I was 11 years old, and I’d gone with friends to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. What unfolded on the screen left me spellbound.
I couldn’t sleep that night. The images kept floating through my head:
man-apes confronting the monolith; a human embryo floating in the abyss; colours cascading across the face-shield of a terrified astronaut as he hurtled through time and space. It was more than a movie. It was a visual experience, like nothing I’d encountered.
“Visually stunning” is a phrase often repeated in the description of the films of Stanley Kubrick.
Whether it’s a flying bone transforming into a spaceship, or a wild-eyed maniac shoving his head through a hole in a door, his are images that not only have become synonymous with his work, but have also infiltrated popular culture. They’ve appeared, or been referenced, in everything from soft-drink commercials to The Simpsons.
It’s hardly surprising Kubrick was so visually oriented as a director. His love of still photography began as a teenager, and by 16 he was already published. At 17, he was hired by LOOK magazine, where he worked as a staff photographer for the next five years.
When I mentioned the idea of doing a series of shoots inspired by Kubrick films, Toronto designer Emily Rishea of Artifice Clothing was ecstatic. Like me, she was a long-time admirer of the late director’s work.
But we faced a number of challenges in trying to come up with concepts. First, of course, was how to approach the concept artistically. Also, Emily intended to use some of the images for marketing her line of PVC wear, so they needed to incorporate garments that would be representative of her work. And, since the shoots were being done as collaborations -- aka “creatives” -- we needed to factor in the portfolio potential for participating models and makeup artists.
With these goals in mind, we drafted the concept for a five-part series. By the time we were done, we’d collaborated with 11 other individuals.
2001: A Space Odyssey was first up. The film is a visual masterpiece, and heavily visual at that. In a film that runs two hours and 21 minutes, there’s only about 40 minutes of dialogue.
Attempting to recreate a single frame from such a powerful piece of cinematography was bound to come up short. It would be akin to using a table-hockey game to imitate Wayne Gretzky’s best moves. Instead, we opted for an image that would capture something of the essence of the film.