A while back a bunch of us in the office went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen. I have a feeling that I’ve written about it before. Anyway, it was at the local cinema and the place was sold out, completely packed. I have seen this movie roughly a million times, but never at the cinema before. I think almost everyone in there was intimately familiar with 2001.
And it’s completely different on the cinema. At home, 2001 is a sublime dawdler. It drags along at a gorgeous slowness, lulling me into this wonderful sort of blissed-out boredom. (Blade Runner does exactly the same thing for me, and this isn’t by any means a slight on either film.) At the movies, sitting in the dark, though? Man, 2001 . The hominids bit at the start is so brisk. It’s just pure narrative beats: this, then this. Here’s Moonwatcher. Here’s Moonwatcher learning to think. Ulp, he’s only bloody killed someone.
And then? Then came Arguably the greatest cut in all of cinema. Certainly the most self-conscious, the most audacious. Certainly of all cuts. You know this cut: Moonwatcher throws a bone in the air, a bone he has been using as a club, a weapon. Up it spins. The camera loses it. Up it spins higher and higher. It slows, reaching the peak of its ascent and starts to fall. And then…
And then in silent space, a bone-white spacecraft ghosts down across the screen. We’ve just gone from the dawn of man to the dawn of the space age, and everyone, even a five-year-old who doesn’t know who Kubrick is, will have perfectly understood what has happened.
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And this made me think. Nothing in the world is so boring as finding analogues between art forms, particularly when one of the art forms is video games. Even so, I couldn’t help but ponder: what is the cut of games?