The optics weren’t up to Kubrick’s standards, though, and he scrapped the idea.

The block was cast and received a lot of newspaper coverage about it being the largest casting of plastic ever attempted. Kubrick was interested in experimenting with projecting images onto its surface (the monolith). The following quotes strongly support the 'monolith as screen' interpretation.Īt one point a private contractor was asked to mold a large block of Lucite. It refers to the spatial relationship between the screen, the audience and the audience’s surroundings. Kubrick is taking us on a psychedelic ride of intellectual evolution and he is demanding that we literally think outside the box! So the term “Space Odyssey” now has a new literal meaning. This widescreen two and a half hour presentation of sight and sound is in itself the stargate and we are its subjects. The joke is on us and Kubrick, if he is watching over us, will be laughing and cheering from beyond the infinite. We are looking directly at the surface of the monolith! The monolith is the film screen and it is singing directly at its audience in the same way that the apes and astronauts are entranced by its heavenly voice, not realising that they are being communicated with directly!!! For almost forty years audiences and reviewers across the globe have sat staring at this black singing screen, not realising that they are staring at the monolith.

So in the films opening and during the intermission, we are not looking at an empty black screen at all. Why? Because the monolith is a representation of the actual wideframe cinema screen, rotated 90 degrees. Kubrick, in adapting the story for cinema, changed this to a black rectangular box …. Clarke described the monolith as a pyramid shaped piece of polished mineral surrounded by a spherical force field. So, why the black screens? The answer can be found by noting one of the key differences between the film and Arthur C Clarke’s original short story, The Sentinel. Atmospheres is heard at the very beginning of the film over a black screen and later repeats during the intermission just before the astronauts do battle with the HAL 9000 computer, again over a black screen. During the stargate, which is preceded by shots Jupiter, Ligetti's requiem blends seemlessly into another Ligetti piece called Atmospheres. We are given repeated confirmation that this music is the singing voice of the monolith and that it sings when it is helping its primitive hosts to evolve. We hear this music when the apes first encounter the monolith in the dawn of man, when the astronauts encounter a second monolith in the Tycho moon crater and when Dave Bowman encounters the third monolith near Jupiter. Variations on the same haunting piece of music, taken from Gyorgi Ligetti's Requiem, seem to occur every time an evolutionary step is being taken in 2001.

Full 47 min version of this particular video is available from my digital downloads storeĢ001: A Space Odyssey - The meaning of the monolith revealedĪnd here is a 2021 update of the above video The video covers much of the material contained in this chapter and includes some additional material not found in the text of this article. Watch the video review or scroll down and read the text. 2001: A Space Odyssey - in-depth analysis - by Rob Ager 2008

Monolith dave space odyssey meaning