Kubrick’s “Jupiter Room” in 2001: A Space Odyssey, reflects films ability to reconstruct the narrative form of time. The audience follows as David Bowman surrealistically jumps from one moment of his life to the next, and eventually to his death. Kubrick does not rely on conventional methods of film technique to construct this scene. He instead manipulates sound, montage, and a paradoxical version of the shot/reverse shot to convey the progression through Bowman’s timeline.
The audience enters this scene and experiences an awakening: Bowman has witnessed the birth and death of the universe by going through a black hole. A close-up of Bowman’s eye, blinking, as if woken up from a nightmare is the opening shot. The color of his eyes have changed to normal blue, and he gapes, with a mixture of confusion and terror, at the sterile, white room. The camera then turns to a point-of-view shot of Bowman looking through the pod’s window. The interior of the pod is a series of rectangular lights leading to a perspective vanishing point that mimics the arrangement of the black hole. Next is a close-up of Bowman’s face, almost seizure-like, with the reflection of …show more content…
The elegant, vintage furnishings sit, quite ill-fittingly, in a sterile and futuristic white-tiled room. This use of set plays with the film’s abstract sense of time and seemingly blends the past with the future. Kubrick mingles time frequently in this film, such as the match-cut from the bone to the spacecraft or the classical music playing in the background of the sailing spacecraft (as referenced in Kolker’s essay). Perhaps, Kubrick is insinuating that there is no difference between the past and the future. Time is not static, it is instead, cyclistic (as seen with the beginning and end of a black screen -perhaps the big bang- and the evolution of man in the middle). Time does not end in this film, it is