In 1964, Stan­ley Kubrick was rid­ing high from the suc­cess of his Cold War black com­e­dy Dr. Strangelove. For his next film, Kubrick want­ed to make some­thing dif­fer­ent. He want­ed to make a sci­ence fic­tion epic at a time when sci-fi was a byword for cheap and cheesy. And so, the direc­tor reached out to writer Arthur C. Clarke, after read­ing his short sto­ry “The Sen­tinel.” In a let­ter dat­ed March 31, 1964, Kubrick wrote:

I had been a great admir­er of your books for quite a time and had always want­ed to dis­cuss with you the pos­si­bil­i­ty of doing the prover­bial “real­ly good” sci­ence-fic­tion movie.

My main inter­est lies along these broad areas, nat­u­ral­ly assum­ing great plot and char­ac­ter:
1. The rea­sons for believ­ing in the exis­tence of intel­li­gent extra-ter­res­tri­al life.
2. The impact (and per­haps even lack of impact in some quar­ters) such dis­cov­ery would have on Earth in the near future.
3. A space probe with a land­ing and explo­ration of the Moon and Mars.

The two soon met at Trad­er Vic’s in New York and start­ed hash­ing out a sto­ry that became 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over the course of the next four years, Kubrick and Clarke talked and cor­re­spond­ed fre­quent­ly. The orig­i­nal plan was for both to devel­op the nov­el first and then adapt the result­ing work into a screen­play. In prac­tice, the script devel­oped in par­al­lel to the book. Kubrick demand­ed rewrite after rewrite from an increas­ing­ly impa­tient Clarke as the movie went into pro­duc­tion. The book ulti­mate­ly came out a cou­ple months after the movie’s April 1968 pre­miere. Ever the mas­ter manip­u­la­tor, Kubrick, in all like­li­hood, did this on pur­pose so that Clarke’s efforts wouldn’t over­shad­ow the film.

The folks over at Cine­fix put togeth­er a video on the dif­fer­ences between the book and the movie. If you can get past the bro-tas­tic voice-over, the piece offers a pret­ty thor­ough account­ing. You can watch part one and part two above.

One of the biggest dif­fer­ences is that in the book, HAL, Dave Bow­man and com­pa­ny are off to Sat­urn. But Kubrick’s spe­cial effects guru Dou­glas Trum­bull couldn’t get the ringed plan­et to look right, so the direc­tor sim­ply changed the mission’s des­ti­na­tion.

Most of the oth­er dif­fer­ences boil down to a dif­fer­ence in the medi­um. Clarke explains every­thing in the sto­ry in great detail – from the man-apes’ evo­lu­tion to the real rea­son HAL9000 went on his killing spree. Kubrick, in con­trast, explained almost noth­ing.

In a 1970 inter­view, Kubrick talked more about the dif­fer­ence between the two works.

It’s a total­ly dif­fer­ent kind of expe­ri­ence, of course, and there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ences between the book and the movie. The nov­el, for exam­ple, attempts to explain things much more explic­it­ly than the film does, which is inevitable in a ver­bal medi­um. […]

[The movie], on the oth­er hand, is basi­cal­ly a visu­al, non­ver­bal expe­ri­ence. It avoids intel­lec­tu­al ver­bal­iza­tion and reach­es the view­er’s sub­con­scious in a way that is essen­tial­ly poet­ic and philo­soph­ic. The film thus becomes a sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence, which hits the view­er at an inner lev­el of con­scious­ness, just as music does, or paint­ing.

Actu­al­ly, film oper­ates on a lev­el much clos­er to music and to paint­ing than to the print­ed word, and, of course, movies present the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­vey com­plex con­cepts and abstrac­tions with­out the tra­di­tion­al reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, suc­ceeds in short-cir­cuit­ing the rigid sur­face cul­tur­al blocks that shack­le our con­scious­ness to nar­row­ly lim­it­ed areas of expe­ri­ence and is able to cut direct­ly through to areas of emo­tion­al com­pre­hen­sion.

So you are some­one who finds the movie to be frus­trat­ing­ly oblique, the book will give you answers. But it prob­a­bly won’t blow your mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Explore the Mas­sive Stan­ley Kubrick Exhib­it at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

When Mar­tin Scors­ese isn’t mak­ing films, he’s busy pre­serv­ing them, from help­ing fund the restora­tion of clas­sics to col­lect­ing the ephemera of his youth, espe­cial­ly posters. A selec­tion of his movie poster col­lec­tion, rep­re­sent­ing the height of film adver­tis­ing from the 1930’s to the 1960s, cur­rent­ly hangs at MoMA through Octo­ber 25, 2015.

The pow­er that a poster held in the imag­i­na­tion decades ago should not be under­stat­ed. For many it was the only knowl­edge they had about the film they were about to see, and many artists, hired in house by the stu­dios, hyped up the sex­i­est parts of the films. It sold tick­ets.

The MoMA exhib­it is cen­tered on the bill­board sized poster for Pow­ell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoff­mann (1951), a stun­ning work when seen large. (For an under­stand­ing about the impres­sive size of most posters, check out this graph­ic.)

It’s only because of col­lec­tors like Scors­ese and Ira. M. Resnick (for whose book Scors­ese wrote an intro­duc­tion) that the artists behind these posters have been named and rec­og­nized.

Although the MoMA web page pro­mot­ing the exhi­bi­tion is sur­pris­ing­ly stingy when it comes to nam­ing all the artists in the show, some inter­net sleuthing brings up some names. The illus­tra­tor behind the Hoff­mann poster, Marc Stone, was also a painter of World War II pro­pa­gan­da posters in the UK.

The min­i­mal, Risko-esque ren­der­ing of Veron­i­ca Lake for Sullivan’s Trav­els (1941) is cred­it­ed to Mau­rice Kallis, though an anony­mous com­ment on the movie poster blog Cit­i­zen K. cred­its it to Fritz Siebel, the commenter’s father. Siebel, who immi­grat­ed to the U.S. from Vien­na, wound up illus­trat­ing A Fly Went By for Dr. Seuss’ children’s book imprint and cre­at­ing the famous Yul Bryn­ner-looka­like and clean­ing prod­uct mas­cot Mr. Clean.

René Péron, who cre­at­ed the beau­ti­ful Expres­sion­is­tic design for Erich von Stroheim’s The Lost Squadron (1932) start­ed his career with posters for silent clas­sics like Abel Gance’s Napoleon and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc (1928). But he’s prob­a­bly best known for the icon­ic car­i­ca­ture of Jacques Tati grac­ing the poster for Mr. Hulot’s Hol­i­day.

Both the poster for Pow­ell and Pressburger’s Black Nar­cis­sus and Kazan’s On the Water­front are by one of the Ital­ian kings of movie posters, Ansel­mo Ballester. His style is lurid and pulpy, and if there is one dame in dis­tress in a movie, he would make her the sell­ing point of the poster. He was also known for his love of Rita Hay­worth, for whom he would pro­duce his best work. (Just look at this poster for Salome, which is way more inter­est­ing than the pic­ture it rep­re­sents.)

Last­ly, Scors­ese has added one of his own film’s posters: Peter Straus­feld’s stun­ning wood­block poster for Mean Streets. The British artist had a very par­tic­u­lar style (text on one side, graph­ic on the oth­er), and was hired by the Acad­e­my Cin­e­ma in Lon­don as their design­er. (Now, *that’s* a job.)

The fact that we can watch trail­ers on our tele­vi­sions and now iPhones has long dimin­ished the pow­er of the poster. How­ev­er, there are still signs of life in the indus­try, and the amount of artists cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful lim­it­ed edi­tion prints of posters for their favorite films increas­es every year.

via Quartz

Relat­ed con­tent:

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Gaze at Glob­al Movie Posters for Hitchcock’sVertigo: U.S., Japan, Italy, Poland & Beyond

The Strange and Won­der­ful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

At first blush, Yasu­jiro Ozu and Wes Ander­son would seem to be miles apart. Ozu is the “most Japan­ese” of all direc­tors. His films are small, qui­et, fine­ly cal­i­brat­ed works that doc­u­ment the slow reorder­ing of the fam­i­ly unit in the face of Japan’s rapid mod­ern­iza­tion. Anderson’s movies are twee and whim­si­cal, filled with wry humor and a shock­ing amount of vio­lence against dogs.

Yet video essay­ist Anna Cat­ley in her piece Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: A Visu­al Essay makes a pret­ty com­pelling case that these two auteurs are more sim­i­lar than you might think. Both film­mak­ers have a clear and high­ly styl­ized man­ner of con­struct­ing their movies: Ozu’s films are char­ac­ter­ized by sym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions and an unmov­ing cam­era that remains about two and a half feet off of the ground. Anderson’s movies are marked by sym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions, long com­plex cam­era moves and lots of over­head shots. Both Ozu and Ander­son have a sta­ble of actors that they work with repeat­ed­ly — Chishu Ryu and Set­suko Hara for Ozu, Jason Schwartz­man and Bill Mur­ray for Ander­son. Both film­mak­ers’ movies are about the com­plex, often fraught, rela­tion­ships between par­ents and chil­dren. And both direc­tors often employed the point of view of chil­dren to high­light adult hypocrisy and dis­ap­point­ment.

Ozu’s movies, how­ev­er, were rel­a­tive­ly free of Cat Stevens songs.

You can watch the full video above. It might just make you watch a dou­ble fea­ture of Ohayo and Moon­rise King­dom.

via Indie Wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums & More

Wes Anderson’s Favorite Films: Moon­struck, Rosemary’s Baby, and Luis Buñuel’s The Exter­mi­nat­ing Angel

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

“What is Bres­son’s genre? He does­n’t have one. Bres­son is Bres­son,” wrote mas­ter film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky in his sem­i­nal book Sculpt­ing in Time. “The very con­cept of genre is as cold as the tomb.”

Nonethe­less, Tarkovsky made two of the most praised, best-regard­ed sci­ence fic­tion films in cin­e­ma. Stalk­er (watch it online) is a meta­phys­i­cal rid­dle wrapped in the trap­pings of a sci-fi thriller. In the ver­dant area called the Zone, ringed off by miles of barbed wire and armed sol­diers, pil­grims come to behold an uncan­ny land­scape ruled by a pow­er­ful, oth­er­world­ly intel­li­gence. The film seemed to pre­fig­ure the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter that hap­pened years lat­er and proved to be the unlike­ly inspi­ra­tion for a video game.

Adapt­ed from a nov­el by Stanis­law Lem, Solaris (watch online) is about a space sta­tion that orbits a sen­tient plan­et that caus­es hal­lu­ci­na­tions in the cos­mo­nauts. The hyper-ratio­nal pro­tag­o­nist, Kris Kelvin, is thrown for a loop when he is con­front­ed by a dop­pel­ganger of his dead wife who killed her­self years ear­li­er. The log­i­cal side of him knows that this is a hal­lu­ci­na­tion but he falls in love any­way, only to lose her again. Kelvin is caught in a hell of repeat­ing the mis­takes of his past.

Solaris was seen as a Cold War-era response to Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both movies are mind-alter­ing deep-space epics that raise more ques­tions than they answer. Yet Tarkovsky hat­ed 2001’s osten­ta­tious use of cut­ting-edge spe­cial effects. “For some rea­son, in all the sci­ence-fic­tion films I’ve seen, the film­mak­ers force the view­er to exam­ine the details of the mate­r­i­al struc­ture of the future,” he told Russ­ian film jour­nal­ist Naum Abramov in 1970. “More than that, some­times, like Kubrick, they call their own films pre­mo­ni­tions. It’s unbe­liev­able! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is pho­ny on many points, even for spe­cial­ists. For a true work of art, the fake must be elim­i­nat­ed.”

Indeed, Tarkovsky seemed to delib­er­ate­ly half-ass the gener­ic ele­ments of film. He used leisure­ly shots of tun­nels and high­ways of 1971 Tokyo to depict the city of the future. He devot­ed only a cou­ple min­utes of the film’s near­ly three hour run­ning time to things like space­ships. And you have to love the fact that the space sta­tion in Solaris has such dis­tinct­ly unfu­tur­is­tic design ele­ments as a chan­de­lier and a wood-pan­eled library.

Tarkovsky, of course, isn’t inter­est­ed in sci­ence. He’s inter­est­ed in art and its way to evoke the divine. And his pri­ma­ry way of doing this is with long takes; epic shots that res­onate pro­found­ly even if the mean­ing of those images remains elu­sive. Solaris opens with a shot of water flow­ing in a brook and then, lat­er in the scene, there is a sud­den down­pour. The cam­era press­es into a shot of a teacup fill­ing with rain. It’s a beau­ti­ful, mem­o­rable, evoca­tive shot. Maybe the image means some­thing. Maybe its beau­ty is, in and of itself, its mean­ing. Either way, Tarkovsky forces you to sur­ren­der to his delib­er­ate cin­e­mat­ic rhythm and his pan­the­is­tic view of the world.

In a piece called Tarkovsky Shot by Shot, video essay­ist Anto­nios Papan­to­niou dis­sects a few scenes from Solaris, break­ing down each accord­ing to cam­era angle, shot type and dura­tion while point­ing out recur­ring visu­al motifs. “Dia­met­ri­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from Hollywood’s extrav­a­gant moviemak­ing Tarkovsky’s Solaris is in a cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse of its own,” writes Papan­to­niou in one of the video’s copi­ous inter­ti­tles. “Sym­bol­ic images and meta­phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions are cre­at­ed and expressed in a poet­ic way where every visu­al detail mat­ters.” Watch­ing Shot by Shot, you get a real sense of just how beau­ti­ful­ly his films unfold with those gor­geous­ly chore­o­graphed long takes. You can watch the full video above.

via Indie Wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Watch Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bend­ing Mas­ter­piece Free Online

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.