick’s cannot hide its influence. Both films establish their narratives in a leisurely manner, with considerable time spent tracking around the space sets; both films employ a widescreen mise-en-scene approach that benefits from superior art direction; and both films generate an aura of mystery that begs for countless explanations. 

Unlike 2001, Solaris, on the other hand, is permeated with sadness, which grips the picture even before it departs from Earth. We watch the protagonist, a space psychologist called Kris Kelvin, gaze at underwater reeds as if they were a drowned woman's tresses in the sombre prologue. Kris, as played by Donatas Banionis, seems perpetually scarred, delayed by some unfathomable sadness. He will depart on a trip to the space station Solaris, a once-thriving experiment that has gone awry; it will be up to him to decide whether or not to shut down the research station. He prepares by watching a video from a scientific symposium regarding Solaris's problems.

Humans seem to be enslaved to equipment and television pictures, disconnected from the natural world around. At Solaris, Kris discovers a dilapidated space station that is empty save for two obsessed scientists while Kris's colleague has already committed suicide, leaving him a recorded warning about hallucinated visitors having "something to do with conscience." Kris's deceased wife, Hari, constantly materialises by his side. Whether she is a doppelganger, the embodiment of a decade's worth of grief-stricken memories, or a delusion, she is real to Kelvin. He has the ability to hold her and talk to her, and hence is the author of her existence. Tarkovsky expands this concept to all of our connections, both past and present, and questions their very existence. Do we adore the people around us, or do we adore our perceptions of them? How much access do we really have about someone, apart from our own mental colouring of their character? 

Tarkovsky often confronts us with such profoundly disturbing concepts, arguing that we may not be the centre of everything after all. Solaris is a picture that not only dazzles and confounds with its visual splendour and remarkable set design, but also with the thoughts that underpin each frame, exhibiting harrowing human concepts into a lifeless environment. 

Tarkovsky's experiments with pace, attempting to "discover Time inside Time," have his camera track up to the sleeping Kris, distorting the moment until we join his dream. In the film's beautiful closing scene, Kelvin returns to his parents in the picturesque country house home shown in the opening scenes – but this reassuring mirage is a huge duplicate manufactured by Solaris's planet-sized brain. Although it seems to be home, Kelvin will never be able to return. 

“The protagonists in Solaris were tormented by disappointments, and the path out we presented them was sufficiently illusory,” Tarkovsky subsequently wrote in his film biography Sculpting in Time. “It was in dreams that they discovered their own roots - those roots that permanently connect man to the Earth that gave birth to him. However, even such connections had become imaginary to them.”

The following conversation is from an interview by Naum Abramov with Andrei Tarkovsky that took place in 1970 while the great Russian director was working on his adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. Initially billed in America as the Soviet Union’s reply to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), at first glance, both films share similar concerns in exploring mankind’s unsettled role in the universe and the consequences of detachment from his natural habitat. However, it’s evident that each film’s view on space, and mankind’s role within it, are quite different:

ABRAMOV: You’re working on a film adaptation of the science-fiction novel ‘Solaris’, by Stanislaw Lem. Lately, the science-fiction genre has attracted the interest of many prominent filmmakers. This seems to be an indication of how the genre answers some sort of inner need for contemporary viewers and filmmakers alike. Complex, intellectual-artistic content can be combined in one film with aspects of a purely entertaining spectacle directed toward the widest possible audience. I think this is especially true for the genre of science-fiction in cinema. Viewers of different levels of sophistication would appreciate different elements of these films; in some cases the philosophical content, in other cases, the strictly superficial, dramatic, exciting aspects of the plot.

In your opinion, what needs are satisfied in our time by the genre of science-fiction in cinema? Is it a desire to see the scientific and technological progress of humanity, incarnated in the vivid imagery of a contemporary film? Is it the expression of philosophical thought within the strange and thrilling context of a flight into space; the future of our planet; or the story of some brave, new invention? Maybe it’s the striving of the writer and filmmaker to study people’s character, our contemporary character, with the dramatic events dictated by the genre?

And finally, why have you turned to science-fiction, a genre which is so new to you?

TARKOVSKY: The questions you’re asking, as far as I understand, are connected on one hand with filmmaking and on the other hand with the viewer. But first, I want to explain why I decided to adapt Lem’s novel, Solaris. Whether or not my first two films are good or bad, they are, in the final analysis, both about the same thing. They are about the extreme manifestation of loyalty to a moral debt, the struggle for it, and faith in it – even to the extent of a personality crisis. They are about an individual armed with conviction, an individual with a sense of personal destiny, for whom catastrophe is an unbroken human souI.

I’m interested in a hero that goes on to the end despite everything. Because only such a person can claim victory. The dramatic form of my films is a token of my desire to express the struggle and the greatness of the human spirit. I think you can easily connect this concept with my previous films. Both Ivan and Andrei do everything against their own safety. The first physically, the second in a spiritual sense. Both of them in a search for an ideal, moral way of living.

As for Solaris, my decision to adapt it to the screen is not at all a result of some fondness for the genre. The main thing is that in Solaris, Lem presents a problem that is close to me: the problem of overcoming, of convictions, of moral transformation on the path of struggle within the limits of one’s own destiny. The depth and meaning of Lem’s novel are not at all dependent on the science-fiction genre, and it’s not enough to appreciate his novel simply for the genre.

The novel is not only about the human mind encountering the unknown, but it is also about the moral leap of a human being in relation to new discoveries in scientific knowledge. And overcoming the obstacles on this path leads to the painful birth of a new morality. This is the ‘price of progress’ that Kelvin pays in Solaris. And Kelvin’s price is the face to face encounter with the materializatron of his own conscience. But Kelvin doesn’t betray his moral position. Because betrayal in this situation means to remain at the former level, not even attempting to rise to a higher moral level. And Kelvin pays a tragic price for this step forward. The science-fiction genre creates the necessary premise for this connection between moral problems and the physiology of the human mind.

ABRAMOV: And nevertheless, even though you emphasize your indifference to the genre, you are resolving this philosophical problem which concerns you within the genre of science-fiction. lt seems to me that science-fiction creates such special conditions of cinematic representation for itself that it’s impossible just to shrug them off. The filmmaker encounters different intellectual and artistic capacities in a novel and a film. He deals with the cinematic incarnation on screen of what was created by the imagination of the author of a literary work, with the need to provide the fantastic with a plastic specificity.

These questions must have presented themselves to you.


TARKOVSKY: The complexity in adapting Solaris is an issue of film adaptations in general and secondarily an issue of science-fiction adaptations. These are the two fundamental issues of my current work. The first issue relates to the principles of a work of literature in general. Prose possesses the special characteristic that its imagery depends on the sensory experience of the reader. So, no matter how detailed this or that scene is developed, the reader, to the degree of his own experience, sees that which his own experience, character, bias, and tastes have prepared him to see. Even the most detailed descriptions in prose, in a way, will elude the control of the writer and the reader will perceive them subjectively.

In the literal, superficial sense, War and Peace is read and envisioned by thousands of readers; this makes it a thousand different books as a result of the differences in experience between the writer and the reader. In this significantly important aspect is the special relevance and ubiquity of literature – its democracy, if you will. In this is the guarantee of the reader’s co-creation. A writer subconsciously depends on an imaginative reader to see more and to see more clearly than the presented, laconic description. A reader can perceive even the most ruthless, naturalistic details with omission through his subjective, aesthetic filter. I would call this peculiarity of prosaic description to influence the reader ‘aesthetic adaptation’. Principally, it governs perception and the prose author invades the soul of the reader within the belly of this Trojan horse.

This is in literature. But what about cinema? Where in cinema does a viewer have this freedom of choice? Each and every frame, every scene and episode, outwardly doesn’t even describe, but literally records actions, landscapes, character’s faces. And in this is the terrifying danger of not being accepted by the viewer. Because on film there is a very unambiguous designation of the concrete, against which the viewer’s personal, sensory experience rebels.

Some may argue that cinema is attractive because it’s really a source of what is exotic and unusual for a viewer. That isn’t quite right. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Cinema, in contrast to literature, is the filmmaker’s experience caught on film. And if this personal experience is really sincerely expressed then the viewer accepts the film.

I’ve noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are based on the filmmaker’s own memory, on the kinship of one’s personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it. If the director follows only the superficial, literal base of the film, for example the screenplay, even if in the most convincing, realistic, and conscientious manner, the viewer will be left unaffected.

Therefore, if you’re objectively incapable of influencing a viewer with his own experience, as in literature as I mentioned earlier, and you’re unable to achieve that in principle, then in cinema, you should sincerely tell about your own experience. That’s why even now when all half-literate people have learned to make movies, cinema remains an art form, which only a small number of directors have actually mastered, and they can be counted with the fingers of one hand. To remould a literary work into the frames of a film means to tell your version of the literary source, filtering it through yourself.

ABRAMOV: Where do you draw the line between a filmmaker’s interpretation and the original work? Isn’t there a danger of remoulding the literary work to the point of losing its original stylistics and visual structure?

TARKOVSKY: Working in science-fiction demands great subtlety and sincerity, especially if you’re talking about the issue of perspective. That’s why Lem is such a great science-fiction writer. You would understand what I mean if you read Solaris, Eden, and Return from the Stars.

In Eden, Lem tells about an expedition to a planet where the members of the expedition encounter a reality, the developmental laws of which they cannot comprehend. These laws slip away from understanding, like thoughts just forgotten. The air is filled with guesses and analogies, seen by the naked eye, but they can’t be caught. It’s a very specific, unnerving, and frustrating condition. And Lem does a brilliant job of expressing this condition. He describes in detail everything that the expedition encounters. But more than the detail, he describes what it is the people see, while not understanding what it means.

The same thing is in Return from the Stars. The protagonist returns from a flight to different galaxies. On earth, because of the differences in time (he has traveled at the speed of light), life has progressed through several generations. The returned astronaut walks through the city and doesn’t understand anything. Lem describes everything the astronaut encounters in extreme detail and despite this detailed description, we don’t understand anything either, along with the protagonist. These emotionally tense pieces express, for me, the quintessence of the author’s personal experience projected into the future.

ABRAMOV: The majority of directors of science-fiction movies think it necessary to impress the viewer’s imagination with the concrete details of everyday life on other worlds or the details of a spacecraft’s construction, which often crowd out the central idea of the film. I think Kubrick’s ‘Space Odyssey’ is guilty of that.

TARKOVSKY: For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future. More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phoney on many points even for specialists.

For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated. I would like to shoot Solaris in a way that the viewer would be unaware of any exoticism. Of course, I’m referring to the exoticism of technology.

For example, if one shoots a scene of passengers boarding a trolley, which, let’s say, we’d never seen before or known anything about, then we’d get something like Kubrick’s moon-landing scene. On the other hand, if one were to shoot a moon landing like a common trolley stop in a modern film, then everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film’s characters. That’s why a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.

Design is design. Painting is painting. And a film is a film. One should ‘separate the firmament from the waters’ and not engage in making comic books.

When cinema moves out from under the power of money, namely, the costs of production, when there will be a method for the author of a work of art to record reality as with a pen and paper, paints and canvas, chisel and marble, ‘X’ and the filmmaker, then we’ll see. Then cinema will be the foremost art and its muse the queen of all the others.

– Naum Abramov: Dialogue with Andrei Tarkovsky about Science-Fiction on the Screen. From Ekran, 1970-1971, 162-165. Translated from Russian by Jake Mahaffy and Yulia Mahaffy. In Tarkovsky Interviews. Edited by John Gianvito. University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

   

Stanley Kubrick: Thoughts On Narrative

2001: A Space Odyssey (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Stanley Kubrick insisted that a feature film can be constructed from six to eight ‘non-submersible units’. A non-submersible unit is a fundamental story sequence where all the non-essential elements have been stripped away. These units would be so robust and compelling that they would, by themselves, be able to keep the viewer interested. They would contain only what is necessary for the storyline. And when joined together they would form a greater narrative.

Kubrick’s ideas on cinematic narrative seem to have been formed at an early stage, as far back as 1960, where he summed up his approach: 

I think the best plot is no apparent plot. I like a slow start, the start gets under the audience’s skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don’t have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense hooks.

The way Kubrick reduced 2001: A Space Odyssey to its most important elements was indicative of his emerging method of telling stories. Over the years, Kubrick had adapted many books into films. By the time he came to conceive of 2001: A Space Odyssey he realised that all he needed – as he later told science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss – are six or eight ‘non-submersible units’: basic story points that cannot be reduced any further. When the story points are linked together they form a narrative that will contain a balanced mix of all the themes, images and characters.

On release in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey polarized critical and public opinion. Many of its admirers considered it a prophetic masterpiece while its detractors praised the special effects but found it confusing and disappointing as drama.

The final scenes in particular remained for many an enigmatic, purely emotional, non-verbal experience. Indeed, less than half the film had dialogue. It was a re-organization of the traditional dramatic structure. Process became more important than plot. As one critic put it: ‘It was a film not about space travel; it was space travel’. 

Kubrick retorted: ‘The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.’ Notably, 2001: A Space Odyssey was Kubrick’s first experiment with restructuring the conventions of the three-act drama. It’s likely it started out to be something quite different. The book based on the original screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick is literal, more explicit. The film, in its early stages, had a narrator’s voice. It was cut gradually and then eliminated completely, by virtue of which 2001: A Space Odyssey evolved as a more visual experience.

By the time Stanley Kubrick began working with Brian Aldiss on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (eventually filmed by Stephen Spielberg) Kubrick had formulated his theory of storytelling. As Aldiss recalls, Kubrick told him:

To forget about the narrative, you don’t want narrative, just concentrate on various scenes. He then expounded his theory of non-submersible units… you can see it working out in particular in 2001 where there are these chunks of narrative. This I believe is one of the attractions of 2001 – not only the music, not only the extraordinary silences and the beauty of the photography, but the fact that they don’t quite fit together. This gives the film a sense of mystery, so the intelligent viewer has to construct their own narrative.

In an interview for the documentary Stanley and Us, Brian Aldiss expanded on Kubrick’s notion of constructing a film based around a succession of irreducible sequences:

I was always keen on the idea of narrative. My books always have a narrative. That is to say, cause and effect. That’s what I like. But Stanley was less interested in that and he said to me ‘now forget about the narrative’. He said ‘what you need to make a movie is six ‘non-submersible units’’. That was the phrase he used: ‘non-submersible units’. And he said when we’ve got those we’re away. And I did actually produce one [a script] that he loved and was really enthusiastic about. It was the one time in our working relationship when he was enthusiastic and he said to me ‘Brian, I have the impression that you have two styles of writing – one is brilliant and the other’s not so good’. But when you think about this philosophy of the ‘non-submersible unit’ you can see it in action most effectively, I think, in The Shining. You have an episode and then it’s linked to another by a blackboard that would just say ‘Thursday, Four PM’. You know something bad is going to happen on Thursday at Four PM. It heightens the suspense and so in that respect it’s a very good device. But when you examine 2001, you can see the non-submersible units and they don’t actually quite link up. For instance, the last mysterious episode is almost complete in itself. And then there’s the episode on the ship with HAL. These are the units. And it’s because they don’t link up that we find 2001 so interesting. There’s something that our intellects can’t quite resolve and that’s an attraction in a movie.

Thus 2001: A Space Odyssey can be understood as a break with traditional cinematic narrative, an attempt to remove itself from a conventional way of telling a cinematic story. It was a ‘new way of assimilating narrative’. 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an articulated plot but a ‘succession of vivid moments’. 

In the case of the narrative structure of 2001: A Space Odyssey one can distinguish four such sections or units: ‘The Dawn of Man’, an untitled second section, the third section called ‘Jupiter Mission – 18 months Later’, and finally ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’, with each section separated by a narrative ellipsis.

This visual approach to storytelling was later discussed by Stanley Kubrick in an interview with Playboy Magazine in which he elaborates on the intention behind the non-conventional narrative of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

PLAYBOY: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film – the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a ‘star-child’ drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called ‘2001’ ‘the first Nietzschean film,’ contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of ‘2001’?

KUBRICK: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a non-verbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to ‘explain’ a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film – and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level – but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being.

PLAYBOY: Without laying out a philosophical road map for the viewer, can you tell us your own interpretation of the meaning of the film?

KUBRICK: No, for the reasons I’ve already given. How much would we appreciate La Gioconda   today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: ‘This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth’ – or ‘because she’s hiding a secret from her lover.’ It would shut off the viewer’s appreciation and shackle him to a ‘reality’ other than his own. I don’t want that to happen to 2001.

PLAYBOY: Arthur Clarke has said of the film, ‘If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we’ve failed in our intention.’ Why should the viewer have to see a film twice to get its message?

KUBRICK: I don’t agree with that statement of Arthur’s, and I believe he made it facetiously. The very nature of the visual experience in 2001 is to give the viewer an instantaneous, visceral reaction that does not – and should not – require further amplification. Just speaking generally, however, I would say that there are elements in any good film that would increase the viewer’s interest and appreciation on a second viewing; the momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it’s seen. The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art. We don’t believe that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has until recent years been exempted from the category of art – a situation I’m glad is finally changing.

PLAYBOY: Some prominent critics – including Renata Adler of ‘The New York Times’, John Simon of ‘The New Leader’, Judith Crist of ‘New York’ magazine and Andrew Sarris of  ‘The Village Voice’ – apparently felt that 2001 should be among those films still exempted from the category of art; all four castigated it as dull, pretentious and overlong. [KAEL: ’It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie’; ADLER: ’Incredibly boring’; SARRIS: ’A disaster’] How do you account for their hostility?

KUBRICK: The four critics you mention all work for New York publications. The reviews across America and around the world have been 95 percent enthusiastic. Some were more perceptive than others, of course, but even those who praised the film on relatively superficial grounds were able to get something of its message. New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema, But film critics, fortunately, rarely have any effect on the general public; houses everywhere are packed and the film is well on its way to becoming the greatest moneymaker in M-G-M’s history. Perhaps this sounds like a crass way to evaluate one’s work, but I think that, especially with a film that is so obviously different, record audience attendance means people are saying the right things to one another after they see it – and isn’t this really what it’s all about?

PLAYBOY: Speaking of what it’s all about – if you’ll allow us to return to the philosophical interpretation of ‘2001’ – would you agree with those critics who call it a profoundly religious film?

KUBRICK: I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia – less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe – can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities – and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

– Extract from Eric Nordern: Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick, 1968.

   

Kubrick, Light and Darkness

2001: A Space Odyssey (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Stanley Kubrick on the meaning of life from an interview with Playboy magazine in 1968:

Interviewer: If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living? 


Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality.



As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. 

Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.

The most terrifying fact of the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.


However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.