Linus Gelber
This image, one of just a few I have created more or less entirely in Photoshop, was prepared for the upcoming "Utata Goes to the Movies" project of the Utata photography group.
The assignment was to create a picture in the style of a film or film genre, either a recreation of a scene or vibe from a specific movie or an evocation of a body of work. For the sci-fi genre I chose 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), one of the most important science fiction movies in the history of the medium.
This picture takes its inspiration from Commander Bowman's bright apocalyptic journey into the Monolith orbiting around Jupiter. Neither director Stanley Kubrick nor writer Arthur C. Clarke (whose story The Sentinel, on which the movie is based, does not much resemble the final product) ever got down to fine points on just what was going on in this extended sequence. A voyage into the heart of knowledge? A race down the gullet of what we would now confidently call a wormhole? A filmic metaphor for the isolation and separation of the epic hero? An acid trip? Or just a bid (successful) to use gala special effects in a way that would make cinema history?
2001 is remarkable in many ways, for its vision as well as its technical structure. For a mass-market film there are amazingly avant garde experimental elements to it. There is no spoken dialogue in the movie until the film has been running for over 30 minutes, and the latter third of the film not only has no dialogue but also has only one character. It is, in its own way, as rakish and edgy as Beckett at his most abstruse.
When I set up to make this photo I decided to use entirely homespun materials. The base background image is a shot of the wall of the Holland Tunnel, copied and flipped and matched in the middle. There are three sets of eyes, which I used to try to suggest the jittering bouncing motion of Keir Dullea's trip: the first is a high key manipulation, the second is set to high transparency and shifted down and to the right, and the third is treated with an extreme radial blur and left largely transparent. The eyes are from an unsuccessful photo of a friend - hi Joyce - but the poor focus and hazy exposure were perfect here.
The fringing at top and bottom is from a shot of weeds growing by the Manhattan Bridge, with most of the dark colors selected out. The psychedelic reflections on the left and right sides are elements from two different photographs of burlesque performers here in the city - on the left the blue starry bits are highlighted portions of the back curtain at the Slipper Room, and the red bands are the shiny parts of the surface of the hula hoop that Scotty the Blue Bunny is twirling while hosting a recent show. The colored jaggedy bits at right are lifts from this photo of Miss Saturn performing at The Delancey.
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