Gabriela Sellart's List: 2001: A Space Odyssey

• 2001 demonstrates a “world” dominated by a species  that has sacrificed wisdom for knowledge.
• The  emptiness of the introduction alludes to the relative brevity of Mankind.
• The “Dawn of Man” sequence shows the ascent of Man to the  top of the food chain.
• The Monolith appears three times in the film, each time preceding a technological  and narrative advancement
• it symbolises enigma itself.
• In the context of the Monolith’s  first appearance, it is a quirk of evolution.
• The monkeys’ engagement with this enigma (or rather, their engagement with  enigma) instigates the first technological leap: the formation of  a tool that irreversibly alters their circumstances. It  is their inquisitiveness, on all levels, that initiates the change.
• Despite verbal  assurances to the contrary, the mise-en-scene continues to depict  human control as an illusion—and its tools as fallible.
• HAL personifies the science/ignorance conflict.
• 001 refutes the very notion  of progress or advancement;  these terms imply a discernable beginning and end.
• One imagines that Clarke was raised on T. S. Eliot’s poetry,  for the Starchild is nothing if not the cinematic confirmation that “we  shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will  be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

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