The Greatest Film Ever Made?

What’s the greatest film ever made? In many of the lists around, such as the BFI’s Sight & Sound, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is at least in the top ten. For the sci fi/fantasy genre it’s often at the top as officially The Greatest Film Ever Made. If you haven’t yet seen it it’s currently being screened around the UK in the first ever digital version as part of BFI’s ‘Days of Fear and Wonder’ festival. Anyway, there was an interesting interview on BBC Radio 5 the other night with Douglas Trumbull, one of the special effects creators for 2001 who later went on to work on other sci fi classics such as Silent Running and Bladerunner. In the interview he talks about the future of film in the digital age. it’s really fascinating stuff and I advise you to listen to the podcast if you recently started to think, as I did, that cinema was nearing the end of its days (it starts at 01:11). But the part of the interview that really set my heart beating a little faster is near the beginning where Trimble talks about making 2001. I’m going to quote a bit of it:
‘The British film industry at that time was highly unionised and so an individual who was working as a camera man couldn’t work as a greensman or a prop maker or couldn’t work as anything else, it was highly stratified, and one of the unique aspects that I was lucky enough to experience by virtue of working with Kubrick was that I was this young, 23 year old ‘California cowboy’ that has a cowboy hat, some boots and a weird belt and they thought this was cute as heck so I was able to transcend this unionisiation, and I was a very imaginative, young, precocious man and I would talk to Kubrick and I’d say, I think we could do this and this and this and he’d go ok let’s do it, and I would show him a Polaroid or some experiment or a drawing or whatever, and so then I could go to the machine shop or the wood shop or the plaster shop or the glass shop or any department in the studio with complete autonomy and aplomb and not be resisted in any way.  And that was one of the things that enabled this extreme and unique ingenuity that was necessary for 2001 to become what it was. Everything was outside the box, nobody going into 2001 knew how to make this movie, we were discovering how to make the movie as we went along so we were building equipment, trying experiments, experimenting with lenses and photography and inside-out photography and asking all these diabolical questions: what is photography? what is a lens? how do we do something like stargate or jupiter? It was an incredible opportunity to experiment and do pure research and development in the service of this movie, which is just unheard of in the motion picture industry’.
Why I got a little excited in the early hours of the morning was because Trumbull’s words sounded like a kind of manifesto for how to approach a photography degree programme, or any kind of creative arts degree in fact. I know that a distance learning student doesn’t have access to different departments as you might in a traditional art school, but at the same time isn’t the vision of the OCA to transcend institutionalisation by providing open access and to be a seedbed for research and development in the creative arts for those who can’t, or choose not to, attend a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ arts school? As a tutor, I also thought that when students really excel is when they do engage in ‘pure R&D’, they ask those fundamental questions of their art and craft, questioning it to the very bottom and then trying to rebuild it from the ground up for themselves. And (among the statues and swans) we do see that kind of creativity at the OCA, for me most recently at the assessment event I attended in November.
There’s a great joke about Kubrick as well which has been going around and has finally been institutionalised on the wall of the of the Whitechapel Gallery cafe, but I’ll leave that for another post.
‘Days of Fear and Wonder’ runs until 31st December in London and around the UK.