A moment of time — the present instant — is so slight as to not truly exist. How long is the present? Less than a second, a nanosecond, a zeptosecond, or even maybe a jiffy.
We inhabit a non-existent moment situated between the immeasurable past and (presumably) immeasurable future. We live in that division, our consciousnesses, it seems, exist there. Just as a cut in a film occupies no time in itself, but is the division between two shots.
A good friend argued that the brilliant jump-cut in 2001, from flung bone to drifting satellite, would be a lot more brilliant if not preceded by an unnecessary jump cut — Kubrick extended the spinning bone by tacking two takes together, resulting in a slightly jarring jump when his subject drifts out of frame and is rediscovered in a fresh shot. But this never bothered me. It was also pointed out that the match cut could have been an even better match if it happened sooner. But clearly, Kubrick wanted the bone-spin to last as long as he could make it last (without getting into the ugliness of step-printing to create an artificial slomo).
Was Kubrick thinking of Winston Smith’s description, in his 1984 illegal diary, of the film he saw — a boatful of children is exploded and in a “superb shot” the camera follows a child’s severed arm spinning through the air. If anyone were to stage such a shot today it would look unavoidably like a Kubrick swipe.
Apparently Clarke and Kubrick intended the spacecraft we see to be, not the Satellite of Love as you might think, but an orbiting missile platform capable of raining down Death from Above, setting up the Cold War scenario that plays out later when we meet Leonard Rossiter (East-West tensions will play a greater role in 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT). When Kubrick decided (wisely) to avoid all VO, it became unfortunately impossible for an audience to tell that the innocuous looking craft is meant to be a weapon of mass destruction. A shame, I suppose, that they didn’t make it look like a bunch of missiles mounted on something, or have open tubes with missile noses poking out. Not only is this a plot point later (and could have been a bigger one: there was a plan that the Starchild would cause all the orbiting missiles to detonate harmlessly in space, giving an optimistic clue as to what his future actions may involve), it would make the cut from bone to rocket a weapon/weapon match, not just a tool/tool one.
At least one of the snooty contemporary reviewers called the transition “naive” and referred to it as a dissolve. Film critics should be cine-literate. This doesn’t mean they have to have seen everything (which is impossible), but they at least should see what they do see. I guess if it were a dissolve, it probably WOULD be naive. The dazzle of the execution imparts sophistication to a simple idea. Nothing can be bolder than jumping millions of years with a single cut.
This is the film’s first really striking use of silence, too. It’s there in the fade-outs, but movies otherwise are supposed to always have some sound going. But there’s no sound in space, and Kubrick honours that: he’ll allow non-diegetic music, and the subjective sound of an astronaut’s breathing inside his helmet, but otherwise, unlike nearly every one of the space epics that followed (including the Sensurround European release of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA that gave me a pounding headache when I was eleven), his interplanetary space is properly soundless.
Two of the reasons that 2010, despite being quite enjoyable, is an inadequate response to this film: it doesn’t add any new music, just recycling Kubrick’s choices, and it has sound effects in space. Lack of imagination and lack of nerve.
Of course 2010 helmer Peter Hyams has nothing in his whole, perfectly decent, filmography to compare to this single edit, which stands alongside the match-to-sun cut in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA as a pre-eminent moment not just in the sixties, but all time. Anne V. Coates is credited cutter on that film. Ray Lovejoy, her former assistant, headed the team cutting 2001 (and died *in* 2001). It was his first film as chief cutter.
Both did a magnificent job on their respective films. But we have to give primary credit to their directors who conceived the shots always intended to lie either side of those cuts.
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