It was a volume that Hitler had issued to the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Zarathustra written at the dawning of the modern scientific and technological age, portending the post-modern, preached hope yet carried a darker forboding. Nietzsche's concepts of the Eternal Return, his notion of the totality of Cosmic Time, of the open (not necessarily determined) potential of humanity, are central to A Space Odyssey. The mythic intensity of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the contemporary moment is further achieved by Kubrick's cinematic transposition of central themes of Friedrich Nietzsche's mythopoeic work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, as the key structure for his film. The more things change the more things get worse. Today the situation is one of expanding civil strife and human cruelties, religious conflict, again massive civilian displacement, mixed with the emergence of new repression, the shrinking of newly won freedoms and growing evidence of environmental collapse. When A Space Odyssey was made, the devastation of two World Wars, and the human annihilations and repressions of the past were still in living memory, added to new wars and a realization of looming ecological disaster. Then as now the promise of a bright future was shrouded in the dark clouds of the past. The problem as to whether humanity would reproduce its future as its past was also critical at the time casting its shadow over the situation today. These relate to concerns of determinism and essentialism – questions that achieve acute poignancy in this technological age and at the moment in history Kubrick created his work-when human being was making its first hesitant steps into space, leaving its existential moorings on its birthplace, Earth. Major ontological and deep philosophical issues are embraced and engaged to Kubrick's work, opening to further critical understanding that is the crisis for humanity at the present and conceivably into the future. This last is so from that of threatening its own destruction to that of transmuting humanity's very own nature.
Kubrick presents all these through humanity's relation to science and technology by which Human Being has come to command its circumstance, define itself, expand its horizons of experience and knowledge, and to shape its destiny. These involve issues concerning God, and religion generally, the State and Society and matters of war and violence. It is a work that examines crucial problematics at the core of recent European and American history and its reverberations into the present becoming the future.
I address the work in all these ways concentrating on its import for Western-cum globalizing realities of the modern, post-modern and what many identify as the coming post-human. More than a film, more than a classic of the cinema, Stanley Kubricks's 2001 A Space Odyssey is a mythological work of cosmological proportions that explores key questions at the heart of humanity and especially the dilemmas and issues of the modern era. From that, I am going to look into the relationship between image and sound, focusing on the way in which the narrative is driven forward through images and music, and whether or not this enables the viewer to interpret the film in their own way – just as Kubrick had intended. I am going to be analysing the narrative of 2001: A Space Odyssey and whether or not the decision to remove a vast majority of the dialogue affects the way in which the story is told. With such minimal dialogue, not necessarily always driving the narrative forward, we are provided with captions on the screen telling us the changing times, and some other very interesting visual story telling devices. David Bordwell wrote that “Narrative is a fundamental way that humans make sense of the world”, a very solid statement, an event without a story to it is unheard of, if we are not told the story then what is left for us to make sense of the event? The notoriously ambiguous 2001: A Space Odyssey (see fig.1) is remembered for its groundbreaking visual effects and its distinctly noticeable lack of dialogue, with only 40 minutes in a 141 minute film.
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