![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps it was the crew that he was staring at in the film with a confused look on his face. The second shot is almost identical, minus the pod window framing, and reveals that Bowman is looking at his own film crew. Again he is half in and half out of the film.Īnd another two photos show him viewed first from inside the pod, but the position of the pod is in the corner of the room, where it would not be able to physically fit. He knows he is a character in a movie.A very nice production photo shows Bowman in a doorway, precisely half hidden by a door. He now has the ultimate in self awareness. By gaining awareness of the monoliths true meaning Bowman is leaving the two dimensional confines of the screen and becoming part of his own audience … hence he begins seeing himself in the third person in the renaissance room.Ī very clever visual trick communicating this theme is that when Bowman looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, the close up of his reflection reveals that the glass in his helmet is reflecting not the bathroom, but the bedroom. It has widely been perceived that Bowman’s stargate journey takes him to another dimension and indeed it does, but now we can explicitly recognise what that alternative dimension is. This would have made the visual connection to the cinema screens of the council meeting much easier to notice. ![]() If the shot had not cut away then the stargate would have filled up the entire screen with pure white, leaving Bowman and the audience staring at an empty screen. At the end of the tunnel the screen begins to fill up with bright white light then the shot cuts and we see a human eyeball which has been superimposed with colour. Now if we go back to the stargate shots we find yet another clue that the monolith is a cinema screen. For example, if we look closer at the meeting room set we find that these strange illuminated walls are flanked by curtains, just like plain white cinema screens are. As it turns out this observation of white monoliths is another conceptual key that unlocks even more of the film’s hidden narratives. An email respondent to my first review of 2001 pointed out that when Heywood Floyd holds a council meeting with his colleagues the horizontal monolith is depicted on all four walls of the room, but in pure white. Now we’re moving into territory that is virtually unique in cinematic history – the notion of on screen characters realizing that their own universe is nothing more than a two dimensional cinema screen. 2001: A Space Odyssey - in-depth analysis - by Rob Ager 2008 ![]()
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