Stanley Kubrick
2001: Odissea Nello Spazio

Kubrick is not a genius, Allen is a genius. Kubrick is simply an extraordinary "craftsman of thought," someone who does not "create" but "reworks," not a "genius" but is "ingenious".

A partially different discussion should be made for this film, one of the greatest in the history of cinema. This film is simply immense. Attempting to explain it would be like trying to objectify Being, enclosing it within the mere sphere of the sensible. Forcing it to "non-escape" from its self-referentiality, killing it in a mirrored and narcissistic reality far from human subjectivity, having a structure open to wonder and re-signification of itself and its past and to the planning of its future.

This film is uniquely the dictation of Kubrick's imagined human evolution and developed in the partiality of the symbolic language of images and sounds, which cannot be fully grasped because ungraspable is man's ability to be a "world shaper." Man's subjectivity never allows itself to be exhausted, but renews and always opens up to new contents, because infinite is man's ability to open up to new subjects and to give them the meanings he deems appropriate.

I could tell you many words, but they would just be words. I could name names (Pirandello, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, Bauman ...) but they would just be names. I could tell you how the film is technically superbly made for being from '69 and how the editing and direction are impeccable as impeccable is the choice to let the images speak, but this would not help you "understand" the film. I could give you my interpretation (nihilistic evolution, death of the Ego as a subject, birth of the Nietzschean child, existential fulfillment of the human Entity... the monolith as an idea of the unknowable or of eternal return... death of form, the uselessness of technology, the tool becoming a subject, the used becoming the user, a functionalistic conception of life replacing wonder and introspection, a self-referential relationship between system and environment, logos and nomos, man as a zoologist of himself... a prophecy of modern civilization drowned and dominated by the market that meets us as numbers and not as subjects...) and probably this interpretation of mine would not be much different from Kubrick's, yet it cannot be called "right," because there is no "right" one. Each is the bearer of a partial truth in which we can all recognize ourselves through the word that opens us to the triality of language as an approach to the Absolute Truth (unknowable by man as such).

This work should simply be watched, it should not be understood or analyzed, it is not the Pythagorean theorem or a mathematical formula, but it is the abstract and symbolic transposition, on film, of a mind that imagines human evolution from its inception to its evolutionary acme and attempts to show it to the world through the interpretive openness that images, sounds, and (few) words evoke.

And you, why are you reading these lines? Do you really believe these words can explain a film like this? They are only the semiotic expression of what I am vaguely perceiving while right now, I am re-watching this film... these words exist in a properly numerical conception already given, they are only the sum of experiences and never escape the circle of "what has been written." They exist as the fruit of a symbolic language that does not renew itself in its being found in a merely formal condition as an "ensemble of signs." These telematic signs that you see scrolling are only the realization of non-subjective moments that slide one after the other, devoid of the duration of a purpose, which constitutes the existential horizon of each of us.

If you are wondering what this review says about "2001: A Space Odyssey," the answer is nothing. However, trust me, no more exhaustive review can exist.

"Man is condemned to be free, even in a prison, chained and near death, he can plan his escape."

A great man.