2001: A Space Odyssey has been an emblematic film since its birth in 1968. A legendary work, it is included by many in their top ten masterpieces of the big screen. It not only gave science fiction cinema a new dimension, but also renewed the multiple links between great spectacular cinema and “pure” cinema. Due to the scarcity of dialogue (crucial nevertheless) and due to the way it favours cinema’s tools (sound, light, movement and editing), 2001 was also the initiator, and masterpiece, of what can be defined as the “film-experience”, in which the film’s projection is similar to a ritual. It draws both on the sound and optical research of the last period of silent cinema and on the modernity of the sixties (Antonioni, Tati), from which it originates. It embodies the dream of absolute cinema, which aims for a non-verbal and universal experience. It is one of the director’s most personal and daring films and, at the same time, a work that speaks to us in an extraordinarily powerful way about the human condition in the cosmos. 2001, along with Jacques Tati’s Playtime, another “futuristic” portrayal which came out in the same period, is one of those rare attempts that cinema’s great auteurs have been able to realise, to free the big screen and stereophonic sound from the inevitability of the blockbuster full of extras and offer in exchange a slow, suggestive and contemplative film.

Michel Chion, Un’Odissea del cinema. Il “2001” di Kubrick, Torino 2001