the cinema achieves its final goal

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2002)

Hegel once said, of course I'm simplifying, that the final goal of art was to be able to express itself using only the means that define it. Therefore, painting had to express itself with colors and shapes, dancing with the movement of the body, music with sounds, etc. Nevertheless, painting was in Hegel's time far away from its final goal because what it did was just to tell a story in a paintings, it was just a variation of literature. Nowadays, it is the same thing with cinema which in Hegel's point of view, has to express itself with movement (because cinema is the art of the moving image, of course), and it is far, far, far away. But from time to time, it comes close from this final pourpose, and it is what happens in this superbe movie in the moments where the story stops and we just see images of a stunning beauty and poetry, particularly when we see the lunar base from the outside or when the astronaut is travelling through time and space and the images become really a symphony of movement and colours that speak for itself without coming near to telling you a story. What I am trying to say in my lousy English is that 2001 reaches a point never achieved before nor afterwards, to my knowledge. It becomes cinema in his more complete, pure and absolute way. Not a variation of literature, but the art of the moving image. Kubrick makes cinema come near to what it is supposed to be in its more evolved way, he becomes a sort of Kandinsky or Mondrian of the filmaking.